Responsibility

PVH Launches Gap Inc. P.A.C.E. Community Program in Ethiopia

  • Nov. 24, 2020

PVH launched our first-ever Gap Inc. Personal Advancement Career Enhancement (P.A.C.E.) community program in Ethiopia, benefiting communities near Hawassa Industrial Park. While PVH has launched P.A.C.E. trainings in 15 factories and facilities around the world, this marks our first program facilitated in a community setting.

P.A.C.E. is an evidence-based comprehensive learning program for female garment workers, that offers courses surrounding professional and life skills such as communication and problem solving, as well as hygiene, health and legal financial literacy. In P.A.C.E. community programming, modules are geared more toward life skills and communication tools that participants can take into their home and personal lives.

The P.A.C.E. community program in Ethiopia is facilitated for adult women and youth through VESAs. These small-scale community groups are centered upon financial literacy as well as trainings that align with P.A.C.E. programming, acting as a foundation for modules within the community training. Over the course of eleven months, concluding in August of 2021, it’s our aim to reach 2,750 women with P.A.C.E. training in our community program. With participants gaining professional and soft skills to help them succeed in any future employment opportunities, P.A.C.E. community programs can also serve as recruitment pipelines to facilities in the area – including Hawassa Industrial Park where PVH will be launching P.A.C.E. factory programs in 2021.

P.A.C.E. community program participants join a training session.

The impacts of the P.A.C.E. community program are already evident in women who have recently graduated from the training:

“The training helped me to see myself. I am shy to express my opinions or respond to questions when asked even when I know the answer. But now, I have got the skills to express what I think and I’m confident enough even to communicate with a new face. In our community there is a culture of thinking that, ‘A women who is outspoken is a bad woman.’ Now I gained a skill to stand against thoughts like that.”

– Dinkesh Dukamo, a P.A.C.E. participant in a VESA in Ethiopia’s Dara community

“The training helped us see beyond today and hope for tomorrow. I learned how to plan, goal setting for the future and effectively utilize time to reduce anxiety and stress.”

– Aster Iedamo, a youth P.A.C.E. participant from Ethiopia’s Aleto wondo community
Members of Ethiopia’s Boricha community participate in P.A.C.E. community programming.

Bringing P.A.C.E. programming to a community level allows the benefits of the factory training to extend beyond the workplace, ultimately amplifying the impact of our efforts. As part of our Forward Fashion goal to improve one million lives across our supply chain, we’ve set a goal to Empower Women by removing barriers to advancement and creating pathways to opportunity and choice for women in the PVH supply chain. Our partnership with P.A.C.E. drives progress toward our target to make professional and life skills development programs and services available to 500,000 women across our supply chain by 2030.

As we continue to drive progress toward our target to Empower Women, we look forward to sharing more insight and updates on our collective efforts. Learn more about our Forward Fashion strategy.