[W]hy is it so hard to find out where corporate human rights abuses are happening and prevent them? There's three major obstacles:

1. We Don't Know Where the Worst Violations are Happening

...We lack systematic, up-to-date information on which countries have the highest rates of child labour, which companies are buying up the biggest pieces of farmland, which government agencies are most likely to ask for bribes. Not only that, but we lack even basic data on where the greatest risks of these violations are. Without hard numbers on private-sector investment and development, we're powerless to ensure that the former contributes to the latter...

2. We Can't Mobilize Against Every Company

...[T]he second challenge of measuring corporate human rights abuses [is that]...[w]e only hear about a small percentage of them.  The vast majority of economic activity is carried out by small-scale companies, ones you've never heard of, mostly in the informal sector. Their goods don't travel across borders, and when they exploit their workers or harm communities, you don't hear about it. Even among multinational corporations, most don't sell their products directly to consumers, and a growing number are based in countries where consumer advocacy and international NGOs can't reach them...

3. We Don't Know What is Working

...What we're missing...is information about whether [companies' & governments'] promises are being kept. Of the companies that have committed to respecting human rights, how many of them are actually doing so in practice? Of all the countries with impeccable laws banning child labour, how many of them are actually inspecting workplaces to find it?  That's a lot harder to find out.  This distinction--between measuring commitments and measuring results--is critical to reducing human rights violations by companies...

...As the old business cliché goes, what gets measured gets managed. And right now, we're doing one without the other...The challenges we face in our own field are big, but they are not insurmountable. The first step toward preventing accidents, after all, is knowing where, how and why they happen.