Study title

Covid-19 has severely impacted employment opportunity and earning potential for workers in Cambodia's garment and footwear sector. Manifesting initially as an economic crisis, the impacts of manufacturing shutdowns and consumer lockdowns around the world slowed the garment sector's output. This led to employment suspensions and terminations affecting hundreds of thousands of workers in Cambodia alone. For two years, the ReFashion study has uniquely tracked the impacts of the pandemic on a cohort of 200 female workers in Cambodia, from January 2020 through to December 2021. The study combines a quantitative survey of female workers to measure monthly trends in employment, household finances, and wellbeing, with qualitative interviews to explore emergent themes in greater depth. Each of these components is repeated with the same cohort of participants at strategic intervals. The research methods are designed to capture an in-depth and long-term understanding of women workers' lives through the pandemic. Our findings indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated a crisis of over-indebtedness for workers in the garment industry, with severe consequences for the short and long-term health and wellbeing of workers and their families. Over-indebtedness is reached when a credit borrower 'is continuously struggling to meet repayment deadlines and has to make unduly high sacrifices related to his or her loan obligations'. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, credit borrowing had become commonplace among low-income households in Cambodia, which has one of the largest microfinance industries in the world in terms of borrowers per capita. This widescale borrowing enables households to temporarily deal with the lack of social protection and public services in the country, allowing them to meet costs of health care and invest in housing in times of urgent need. High levels of borrowing by garment workers specifically, as evidenced in the ReFashion study, indicate that...