This week I’ve been working with a global organisation, RISE, that is seeking an end to the oppressive conditions faced by female workers in the garment industry. In the very same week we have seen Iceland, which consistently ranks as one of the world’s most progressive nations, convene a nationwide strike (that included their own Prime Minister) demanding equal pay for women.

This, in itself, should speak volumes to the task in hand for the RISE team.

RISE is a newly established start-up of just twenty people but representing the experience and learning of over a quarter of a century’s worth of engagement in the readymade garment sector, by RISE’s founding partners, to improve the conditions for workers. RISE launched on International Women’s Day, in March 2023, the culmination of several years of planning and investment by Business for Social Responsibility, CARE International, the International Labour Organisation, and Gap Inc.

As a collection of very large and diverse organisations, all offering resources and technical support to addressing gender inequities in an industry that employs 60 million female workers, these founding partners have coalesced around the need not only to collaborate, but to go one step further, and to actually join forces and handover the reins of this colossal objective to a single entity.

In taking on that mantel, RISE has a head start on most start-ups, given the vast intellectual property and knowledge it is able to draw on from each of its founding partners.

The twist, of course, is that the journey ahead, in achieving any sort of equity for female garment workers (given the disparities which exist in a country such as Iceland) is a long one. As so many of the RISE team themselves already know from their own experiences, the path ahead will also be fraught with many complex challenges. Not least is the issue of garnering attention from all of the necessary stakeholders – brands, suppliers, factory owners, governments, consumers, the media and so on – who hold sway over worker conditions, on a topic that no single country of the world has managed, yet, to resolve.

What I saw in Saigon over the past three days, however, in terms of the commitment RISE is making through its incredibly dedicated and specialist team, was inspiring.

In just 7 months, this team has already achieved the goals set by its Board – on programme design, fund raising, communications, and on the overall operations challenge of fusing four different organisation’s strategies into one. In this same span of time the team has grown fast – 37% of them joined over the past few months, and many of the longer term BSR staff involved over the past 4-5 years during the set-up phase for RISE, were meeting in-person for the first time in Vietnam this week.

RISE is already delivering programmes for factory workers in multiple countries, here in Asia, but also in the Middle East and East Africa. They are led by inspiring colleagues, who have dedicated large parts of their own lives and careers to the cause, from North America and Europe across to North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, as well as from China’s mainland.

And I commend whole-heartedly, to anyone interested in this agenda, the spirit and passion I saw in the values, behaviours and actions of the team, both as they set about discussing strategic plans, but also as they spent time forming and learning more about one another.

As the American Anthropologist, Margaret Mead, famously said: “Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.”

I look forward to following the successes of RISE in the years to come.