Ethical Trading Initiative’s Transparency Journey

Transparency has been a key part of the Ethical Trading Initiative’s (ETI) strategy for the last 10 years. As a multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI), we believe it is critical to address human rights impacts in supply chains, particularly through due diligence and multi-stakeholder collaboration. To carry out effective human rights due diligence (HRDD), our company members need to be open about where they are sourcing from and the issues they find. To address these collaboratively, our members need to share this information—to know who else is sourcing from or working in the same places.

To this end, ETI’s goal has been to increase transparency and make public reporting more impactful. We introduced our original Corporate Transparency Framework two years ago. This is a public reporting framework for our company members, which includes a set of minimum requirements that we ask all members to meet. This year, we are specifying that our company members must publish their tier 1 supplier lists directly on Open Supply Hub. We are proud to be the first MSI to mandate this as part of our membership obligations.

Partnering with OS Hub as an MSI

Choosing to work with Open Supply Hub was an obvious choice for us. We have asked our company members to publish their tier 1 supply chains on their own websites since 2021. We found that this data was often hard to find, and in formats that were difficult to collate and use effectively. Open Supply Hub provided a neat solution; a place where all our company members across all sectors could publish their lists in one place and contribute to publicly available sourcing information. The information can now be easily accessible, usable and shareable. This helps companies to easily upload, manage, update and keep track of their data. It also helps us as a membership organisation to easily access all our members’ data in one place for time-efficient analysis, especially in times of crisis.

Impacts We’ve Seen So Far

Driving efficiencies

• Transparency offers our members better opportunities for HRDD and collaboration, and as a membership organization, it provides us with excellent data. It gives us easily accessible insight into our members’ work and performance. 
• Partnering with OS Hub has also revolutionized our ability to collect and access our members’ sourcing data. Before partnering with OS Hub, we were manually collecting our members’ sourcing country data from their individual websites which was an onerous process. From next year, we will be able to do this much more efficiently using the OS Hub platform. It is an up-to-date and reliable source of data. Visually, it is much easier to see precise locations and linkages which we can’t do with manual data collection.

Crisis response

• This quick and dependable access has been particularly useful in cases of crisis response. During the earthquakes in Morocco in September 2023, we used OS Hub to identify how many members were sourcing from the affected area and where the majority of those suppliers were located. We compared this to where the earthquake happened and overlayed this with our members’ supplier data and other manufacturers to get both a general and specific understanding of the whole sector. We reached out to our members and other MSIs to share what our understanding was and what the impacts might be and recommendations moving forward. 

Support and learning

• It enables us to better understand which members need more support from us and which members can support others by sharing their learning. It facilitates case study collection to share with other members as well as for our own internal use, to help direct our work.  

Accountability

• As transparency can be a strong indicator of how well a member is performing in their HRDD processes, it can also help inform our ability to hold members to account.  

Join us!

The more companies that are sharing their information on the OS Hub, the more successfully it can be used as a tool for effective collaboration and better HRDD. MSIs have a strong ability to influence their company member’s decisions on where they publish their supplier data and the resulting impact this can generate. We ask all MSIs to consider mandating the publication of supplier lists on the OS Hub so we can work better together and ultimately advance respect and protection of human rights in global supply chains.

What is the Ethical Trading Initiative? 

ETI is a leading workers’ rights organisation focused on addressing human rights impacts in global supply chains. We support companies to identify and reduce human rights risks in supply chains through delivering support, sharing guidance, and driving collaboration across our membership. By working together with companies, trade unions and NGOs we are uniquely placed to tackle the challenges faced by workers around the world.

Helpful resources:

• Read this OS Hub Quick Start Guide for MSIs
• Watch this recorded webinar by and for MSIs working on advancing transparency and collaboration across their membership
• Check out ETI’s Corporate Transparency Framework

Want to connect with the OS Hub team to learn more about how MSIs are making use of OS Hub? Email info@opensupplyhub.org.