Helena Helmersson, Head of Sustainability for Hennes & Mauritz AB (H&M) announces that H&M is extending its All for Children collaboration with UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, to include Bangladesh. In total H&M will contribute USD 7.99 million to the project, which is H&M's biggest donation to community investment to date. In addition, 25% of all sales from this collection will go to UNICEF's work with All for Children in Bangladesh.
All for Children is the name that H&M gives to the long-term projects that we do to support and promote education and better health for children in countries where H&M operates. Bangladesh is an important production country and we want to contribute to positive, sustainable development.
The All for Children project aims to take a holistic approach to child development in slum areas in Dhaka. Since H&M believes that children who learn how to read and write are better equipped to make informed choices about their future, the objective is to get approximately 40,000 children in targeted slums around Dhaka into schooling.
The project goal is for children aged from 3 to 14 years to have improved access to quality education, basic life skills and social protection services. The expected long-term impact of the project is to contribute to overall poverty reduction and improved livelihoods for families in the slums, and in a wider context to improve social development in Bangladesh. The project in Bangladesh will run from 2012 to 2017.
In 2009 H&M began the first All for Children project in India in collaboration with UNICEF, to give children in the cotton producing region of Tamil Nadu the opportunity to go to school and to improve their access to health and nutritional care.
The project is being funded by a donation of USD 4.5 million from H&M. Since the overall partnership began in 2004, H&M has given an annual subsidy of USD 500,000 to various UNICEF projects focusing on education for girls, HIV and AIDS prevention in Cambodia and children's rights in Uzbekistan. H&M has also contributed to UNICEF's emergency relief on several occasions.