What I can offer
Conducting research into and writing reports on international development and trade issues. Writing funding proposals, annual reports, practical guides, blogs, articles and other communication materials.
Supporting existing ETI members in writing ethical trade reports and strategic plans, and helping prospective members to prepare for ETI membership application.
I adapt my writing style to the relevant audience, seeking always to be clear, informative and engaging.
Please do contact me for an initial chat about how I could help.
My research and writing experience
- Advising on ethical trade plans and reports: Five years’ experience of providing ETI corporate members with feedback and advice on their ethical trade strategic plans and reports to ETI. Having advised a range of companies from within ETI, I am well positioned to work with you to write strong and effective ethical trade plans and reports that meet ETI’s requirements.
- Writing funding proposals: I have written and contributed to successful funding proposals to DIFD, Comic Relief, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Commonwealth Foundation as well as individual major donors.
- Managing a global survey researching the impact of purchasing practices on suppliers’ ability to provide decent working conditions. The on-line survey was the largest of its kind, reaching out to 43,000 suppliers in multiple supply chains worldwide. It was a partnership between the Ethical Trading Initiatives of Denmark, Norway and UK and the ILO.
- Managing a multi-country survey of over 1,000 workers in three different countries and supply chains to assess the cumulative effects of ethical trade efforts on their lives. This was supplemented by a synthesis of twelve external surveys.
- Research approaches included Sensemaker, an innovative approach that puts the interviewees far more in control of the results, thus reducing the risk of researcher bias. I would highly recommend this approach for large scale surveys that aim to genuinely understand workers’ needs, concerns, ideas and aspirations.
- Managing a gender analysis of five companies exploring the drivers, impacts and lessons of their gender-related work and the extent to which they succeeded in improving the lives of women workers in their supply chains.
- Ethical trade guides and articles: My extensive writing on fair and ethical trade, particularly living wages and gender in global supply chains, draws on my experience of engaging with international experts and activists, of commissioning research and guidance and running workshops and conferences to explore these complex issues. It also draws on my international development communications experience in Asia, Africa, South America and Eastern Europe where I developed a strong grounding in the complex challenges faced by people living in poverty
India – with a focus on the tea sector – is a particularly strong area of interest and expertise; I have researched and written about this extensively, and I continue to follow the issues closely and commentate on them. I would be happy to give talks, workshops or seminars on this topic.
Selection of articles, blogs and other publications
- ‘What Moroccan women workers really, really want…and feel’ – ETI, 2017
- ‘What does it take for a woman to become a Bangladeshi garment factory supervisor?’ – ETI, 2016
- ‘Those Lush Tea Estates Are Hiding Death and Despair’ The Wire, 2016
- ‘Breaking the system designed to keep tea workers poor’ New Internationalist, 2016
- ‘The Sports Direct ‘how not to follow the ETI Base Code’ manual’ ETI 2016
- Quoted in ‘Fair wage, decent wage, living wage…’ Six things you need to know – The Guardian, 2015
- ‘What does a National Living Wage really mean?’ – ETI,2105
- ‘‘What is a living wage? Ask workers!’ – Stronger Unions (TUC) 2014
- ‘Review of Gender Relations in Forest Societies in Asia: Patriarchy at Odds’ in Development in Practice, Oxfam, 2004
Sabita Banerji 