Over the past months, some of our readers and other interested stakeholders have asked for more detail about the geographic distribution of the workers participating in the Garment Worker Diaries (GWD) study in Bangladesh. As we have stated in all our blogs and other publications, the sample was selected from five areas where there is a concentration of RMG factories: Chattogram, Dhaka City, Gazipur, Narayanganj, and Savar. MFO chose these areas because this is where factories are concentrated, and at the time when we were building our sample we only had factory locations to guide us.
In this week’s blog post we provide an update on our sample, including a comparison of the distribution of our sample in comparison to the distribution of garment workers identified in the 2017 Labour Force Survey (LFS)—a dataset that was not available to use when we started the GWD. As might be expected the LFS results show that workers are, indeed, concentrated in the areas we targeted and the distribution of workers across those areas is similar to the distribution of the GWD sample.
The blog also includes an updated, interactive map showing the distribution of the sample, overlaid with the locations of all the factories identified in the Open Apparel Registry and Mapped in Bangladesh.
As always, you can send any questions you have for MFO, SANEM, the workers or about the project to [email protected]
