Burma Benefits From Foreign Investment Drive

In their trademark maroon robes and with their heads shaved, a line of monks walk along a sodden and potholed back lane in Rangoon.

They collect donations of rice from each house they pass.

One of the monks rings a bell, signalling their presence. The rain pours down. This is Burma's rainy season.

Tradition is still well ingrained in this country. Much of Rangoon, Burma's old capital city, is still stuck in time after half a century of military dictatorship.

Old colonial mansions sit derelict behind once-grand gates along the city's streets. Some are almost entirely obscured by the vivid green foliage which hasn't been cut back for decades.

But two years have now passed since the generals took off their uniforms and turned towards a democracy of sorts.

The icon of that change, Aung San Suu Kyi, has now been in parliament for a year, sanctions have been lifted and the people are slowly seeing what all that means for them.

On the outskirts of the city is a shiny new factory.

Famoso Clothing Company is Japanese owned and they used to make their clothes in China. But wages there are now too high and so they began to look elsewhere.

Kazuto Yamazaki, deputy manager of Famoso, said: "We had three factories in China. Now we have shut two. The third will shut soon. All our production will move to Myanmar (Burma)."

The sanctions would have stopped Famoso from relocating to Burma. Now, they're here with a new factory and with jobs for 1,100 workers.

The production floor is vast. Six hundred suits come off the busy lines each day. The workers are paid the equivalent of £75 a month.

For them, that is an increase from £25 just a few years ago. In China, Famoso had to pay four times as much. A win-win.

Mr Yamazaki is on the cusp of his biggest contract. Last year, British retail giant Marks & Spencer visited the factory. They liked what they saw but wanted a better commitment to employee safety before they signed the deal.

Mr Yamazaki shows me an M&S branded audit form with a list of improvement requirements.

"This is their guidance. Some points need to be improved. We have to have arrows on the floor for the evacuation and these kind of things. Only after their approval can we export our products," he said.

The clothing factory collapse in neighbouring Bangladesh last month in which hundreds of workers died has focused global attention on cheap labour. Mr Yamazaki believes that international investment in Burma will improve workers' conditions here.

"Last time when Marks & Spencer came to check they said 'Did not mark emergency exit passageway', so we put arrows and then we also changed the colours," he said, pointing out the arrows on the floor.

"We are proud of receiving their order. Once we have made products for Marks & Spencer, the other buyers will automatically trust our quality," he adds.

Sky News spoke to three of the workers on their allocated half-hour lunch break. Lain Lain says she is 31 although she looks younger. Her friend Ni No Mar gives her age as 28.

Burmese law stipulates that workers must be 15 to be employed in factories. Mr Yamazaki says his company insists their minimum age is 18 though he admits that some workers lie to secure jobs.

Both the women we spoke to agreed that things were better since the country's reforms took hold.

Every indication we had from our two-hour visit was that they were content with their work.

Across town, more signs of change. Along the city's wide river is a busy new port. Two years ago the river bank here was empty. Now it is covered with containers from all around the world.

The Marks & Spencer suits and everything else this country can offer will be delivered to the world from this port or one of the others being built along Burma's long coastline.

But that is only half the story. The sanctions have prevented Burma from importing anything from the West for more than two decades.

Battered buses limp along the country's road and the trucks are from a different era.

Now, anyone can import their product here. This is an almost virgin market. As the people get richer they will buy more and the wheels will slowly start to turn.

Still, the challenges are huge. This is a country is made up of many ethnic groups thanks to random borders drawn by British colonialists.

With the dictatorship gone, the tensions the generals kept in check are back. Religions have clashed with Buddhist monks accused of encouraging attacks against Muslims. More than 100 have died, and 125,000 are homeless.

Human Rights Watch recently declared the violence in the country's far west to be a form of ethnic cleansing with evidence of military backing.

"The criminal acts committed against the Rohingya and Kamen Muslim communities... amount to crimes against humanity carried out as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing," they wrote in a report published in April.

For now, that violence is contained in three distinct regions of the country, but it is a signal that this emerging democracy isn't quite there yet.