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.