Ability in Disability

Marks and Spencer a British value-for-money retailer who started as a Penny Bazaar in Leeds back in 1884, currently expanded in 1,509 stores and over 100 websites globally. As a business that’s been around for 137 years, we know how important it is to look to the future. M&S has been built on a belief that caring about our impact on tomorrow’s world as well as today’s. We aim to enhance the lives and support the local communities of the people who work for and with us. Our Global Sourcing Principles set global supplier standards on health and safety, labor standards, environment, business ethics, equality and community human rights topics and apply across our entire business.

 

Aligning with the standards M&S globally started a community engagement program called Marks & Start. Through this program M&S has successfully supported more than 20,000 people around the world which includes homeless people, disable empowerment, young people and single parents. M&S started its sourcing office in Bangladesh back in 2004 and from the very beginning M&S Bangladesh is committed to work for the improvement of people, society and community. As per social commitment M&S Bangladesh has engaged projects for women empowerment, digital wage initiative, workers’ rights, child rights, education, sanitation, health & wellbeing, disabled empowerment and so on.

 

Statistics regarding disabled people shows that 10% of total population in Bangladesh is disabled. To improve the life of these disabled peoples M&S Bangladesh started Mark & Start project collaborating with Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralyzed (CRP) in 2006. Standing on 16 years with Marks & Start project in Bangladesh we can now proudly declare that we have trained & employed a total of 3075 (Female:1675 & Male:1400) disabled persons in 80 sourcing factories all over Bangladesh.

 

Marks & Start training program is generally a three-month session for each batch. After ending of every session, the successful candidates receive employment from the factories who are committed to M&S earlier to recruit according to their capacity. These physically disabled persons aged between.

 

18-30 are selected from different District through Disabled Development Council and trained in three different programs e.g., industrial sewing machine operation, linking machine operation and computer office application.

 

The training program run in CRP Ganakbari, Savar & Manikganj training center. The program is also supervised by M&S Bangladesh Office at regular interval and ensure proper training environment by arranging cultural exchange program, certificate distribution ceremony, induction kit distribution ceremony and parents meeting for all the trainees. We also encourage the factories by giving award as best contributory factory every year as well as the employees by giving best employee award among all recruited employees.