Building Bridges: Partnerships in Responsible Supply Chains
Forging Common Ground – Series of Oxford Student Insights to the Skoll World Forum 2017.
The task to build bridges to trigger the development of responsible supply chains is not only a task for “bridges builders”, it is a common task. We need to forge common bridges together.
The session kicked off with a “pop-quiz” leading by the session’s moderator, Daniel Viederman, Managing Director at Humanity United. “How many cocoa farmers are around the world?”… After guesses and approximations, the right answer was 5 million.
Could you imagine the investment that is needed to audit all of these cocoa farmers have the responsible practices? How many more products a single food industry company have? As Viederman mention, we are not talking about a lineal supply chain, we are talking about a supply web.
The complexity of this supply web has meant that no one takes the responsibility to ensure fair labour conditions within the web. The private sector thought that labour issues needed to be solved by the public sector. Governments have been establishing regulations that encourage big industry players to start solving these issues.
Despite this complexity, companies such as Target and Mars Inc. are taking responsibility and action. In 2015, Target started a partnership with GoodWeave in support of their mission to end child labour in the rug industry. Mars Inc. is partnering with Verité to design simple solution for their suppliers to meet their responsible sourcing standards.
These leading efforts are transforming the unfair labour practices across industries. However, these partnerships and projects are not easily scalable for the various products across different industries. As Marika McCauley Sine, Mars’ Human Rights Director, said,
‘The situation is complex; we need to make it easy. We need to be specific and clear. Make it as simple as possible.’
For me, this simple and scalable solution is called: trust. If enterprises trust in other stakeholders, especially suppliers and suppliers of suppliers, there would be no need for huge investments to develop detailed audits or localised projects throughout the supply chain.
Although, building trust is not easy. How can we trust in others? Transparency, openness, collaboration, accountability, and information flow is needed. Who is creating trust through stakeholders? Talking and listening during the forum, two potential solutions came into my mind. After the panel, I had the opportunity to talk with Charmian Love, Co-Chair and Co-founder of B Lab UK. I realised that the B-Corporation Certification is identifying responsible players around the world. Listening to the session “Data-Driven Models for Change”, I discovered that Provenance is developing digital tools to trace products’ journeys.
Both trust’s mechanisms, mentioned above, include characteristics such as collaboration, data sharing, and transparency. This openness creates and distributes value along all stakeholders. Which make me reflect: Are the main industry players and competitors ready to collaborate between them? Are the innovators ready to share best practices? Are businesses ready to share value, despite the fact that these actions will reduce barriers to entry, increase the number of competitors, and increase consumer power?
I hope they are! In the long term, collaboration will be the key for value creation. My favourite value at Prospera, the Mexican social enterprise where I was working before coming to Oxford, states: “El que comparte, prospera. Siempre.” Translated to English:
“The one who shares, thrives. Always.”
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