Terms of Reference
Role: Project Associate - Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu
Swasti is a global public health organisation committed to improving health outcomes for vulnerable communities by strengthening systems, building capacities, and enabling community-centered solutions. With a mission to add 100 million healthy days by 2030, Swasti works across multiple states in India and several countries globally, partnering with governments, communities, and institutions to address complex health and development challenges.
About the Project
Globally, the ILO estimates that heat stress contributes to nearly 23 million workplace injuries and 19,000 deaths each year, underscoring the urgent need to treat extreme heat as a serious occupational health and safety risk. For apparel and textile workers, prolonged exposure to heat can increase the risk of dehydration, fatigue, heat exhaustion, fainting, reduced concentration, and workplace accidents.
It is in response to this growing risk that the Heat-Resilient Workforce Project has been designed to address these challenges, under the aegis of Health@Work model. This project is a worker health and climate resilience initiative aimed at protecting apparel and textile workers from extreme heat-related harm across industrial clusters in India. The project focuses on embedding heat safety into everyday factory operations through Heat Action Plans, worker and supervisor training, early-warning dashboards, and practical workplace protections such as hydration, rest, cooling, and referral systems.
Swasti, with multistakeholders, will work with factories, district administrations, industry associations, brands, and technical partners etc to build a cluster-level model for coordinated heat preparedness and implementation. The initiative seeks to strengthen worker health, safety, and agency while creating a tested, evidence-backed Heat-Resilient Workforce Model that can be replicated across other labour-intensive supply chains.l
Key Responsibilities
1. Responsible for day-to-day field execution of the Heat-Resilient Workforce Project across assigned factories in the Tiruppur industrial cluster, under the guidance of the Cluster Manager.
2. Responsible for factory-level activity coordination with HR teams, welfare officers, supervisors, worker representatives, and other factory stakeholders to ensure planned activities are scheduled and completed as per the agreed workplan.
3. Responsible for rolling out factory readiness assessments, worker mobilisation, training logistics, workplace heat-safety activities, feedback collection, and follow-up actions at the factory level.
4. Responsible for worker-facing implementation activities, including worker trainings, heat Champion mobilisation, peer-led health education sessions, heat-risk awareness activities, and field follow-ups.
5. Responsible for identifying, onboarding, and regularly engaging Climate Care Champions within assigned factories to support early identification of heat-related risks, first response, referrals, and preventive health promotion.
6. Responsible for factory-level documentation, including attendance records, training reports, field visit notes, meeting minutes, worker feedback summaries, activity trackers, and photo documentation as per project requirements.
7. Responsible for routine data collection and field-level monitoring for baseline, midline, endline, worker feedback, implementation fidelity, workplace measures, and Climate Care Champion activities, in coordination with the MEAL team.
8. Responsible for following up with factories to ensure agreed workplace heat-safety measures are implemented, including hydration, rest, cooling, first response, referral pathways, heat-risk communication, and worker feedback mechanisms.
9. Responsible for coordinating factory-level referrals and linkages for workers requiring heat-related first response, follow-up care, ESIC or government health services, and other relevant heat-health support.
10. Responsible for tracking field-level issues, implementation delays, worker concerns, factory-level barriers, and operational risks, and escalating them to the Cluster Manager with clear updates and suggested actions.
11. Climate health expertise
12. Supply chain understanding , multi stakeholder engagement
Qualification
A graduate degree in social work, public health, community development, social sciences, rural development, development studies, or a related field, with 2–4 years of relevant experience in program support, field implementation, stakeholder coordination, documentation, and operational follow-up. The candidate should have experience supporting field-level activities, coordinating with community members, workers, factories, partners, or local stakeholders, maintaining trackers, assisting with training logistics, and supporting reporting and documentation. Candidates with strong field experience in community or worker-focused programmes may also be considered.
Skills and Competencies Required
1. Demonstrates accountability, integrity, confidentiality and respect while maintaining professional working relationships with team members, partners, factory management, workers and field stakeholders.
2. Takes ownership and responsibility for completing assigned activities, follow-ups, documentation, trackers and field deliverables on time and to the required quality standards.
3. Is self-driven, proactive and solution-oriented, with the ability to identify coordination gaps, flag challenges early and recommend practical field-level solutions.
Has relevant experience supporting field-based programmes, preferably in public 4. health, worker wellbeing, labour rights, occupational health and safety, climate resilience, supply chains or community development.
5. Has a sound understanding of climate and health, particularly heat-related health risks, prevention measures, early identification of heat-related illnesses, first response and referral. Alternatively, demonstrates the ability and willingness to rapidly build this expertise.
6. Understands or is willing to develop an understanding of apparel and textile supply chains, factory operations, production systems, workforce structures, buyer or brand requirements and the realities influencing workplace interventions.
7. Has strong multi-stakeholder engagement and coordination skills, with the ability to work effectively with factories, industry associations, government departments, ESIC and health facilities, worker representatives, brands, civil-society organisations, implementation partners and internal technical teams.
8. Has strong skills in training support, field facilitation, documentation, report writing, data collection, data entry, record maintenance and activity-tracker management.
9. Understands or is willing to build an understanding of worker vulnerabilities, gender and migrant-worker concerns, labour rights, occupational health and safety, factory systems and worker-sensitive engagement approaches.
10. Has good communication and facilitation skills in Tamil, Hindi and English, with the ability to support meetings, training sessions, field visits and stakeholder consultations, and is willing to travel extensively within the cluster.
Work Location
Tiruppur industrial cluster, Tamil Nadu, with travel within the cluster and to district/state meetings as required.