...

Our commitment to human rights is reflected in our due diligence approach. We understand our supply chain responsibility and since the introduction of this approach in 2019 we have made considerable progress on human rights. The human rights impact assessments (HRIA’s) that we’ve carried out have contributed to this. Our ambition earlier communicated is to perform 3-6 HRIA’s per year. We aim to be as transparent as possible, but at the same time, we have a responsibility to minimize potential (unintended) consequences for our suppliers, who often operate in countries with a different culture and context. During this process, we have learned that within the meaningful and respectful relationships with our suppliers it is important to be mindful of their interests, as well as those of the rightsholders and other stakeholders, in order to improve on the findings.

Our HRIA’s are always performed by an independent third party with local experts that speak local languages, and address internationally recognized human rights. Within the cultural context, we aim to apply a gender-responsive approach. Report findings are not based on a single source, evidence of impact is based on consultation of multiple rightsholders and stakeholders. This consultation takes place in an anonymous and safe environment. In our HRIA’s, both negative and positive impacts are identified, but the priority is on identifying possible negative impacts.

We started with HRIA’s in 2020, which was a challenging time to implement such assessments due to the many restrictions during the pandemic, especially on engaging with rightsholders, and we were unable to fulfil our commitment of 3 to 6 HRIA’s during these years. In the meantime, we have built up our experience with performing HRIA’s in high-risk supply chains and have concluded that in the current way of working performing 6 HRIA’s per year is a significant challenge, and not particularly scalable. We also found that publishing meaningful action plans based on the results of an HRIA within 6 months is unrealistic, considering the complexity of those results. It requires specific expertise, coordination with many internal and external stakeholders, and therefore time to set up meaningful action plans. Our suppliers are key partners in the development and implementation of those action plans, and therefore we can only publish the HRIA’s and action plans with their approval and full support. Oxfam does not recognize the action plans we have published so far, because part of the actions were already implemented, and we did not publish the action plans within the Oxfam mandated timeframe of 6 months. From our point of view, this fixed time frame is not realistic, and contributes little to the end goal of improving the situation for workers and communities on the ground. We believe in our approach and prefer to work constructively in collaboration with our suppliers and relevant rightsholders and stakeholders to find and implement meaningful solutions to issues identified within the HRIA’s...