2017

Commitment Progress

BSR’s HERproject is a collaborative initiative that strives to empower low-income women working in global supply chains. HERhealth works to increase the ability of low-income women to take charge of their health.

BSR commited to continue expansion of HERhealth, which promotes women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights through workplace based programming in factories and farms. Since January 2016, HERhealth has improved  the health knowledge, behavior, and access of 218,000 women workers. This work has resulted in improving women’s health in the following focus areas: SRHR and Empowerment of Women. The commitment focuses on capacity building and training directly with women in supply chains.

In addition to direct implementation with women workers, a key milestone is BSR’s participation in FP2020. Through our participation, we encouraged company partners of HERproject to make commitments to accelerate access to family planning products, including a commitment from one company to improve the health of 40,000 women in their supply chain.

2016

BSR commits an estimated $6 million towards promoting women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights through workplace training programs in global supply chains to reach 5 million women by 2020.

HERhealth, is a public-private partnership initiated by BSR to promote women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) through workplace training programs in global supply chains. HERhealth works to quantify the return-on-investment from SRHR and women’s empowerment to support sustainable communities and economies. Since launching in 2007, HERhealth has reached over 350,000 women in over 250 factories and farms in Asia and Africa.

BSR commits to the following:

• To impact 5 Million women by 2020 with sexual and reproductive health and rights education and connections with services.
• To improve the availability of easily accessible and high-quality sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) information and services for women workers in Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Vietnam.
• To grow the capacity of locally-based community organisations to implement effective and holistic sexual and reproductive rights training programmes in the workplace and the community through innovations for scale.
• To increase the level of active participation of local and international businesses, and governments on SRHR through HERproject country programmes.

Commitment Progress

HERproject has made significant progress on our commitment to promote women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights through workplace training programs in global supply chains. To date we have reached approximately 600,000 women and indirectly as many as 2 million of their family and friends in 12 countries. We have expanded our network of multinational companies investing in HERproject to more than 50.

In addition to continuously enhancing the quality of our training programs, we’ve developed innovative approaches to enhance considerations for women’s health in the workplace. Some of these innovations include: nurse training programs in Bangladesh, nutrition programs in Bangladesh and Cambodia to improve the provision of nutritional foods in factories, child care upgrading services, factory health clinic assessments and training in India, and formal linkages to health services in Kenya. In addition, we are working with local businesses and business associations to strengthen policies and standards around gender, including a specific focus on women’s health. Furthermore, we are also working with some companies in our network to integrate women’s health among other critical gender issues into their approaches to supplier management, including clauses in codes of conduct, KPIs, and auditing protocols.

2013

HERproject, is a BSR initiative that catalyses partnerships between the private sector and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to promote women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) through workplace training programmes. HERproject works to quantify the return-on-investment from SRHR and women’s empowerment to support sustainable communities and economies. Since launching in 2007, HERproject has reached over 200,000 women in over 150 factories and farms in Asia and Africa. HERproject is now poised to scale in existing countries and new geographies.

BSR commits to the following to impact 1 Million women by 2020 with sexual and reproductive health and rights education and connections with services.

• To improve the availability of easily accessible and high-quality sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) information and services for women workers in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and at least two of the following countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda

• To grow the capacity of locally-based community organisations, including youth organisations, to implement effective and holistic sexual and reproductive rights training programmes in the workplace and the community through innovations for scale

• To increase the level of active participation of local and international businesses, and governments on SRHR through HERproject country programmes

Learn More

Business Impact Stories:
Her Health Case Study