An interlude

To break up the essays, a progress update from the workshop here in Pram Pram.

Firstly, to show you around again:The beginning of a busy day  (video)

We now have 8 full time sewing staff, 3 batikers and 2 guards. True to the Global Mamas ethos of empowering women, the workers are mostly female, with just one tailor in the workshop.

Sewing is split into two teams, with the first two ladies to join, Charity and Eunice, running one each. They are well qualified for the roll, having both run a 2-4 person sewing spot in town before joining us. Their deputies, Phidelia and TT have 15 years sewing experience between them, TT is also our resident machine maintenance man, as well as being handy at fixing electrical items. Justina and Gifty are our new arrivals, filling the 'junior seamstress' rolls in each team. Both are from New Ningo rather than PramPram, the town a 5 minute drive East rather than West from us. These two turn up an hour early every day, we're not sure why but it certainly helps with productivity. The final team members Henrietta and Gladys are our 'Sewing Assistants', focusing on ironing and button making to assist the seamstresses.

              Phidelia (left) and Gladys beginning to make Pocket Wallets from our scraps

  

       Justina (left), Eunice and Henrietta (right) laying out a Sarong batik, ready for cutting

  

      Gifty just loves her new sewing machine. We now have seven with two more on the way.

  

On the batiking side, after the production of a three colour fabric named 'ornament drop' went wrong in Cape Coast, we've been handed the baton and taken over the manufacture here. It's a huge volume of work, the first request alone was for 500 yards. 

                                         Christy batiking in the shade of the trees

  

                   6 yards of 'City-Scape' sarong and 6 yards of 'Sunflowers' hangs to dry

  

On a very positive note Global Mamas has just refreshed the cost models for all production sites and, after much work, we're now the most cost efficient site for both batik and sewing that the organisation has. As a result we expect to be pushed hard over the coming months to make as much as possible at those nice new lower prices, which allow the NGO to expand significantly into the bulk wholesale market in the US. 

As for Lydia and I, Lyd is putting the finishing touches to the Access system which will manage this whole operation. It tracks all inventory, provides shopping lists for material purchasing, recommends prices and locations for purchasing, stores incoming orders and assigns work in daily or weekly buckets to our sewing and batiking teams. That's after she built the HR system, which we also use every day to keep things in order. Both are fully scalable for the large, 200 person workshop we someday hope to raise the funding to build.

                                                                  Our HR management system

I've been out and about purchasing twice a week, it's amazing how many raw materials are needed to keep a small workshop up and running. In my spare time I build cabinets and quality check the work coming from the sewing side of the operation.

                                                     The first of three cabinets...

 
All in all, the business is progressing nicely.

Tim x