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Tokyo. Japanese casual clothing brand Uniqlo and Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus said on Tuesday that they would create a textiles company in Bangladesh to help poor women gain financial independence.

Fast Retailing, which owns Uniqlo, plans to invest some $100,000 to set up Grameen Uniqlo in October.

The new company will source materials and make garments in Bangladesh — including women’s underwear, school uniforms and blankets.

It plans to hire up to 2,000 local people within three years, drawn mainly from the eight million borrowers of Yunus’s microcredit Grameen Bank, and train them to become financially independent by selling clothes.

Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his Grameen Bank, which gives tiny loans to help the very poor start businesses. Of its borrowers, 97 percent are female.

“Grameen ladies will become their own business owners by selling the clothing products in visits to neighbors’ houses,” said Tadashi Yanai, chairman and president of Fast Retailing.

“The best way to combat poverty is to help each person make money and stand on their own.”

Yunus, a groundbreaking banker from Bangladesh, is backed by corporations such as food giant Danone, global water group Veolia, sportswear company Adidas and software company SAP.

Fast Retailing will be the first Asian corporation to start a social business with the Grameen Bank group, Yunus said.

“Uniqlo is a global company, a big company, and a company that is now creating a social business in Bangladesh,” he said in Tokyo, adding that the world needed a new economic “architecture” to fight poverty.

“One of the attempts to redesign the architecture is to bring another kind of business into the world, besides the business that we all know today, the business to make money for ourselves,” Yunus said.

“Now the other business we talk about is a business to change the world. That’s the kind of business we signed with Uniqlo today,” he said.

Protesting workers have recently forced dozens of garment factories near the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, to shut in major industrial unrest that hit the sector.

Employees were demonstrating over low pay.

Bangladesh’s garment workers, who make clothes for major Western brands like Walmart, have been demanding wages of at least 5,000 taka ($70) a month. The current minimum wage is just $25.

The government has said it will raise the salaries of the country’s three million garment workers by the end of this month.

Garments accounted for nearly 80 percent of Bangladesh’s $15.56 billion of exports last year. The factories employ about 40 percent of the industrial work force.


Agence France-Presse