Cloth Based Employment

Background

The recent Oxfam report suggests that more than 46 million Indians have fallen into extreme poverty in 2021. Additionally, 1 million tonnes of textile waste is generated in the country every year, costing billions of rupees for disposal. At Goonj we use this underutilized urban discard as a means to generate livelihood through the processing and upcycling of material. Out of these, even the material that cannot be reused such as oversized or see-through clothes, shreds of cloth, reels of cassettes, etc are used to create products like aasans (sitting mat), cloth sanitary napkins, daris, rugs, sujini (quilt/mattress) that when channelized to rural areas can elevate material poverty.

Our Model

• Through Goonj’s collection camps, dropping, and processing centers 9000+ tonnes of material get collected and processed annually
• Material that cannot be channelized directly is upcycled into cloth-based products. Through this lakhs of man-days of employment are generated. Additionally, ignored and marginalized communities become producers for themselves.
• The products created and processed in these centers are channelized to rural areas as rewards and used as a catalyst to trigger large-scale development work in the most ignored pockets of India.

“After my husband’s death, I had no way of supporting my family. I began making Sujnis for Goonj and saved enough money to open a small shop in my village. My shop has been open a month and I am proud to be supporting my three children with my business” - Baby Devi

Contribute to our initiative and let us take forward the mission of empowering more women like Baby Devi through dignified and sustainable cloth-based livelihood opportunities.