KARACHI, Pakistan– Abdul Majeed, Senior Manager, Compliance at Karachi-based Eastern Garments, sketches his business’s operating environment. “Factories have many different burdens,” he explains. “Volatile inflation, rising utility costs, operational costs, supply chain issues, increasing compliance and investment requirements, and strong pricing pressure from buyers. It’s very competitive in price.”

These challenges are not unique to Eastern Garments. The garment industry, while a major contributor to national exports, is under constant pressure to reduce costs. This directly affects working conditions and compliance with national and international labour standards.

Pakistan’s more than 8,000 garment factories were responsible for more than half of the country’s total export earnings in 2025 and employed nearly 40 per cent of the industrial labour force. The sector is enormous, complex and change is difficult.

With a team of fifteen and operational hubs in Lahore and Karachi, Better Work Pakistan works directly with 135 factories and plans to engage 350 by 2030. Lifting labour standards across a sector of this size is not something any programme achieves one factory at a time. So, Better Work is trying something new in Pakistan.

Better Work lite

Better Work’s standard model is built around direct engagement with fee-paying factories, relying on compliance assessments and enterprise advisors who help management steadily improve practices. Many smaller enterprises lack either the budget to participate or simply don’t know where to begin with a programme this far-reaching. To close this gap, the programme’s operations manager, Farzana Islam, developed a lighter, free-to-access training package delivered online through the employer organisations that factories already trust.

“Our sense was that any kind of contribution that we make with these factory representatives is going to be fruitful and beneficial in the long run for the Pakistan supply chain,” says Islam.

Piloted in the final quarter of 2025, the training comprised five sessions of sixty to ninety minutes, offered through the Pakistan Hosiery Manufacturers and Exporters Association (PHMA), the country’s oldest knitwear industry body, to forty of its member enterprises. The sessions delivered a condensed version of Better Work’s methodology: self-diagnosis tools, the Plan-Do-Check-Act framework for continuous improvement, occupational safety and health, and chemical management. Also included were the basics of bipartite worker-management committees – a central pillar of Better Work’s model for building trust and sustainable workplace improvement.

Ivo Spauwen, Better Work Pakistan Programme Manager, is realistic about what a single course can achieve in a factory with potentially thousands of workers. “Some will climb the ladder of learning,” he says. “Others may come back to it at a later point.”

Lessons flowing through networks

Murtaza Aftab is head of group compliance at Mustaqim Dyeing and Printing Industries, a Karachi-based group with 3,500 workers spread across multiple stitching and spinning units. He has navigated ISO certification, environmental management systems, social audits, and the rotating cast of buyer standards that Pakistani exporters must satisfy to stay competitive. He found an immediate use for the training:

“We are going to start a comprehensive training programme within our organisation,” he says. “We will start a train-the-trainer programme – these trainers will be the internal trainers, and they will further train their departments. We plan to conduct more than 150 trainings per month in our organisation.”

Murtaza Aftab, whose company is also enrolled with Better Work, is clear about what distinguishes Better Work from the audit frameworks that already crowd the compliance landscape. “The one point that makes Better Work different from other certifications or other programmes is the advisory system,” he says. “In some areas, compliance people have to be restricted or limited with respect to actions. But with the help of an advisor, we can get it implemented efficiently.”

The distinction matters. Audits tell factories what they are doing wrong. Better Work’s advisory model tries to show them how to course correct, a difference that compliance managers, caught between buyer demands and factory realities, feel acutely.

It is a difference that Pakistan’s industry associations have been quick to recognise. Faisal Arshad Sheikh, Chairman of PHMA, whose association hosted the pilot sessions and has since used his influence to support the ILO’s funding request with the domestic Export Development Fund (EDF) for Phase Two, speaks of Better Work in terms that go beyond compliance paperwork.

“We are educated by the Better Work programme,” he says. ” So, the performance will be far, far better than those that don’t have the programme. PHMA fully supports the continued work  of Better Work Pakistan with the inclusion of SMEs as major beneficiaries.”

Majeed echoes the point from the factory floor. Better Work’s focus on worker empowerment and worker-management committees, he says, is the programme’s most distinctive benefit for workers, and ultimately for the businesses they work for.

National goals

Better Work Pakistan is unusual among ILO programmes in that approximately 80 per cent of its budget is generated within the country through factory fees, private-sector revenues, and, most significantly, contributions from Pakistan’s Export Development Fund, which operates under the Ministry of Commerce. The EDF’s mandate is export promotion, and the PHMA sees significant opportunities for the industry to be an even larger contributor.

“Pakistan’s apparel and textile industry is the cornerstone of our country’s manufacturing,” explains the PHMA’s Faisal Arshad Sheikh. “It is the single largest source of export earnings and generates significant industrial employment, particularly for women.  It is integrated, from cotton growing, ginning, processing and the manufacture of home-use and technical textiles and contributes between 8 and 9 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP.” This established foundation, solid relationships with European and US buyers, and the government’s efforts to expand preferential trade agreements could see the country become a major sourcing destination.

Adherence to international labour standards will be a central plank of this expansion. Pakistan still has thousands of factories that Better Work will never reach directly. But the factories that sat through five webinars are already demonstrating impressive flow-on effects – teaching each other, cascading what they learned down through departments and across factory floors.

Programme manager, Ivo Spauwen, is optimistic about the results. “What we have seen from the pilot is encouraging.  This approach will be central to our second phase of operations, subject to funding being made available. Working through industry associations, equipping others to carry the methodology forward is clearly having a meaningful impact.”