Factory Opens a Child Friendly Space in Just One Week to Keep Children Away from the Production Floor

To support its workers with childcare, one garment factory in Jiangsu allows workers’ children to come to the factory with their parents and stay in the meeting rooms. The children can read or do homework there and an office staff will come to check occasionally. Due to a lack of experience running such factory based childcare centres, the factory did not have a dedicated staff to take care of the children and one day a child accidently ran to the production floor during an audit.

The supplier and the brand then reached out to The Centre to support the factory in setting up a Child Friendly Space (CFS). The Centre visited the factory on July 24 for a baseline assessment and trained two management staff on CFS operation the following Tuesday. The factory started preparation immediately after the training. They hired a college student who majored in early childhood education as the CFS teacher and assigned an internal staff to assist her. Since the venue (the meeting room) was in a good shape, they finished the renovation in less than a week and the CFS opened its door on July 29, 2021. The factory owner said that they wanted to have the CFS ready as soon as possible as they worried about the risks of parent workers leaving their children unattended at home.

Due to the recent COVID outbreak in Jiangsu province, the local government of the city where the factory is located ordered a mandatory closure for all on-site training centres. Those children who would originally go to those training centres had nowhere to go as a result. Fortunately, the factory’s CFS provided them with an alternative solution. The Centre has also worked closely with the factory to make sure the CFS takes necessary precautions and operates safely.

The space before renovation:

After the renovation: