As March got underway, the International Garment Training Center (IGTC) opened in Ho Chi Minh City with the goal of helping the Vietnamese compete in the worldwide textile industry. As it is, the country struggles to compete against major exporters like China and India.
The center aims to improve the management capacity of the Vietnamese garment industry – and to help to do this, six teachers from the Danish Teko-Center will travel to Vietnam.
Teko is a Danish textile school, located near Herning in Jutland. The center is Scandinavia’s largest institute of education within design and business and teaches all disciplines used in the garment industry, from management to economics and design. The garment centre in Ho Chi Minh City is the first of its kind in Vietnam and it will focus its training on the areas of production management, marketing, sales, personnel training and enterprise social responsibility.
Administrative chief at Teko, Finn Jørgensen explains: “The first teacher will arrive soon and stay at the centre for seven weeks. During the next year we will send six teachers to Vietnam where they will all stay for seven weeks – the last one will finish in early 2007,” he says.
Joint Effort
The garment centre is a US$212,000 project established under the joint effort of 13 garment manufacturers and one equipment supplier in Ho Chi Minh City. The project is run in association with the Mekong Private Sector Development Facility (MPDF) a multilateral Sponsor Programme run by the International Financial Company (IFC) and the Ho Chi Minh City Association of Garment, Textile, Embroidery and Knitting.
The help from the Danish Teko is provided through DANIDA in Vietnam.
“Our help on this project has been established through an earlier project we did with the Danish Embassy and DANIDA, where we also trained Vietnamese teachers. This time IFC runs the main project, and we are to run courses for teachers in the Vietnamese center and managers in the textile industry, where we are to teach everything from economics to design and construction,” Finn Jørgensen elaborates.
