Group Picture of Trainees with their Trainer
2nd Round Skills Training in Leather Started
The Center for Accelerated Women’s Economic Empowerment (CAWEE) implementing the project of the Office of the First Lady “Connecting 1,500 Women and Young Girls to the Export Market” has continued working on different priority sectors. The second round training on the leather sector started on December 5, 2016, in the facility of the Federal Small and Medium Manufacturing Industries Development Agency.The training is organized for two months.
Trainees practicing sewing
The training involves twenty five (25) young women that have never been trained in the production of leather goods. Those trainees will be employed in the following six women owned and managed companies:
- Leather Exotica,
- Lidia Leather Crafts,
- Negist Ethiopia,
- AB Leather,
- Leather Extra and
- Msgana Shoe.
Those six companies, all of them members of CAWEE, were selected based on their export orders at hand and also their potential and readiness for export, with the ultimate purpose of building their export supply side capacities.
The training is delivered by an expert from the Leather Industries Development Institute (LIDI). The focus of the training is on theoretical and practical knowledge of producing leather goods, where trainees are expected to get basic knowledge on how to operate the stitching machine, exercising pattern making, cutting, sewing and all other basic knowledge related to the production of leather goods.
Trainer Abebaw working with a trainee
The implementation of this part of the project is financed by UNDP Ethiopia, covering all costs of the training except the purchase of the machines. All the machines used for the training is purchased with the support secured from the Government of Japan. Once the training is completed, on the delivery agreement which will be agreed and signed with each of the companies, those targeted six companies will receive the machines from CAWEE to continue production in fully employing those trained young women.
The skills training in leather is taking place at the compound of the Federal Small and Medium Manufacturing Industries Development Agency.
Once the skills training is completed, all the 25 young women will start working in the six companies, starting February 2017, as full time employees, where the distribution of the number of employees and the machines is set based on the export orders that the companies have at hand and also their export readiness/potential to start exporting soon. In this respect, distribution of the 25 trainees as well as the sixty eight (68) different kinds of machines (single needle, double needle, cylinder arm and skiving) allocated to the exporting companies is as follows:
