Zilingo, the online fashion retail startup headquartered in Singapore, launches a women-empowering initiative called SheWorkz, seeking to give women at home a chance to monetise their free time and space in their homes to start a business by providing them vocational training, financing, and business development opportunities.
SheWorkz wants to bring women back to the workforce, on their own terms, and pave the way toward greater financial independence without the constraints of a traditional workplace.
In its official statement, Zilingo shares that in South and Southeast Asia, women contribute a meagre 31 per cent to the workforce and they contribute even less, 24 per cent to the GDP. Meanwhile, a McKinsey Global Institute report found that advancing women’s equality in the workplace could add US$12 trillion to the global GDP by 2025,
SheWorkz has a four-step program:
- Identifying women to participate in a 20-day vocational training course funded 100 percent by Zilingo to build critical skills such as batik making, pattern design, sewing, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy. Participants are then grouped according to skill-level and geography into ‘micro-factories’.
- Connecting micro-factories are to the global market through Zilingo’s network where they have the opportunity to receive apparel orders from brands.
- Zilingo to provide access to microfinance through verified lines of credit from partners.
- Allowing flexible working hours to balance work and family by enabling women to work from home.
SheWorkz’s inauguration event was attended by guest-of-honour, Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs, Darmin Nasution.
Also Read: Zilingo CEO Ankiti Bose on failures, challenges, handling depression and more
SheWorkz has led to the creation of Indonesia’s first-ever fashion cluster for microcredit financing, termed the “fashion and lifestyle cluster”.
Zilingo, founded in 2015 by Ankiti Bose, CEO, and Co-founder of Zilingo, has been vocal about women empowerment. At Zilingo, women make up more than half of the company’s employees; with close to 50 percent of the C-level executives being female.
“Women are the most underutilized and latent potential Asian economies. They contribute only 24% of GDP in South and Southeast Asia. We kept thinking about this and the opportunity compelled us to act. SheWorkz will be the largest decentralised manufacturing ecosystem in the world. Airbnb taught us that every extra bedroom in your house could be a hotel with some investment and vision. Then why can’t that extra space be a workshop/small manufacturing unit utilising the time women have on their hands-on account of falling out of the workforce,” said Bose.
In February this year, the company secured US$226 million in Series D round of funding from a host of investors, including Temasek, Sequoia Capital India, Singapore-based Burda Principal Investments, Sofina (Belgium) and EDBI.
Zilingo aims to expand SheWorkz’s reach and upskill over 2,000 women in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia by 2022.
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