The SWITCH Garment project, with its auditing partners TERI and the Institute of Technology of Cambodia have now carried out 10 factory assessments. 

Geres engineers Bunheng LY and Sophea LUN were on hand to facilitate these audits and begin to provide advice to factories.

Geres has also begun designing the detailed training programme. We carried out a detailed factory survey which was sent out to 500+ members of the Garment Manufacturing Association in Cambodia (GMAC). Geres’ team then carried out in-depth interviews with several HR managers, compliance officers and technicians in order to get a more accurate understanding of existing and missing skills.

This is in preparation of short courses to develop technical and management skills on energy in factories, as well as a potential future apprenticeship scheme for sustainability in the garment sector. Watch this space for more news!

Geres also organized a series of well-attended webinars, on the Higg Index, on solar rooftop PV (in collaboration with GIZ) and on boiler efficiency (with UNDP). Each webinar had over 100 participants, mostly from garment factories.

Finally, Geres has now conducted introductory training for the 30 first factories who have joined the Switch programme. These were led by Geres’s most experienced Cambodian engineer Bunheng Ly with the support of GMAC and its training center CGTI.