Premium fashion made in Rwanda

Rwanda’s nascent garment sector often operates informally, with limited market linkages and collaboration. Access to raw materials and adequately skilled workers are key challenges that Rwandan garment companies face, hampering their development. While garment-specific technical and vocational education and training (TVET) courses exist, training opportunities remain scarce, and curricula often lack alignment with industry requirements. Many tailors never received formal TVET and therefore lack necessary skills with relevance for international production. Surveys suggest that Rwandans are willing to purchase locally made garments but are dissuaded by high costs and concerns over product quality.

Rwanda encounters stiff competition from low-cost international garment producers. However, the country has the potential to become an appealing source of sustainably produced, premium African fashion. This requires a significant improvement in the skill set of Rwandan garment workers.

To tackle existing challenges and realise the significant job potential of Rwanda’s garment sector, Invest for Jobs partnered with the garment company Pink Mango Asantii to establish an industry-relevant training facility offering high-quality on-the-job training.

In 2022, Pink Mango Asantii founded its first direct-to-consumer fashion brand. The label’s ambitious approach is to leverage the African cultural heritage by collaborating with African and international designers and sourcing all their production materials from the African continent. The fashion house is on a mission to promote Africa as a top-tier location for the production of garments and fashion, while also paying due care to worker welfare.

To successfully work in the premium fashion industry, Rwandan workers must enhance their technical and soft skills to levels currently rare in the East African region. In March 2023, Pink Mango Asantii launched an on-the-job industrial training programme with the support of Invest for Jobs. It offers training opportunities to at least 360 Rwandans, most of them women and young people, and aims to place at least 300 of them in new good jobs at the company. Trainee skills are initially assessed and ranked on a scale ranging from E (no prior experience) to A++ (supervisor skills). Training is determined by the rank. Based on a comprehensive curriculum, trainees get acquainted with new machines and operations, enhancing their efficiency, and learning new soft skills.

By gradually ranking up during their training, trainees obtain higher salaries and the skills to ultimately produce full garment items and become trainers themselves. Some will eventually be able to take over responsibilities for buyer communication and order planning. Soft skill trainings include topics such as production supervision, occupational safety and health standards, sexual harassment at the workplace, waste handling, and problem solving. As the project also aims to reach the company’s certification for certain international standards for quality assurance, social protection and sustainable production processes, employees are empowered to implement and maintain these standards to contribute to sustainable business practices and benefit from improved working conditions through better social protection and labour practices.

In July 2023, Pink Mango Asantii concluded its comprehensive curriculum creation. It also added machines, equipment, and materials to the facility located in the Special Economic Zone in Kigali. The company then contracted international garment experts as instructors, teaching valuable skills to the trainees. In total, 360 garment workers will be trained in cohorts of 60 to 110 people, 70 per cent of them women and 80 per cent young people.

The inaugural group of 60 trainees began its first six-month training cycle in July 2023. After completing of the training, 53 of them secured good employment at Pink Mango Asantii. The second and third cohorts, each consisting of 65 trainees, began their training in April and August 2024. A fourth cohort of 110 trainees started their training in November 2024.

Pink Mango Asantii Ltd is supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in the context of the Special Initiative “Decent Work for a Just Transition” (Invest for Jobs) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).