Global Trade: Past Activities & Accomplishments

Marilyn Carr, then Senior Economic Advisor for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), began WIEGO’s Global Trade Programme in 1998. A development economist, Marilyn was formerly a Senior Economist with the Intermediate Technology Development Group in the UK. The current Director of the Programme, Elaine Jones, who took over as Director of the WIEGO Global Trade Programme in 2005 was formerly Head of Ethical Trade with The Body Shop International.

Membership & Participation in Ethical Trade Initiative

Starting in 2008, WIEGO engaged in an experimental project with a High Street retailer of fast fashion to analyze the impact of purchasing practices on working conditions in one factory in Turkey. The project involved an analysis of purchasing practices along the supply chain from end to end. It found evidence that the fashion and garment industry’s way of working drives poor working conditions and an increasing informalization of labour. For more information about this project, see Analysis of Purchasing Practices in the Garment Industry. 

Global Value Chain Analysis

The term “value chain” refers to the full range of activities that firms and workers perform to bring a product or commodity from its conception to its end use or final consumer. When the activities of a given chain are divided among multiple firms and spread across different countries it is called a “global value chain.” From the beginning, WIEGO recognized the importance of value chain analysis to our work on global trade. But we were surprised to find that many analyses of global value chains focus on the chain as a whole or specific firms within it – but not on the workers in the chain. We also learned that few of the analyses that focused on workers in the chain included a focus on the industrial outworkers at the very bottom of the chain. 

Manual on Global Value Chain Analysis in the Garment Sector

To address this gap, WIEGO commissioned Hubert Schmitz of IDS, Sussex and Dorothy McCormick of IDS, Nairobi to prepare a research methodology manual on how to trace global value chains in the garment sector down to the homeworkers. Read the manual.

In preparing the manual, Hubert Schmitz and Dorothy McCormick consulted with a number of grassroots organizations working with home-based workers. After the manual was produced, they led several training workshop on global value chain analysis using the manual; and, in the following years, the manual was used by research teams composed of local researchers and activities in several countries. Lizbeth Navas-Aleman from IDS, Sussex, who assisted in the preparation of the manual, has used elements of the manual in subsequent research: in India with SEWA supported by WIEGO (2001); in Nicaragua with the International Labour Organization (ILO) (2004); in Tanzania with Dorothy McCormick researching footwear value chains (2004); in Brazil analyzing the footwear cluster with Nova Serrana (2005) and with the Institute Euvoldo Lodi (2006); and in Turkey with the State Planning Organization in Ankara (2008).

Sector-Specific Global Value Chain Analyses

WIEGO also commissioned comparative studies in different countries of informal workers in selected global value chains. These studies were designed to analyze global value chains from the perspective of workers/producers at the lowest ends of these chains (many of whom are women). Specifically, the studies investigated how informal workers and producers are integrated into global value chains, with what consequences for them, and how they might be integrated on more favourable terms. Multi-country studies of informal workers in global value chains in two sectors were undertaken: garments and non-timber forest products.

WIEGO’s core activity on garment workers was a comparative set of studies in eight countries, which began with a background issues paper and research design workshop at the North-South Institute in Canada in 2002. At an April 2004 workshop at IDS in the UK, researchers discussed the empirical findings and policy lessons arising from the research; this was later summarized into a synthesis overview including an update of the impact in each study country of the phasing out of the Multi-Fibre Agreement. Read about garment workers and this global value chain analysis of the garment sector.

Use of Value Chain Analysis to Study the Social Protection of Informal Workers 

An unanticipated but welcome outcome of the early research activities was the establishment of a research collaboration with IDS, Sussex, in particular with its Globalization Team, which included the work on the global value chain manual (see above) as well as subsequent application of the manual to analyze the social protection of workers in both the garment and horticulture sectors.

In 2002, the Global Trade Programme worked with WIEGO’s Social Protection Programme, the ILO and the World Bank, in an innovative research project that used value chain analysis to look at whether, how, and from whom workers in different rungs of the value chain receive social protection. Stephanie Barrientos (formerly of IDS, Sussex now University of Manchester) and Armando Barrientos (with the University of Manchester) prepared a case study on workers in the horticulture sector in Chile and South Africa; Donna Doane (independent consultant), Rosalinda Ofreneo (University of the Philippines and Patamba), and Daonoi Srikajon (HomeNet Thailand) carried out the value chain analysis of workers in the garment sector in the Philippines and Thailand. The case studies were used to ground the technical dialogue between the ILO, WIEGO, and the World Bank on social protection in everyday reality, and were then featured in a joint publication on social protection: Chains of Production, Ladders of Protection, edited by Francie Lund and Jillian Nicholson.

Export Marketing Strategies for Groups of Informal Producers 

Early Assistance to SEWA’s Trade Facilitation Centre

WIEGO played a technical advisory role in the development of SEWA’s Trade Facilitation Centre (TFC) set up to link rural producers in SEWA’s membership to global markets. Marilyn Carr (then Director of the Global Trade program) wrote the original funding proposal for the International Finance Corporation (IFC); two consultants identified by WIEGO (Jacqui MacDonald and Mo Tomaney) provided design and marketing services.

Documentation of Best Practices

Marilyn Carr edited a book of case studies on best practices in linking women producers and workers with global markets called Chains of Fortune: Best Practices in Linking Local Women Producers and Workers with Global Markets, commissioned and published by the Commonwealth Secretariat. This edited volume brings together six case studies that describe how women workers and producers have been successfully integrated into global markets. These include: a cocoa cooperative of 45,000 producers in Ghana who are co-owners of a chocolate company, Divine Chocolate, in the UK; family-based cooperatives in Samoa which produce organic virgin coconut oil for export; small enterprises in Mozambique which are helping to regenerate the cashew processing and export industry; as well as thousands of wage workers in global value chains, including deciduous fruits from South Africa, ready-made garments from Bangladesh, and call centers in India. Each case study was written by a team of international and national researchers and aims to present decision makers with concrete examples of how to spread the gains of globalization to poor working women through shifting the balance of access, power, and returns within global value chains.

This book was launched at the September 2004 meeting of Finance Ministers from Commonwealth countries (along with the other book prepared by WIEGO for the Commonwealth Secretariat, Mainstreaming Informal Employment and Gender in Poverty Reduction). Both books were also featured in a book launch organized by the Commonwealth Secretariat at the March 2005 meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN. For ordering information, please visit: http://publications.thecommonwealth.org/