Webinar on impact of coronavirus on non-member RMG factories coducted
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The Mapped in Bangladesh (MiB) project of Centre for Entrepreneurship Development (CED), Brac University (BracU), organised a webinar on August 12 titled "Impact of Coronavirus on Non-member RMG Factories in Bangladesh".
The webinar was based on the findings of the recently conducted rapid survey on Non-member RMG Factories in Bangladesh under the same title.
The survey was carried out in partnership between Centre for Entrepreneurship Development (CED) of Brac University and Brac James P. Grant School of Public Health, according to a press release.
As part of the rapid survey, 555 export oriented non-member factories from Dhaka, Gazipur, Narayanganj and Chattogram districts were called over phone among which 448 non-member factories participated in the survey.
These factories were sampled from the database of the Mapped in Bangladesh (MiB), a four year-long (2017-2021) project which has been conducting countrywide factory census and continued to publish the factory information in a digital map (https://mappedinbangladesh.org/) to enable transparency in the RMG sector.
Representing Brac James P. Grant School of Public Health, Dr. Atonu Rabbani, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Dhaka, presented the findings of the rapid survey.
The webinar was moderated by Mr. Syed Hasibuddin Hussain, Project Manager, MiB, and chaired by Professor Dr. Rahim B. Talukdar, Adviser, CED and Team Leader, MiB, CED-BracU.
As per the findings,82.6 per cent (370) non-member factories were operational at the time of the survey i.e. during mid-June among 448 surveyed factories.
The average capacity utilisation was 53.8 per cent.
In April, the factories were open on average for only 2.3 days. By May, they slowly started to open and worked for about 9.6 days.
Since the onset of the pandemic crisis the factories in total laid off about 58 thousand workers, the average was 226 workers per factory.
Among the 208 factories that reported having orders in the pipeline, 61 per cent said that the orders were still valid, 36 per cent said that they were still in negotiation with the buyers, and only 2.9 per cent said that the orders were cancelled.