Children’s Rights
and Business Atlas

Nina Vollmer

A very warm welcome to this webinar hosted by Global Child Forum. We’re especially excited today because we are launching the Children’s Rights and Business Atlas (The Atlas).

It’s a tool we’ve been working on for a while to help make geographic risk to children more visible, and making this tool openly available to a wide audience is something we’ve prioritised, because we know these questions aren’t owned by any one group – they’re shared across business, finance, and civil society.

First of all, we would like to thank our project partners on this initiative, where we had the support of a group of businesses (Arcor, Barilla, Orkla ASA, Mondelez International, The Hershey Company, and Ferrero) who have helped us develop and test the tool before it was launched, and we really appreciate this – this dialogue and this work to make sure the tool is fit for purpose.

I will speak about what the Atlas is and show you how to use the tool. Then we have Anita Househam from Orkla ASA, who will talk about how they practically use data and due diligence in their operations. We also have Ines Kaempfer from The Centre for Child Rights and Business, who will talk about how to transform data into work on the ground, and how those two processes are connected.

The Atlas is a country-level risk screening tool, and it helps understand how business activities may impact children across different countries and geographies. So, it allows you to identify high-risk countries, explore specific issues, compare countries and prioritise where to focus your efforts – and that is really the key point here: it is about prioritisation. Most of you are already aware that risks do exist, but the challenge is where to start and where to focus, and that’s what the Atlas is designed to support.

What kind of questions can the Atlas help you answer at a high level? It’s mainly these: where are the risks to children the highest, and what is driving those risks? What topics or what structures are behind the risk level? For this, the Atlas gives you a structured starting point for your analysis – and it is the starting point. This is meant to guide your thinking and help you prioritise before going deeper and doing more research.

The Atlas covers three indices, as we call them, and they are focused around areas or topics that are related to how children are impacted by business activities. The first index is Workplace, and here we look at risks linked to employment and supply chains, for example, child labour and working conditions. The second one is Marketplace, which looks at risks linked to products, services, marketing, online environments, and product safety. And thirdly, we have Community and Environment, and here we look at risks linked to the broader context in which companies operate, including environmental and societal factors.

What this gives you is a more holistic view of risk. It’s not just about supply chains, it’s also about how children are affected as consumers and as part of communities where you have operations.

The results or the data in the Atlas use four simple risk levels: there is very high risk, high risk, medium risk, and low risk. These are the main ways to interpret the data, and it should help you focus your efforts – perhaps less effort where there’s low risk; keep an eye open and research where there’s medium risk; and more work where it comes to high and very high risk. It makes it easier to quickly identify where risks are most concentrated and where you want to focus first. Important to know is that these are relative risk levels, so they’re based on quartiles out of the number of countries in the index – they show how countries compare globally to other countries, rather than being fixed thresholds.

Before we go into the demonstration, I want to give you an overview of how the data is structured, because it helps to interpret the results. If we look at how to use it, there are three main use cases you can look at: you may be interested in a single country and want to have an overview of that; you can compare countries or regions, or larger sets of countries; and you can also go directly to issues and see what is driving risk in different geographies. This is what gives you the data to identify risk hotspots, and prioritise between countries and issues when you do your due diligence.

The scores are built in four steps, and all of the steps are accessible to review. We start at the indicator level – so these are the raw data points, and each raw data point is scored between 0 and 10, where 0 is high risk or low protection for children’s rights, and 10 is low risk or high protection of children’s rights. Indicators are then grouped into categories, and the categories look at the structure of how this topic is addressed in each country – so there we have international law, national law enforcement, or the structures and outcomes or violations. The four categories are then grouped into issues, and this is perhaps where we start to think about where to look, for example, child labour, or product safety, or environmental protection. The categories are given different weights when we group them into issues, so outcomes are weighted outcomes and enforcement is weighted higher than national and international frameworks, because the reality is what really matters. The legal structures are important, but they will not determine the outcomes. And then, finally, issues are grouped into an index score for the country, which is the average of those issue scores. This is a good overview of how the data built up.

Scores in the Atlas are used to calculate the risk levels, so when you see the scores, again – high risk is low protection and low risk is high protection. That’s important to remember – these scores are a way to identify patterns and ask better questions, they will not give you the definite answer of what the situation looks like, or what the exact issues or risks to your company is in a specific country; but they help you get an overview.

When you first open the Atlas file, you come to the content tab – there is a quick link just to help you navigate through the other tabs, and an explanation of what is on each tab and how to use the Atlas – a very high-level overview. Then there’s also a guide on how to get started.

If you come into the Atlas file and you want to look at a specific country, you use the dashboard – here you can see that this is an overview of a specific country. I know that Ines, in a minute, will be speaking about Vietnam, so we can use that as an example (Nina selected Vietnam in the Atlas dashboard).

So, you then get the risk ratings for the different indices, and for the different issues. We have Workplace, Marketplace, and Community and Environment. Here you can find the kind of topics that are covered by each of the indices, and it will give you a good idea of which topics may be a higher risk in that specific country.

Maybe you have a group of countries or a region that you want to start off with, and then the index comparison is a better entry point. In the index comparison we have a list of all of the countries in the Atlas. It’s over 190 countries, some that have too little data available are not included, because it doesn’t give you enough information to make any informed decisions. So, there might be a few countries that you will not find in the list, but the majority are there.

You can filter this list, search for a specific country, or compare. Check or uncheck for the countries that you want to look at, and do this for all of the columns. For example, if we’re now looking at Vietnam, but we want to look at Asia as a whole, I can filter for Asia too. This view gives you an understanding of the quality of the data and how many of the total indicators there is data for. This view can show you that maybe you should do more research and not trust it to such a high degree, because there might be missing information (and more is needed for informed decision-making).

Then you can get the risk rating for each of the indices that you see here. Again, we have Workplace, Marketplace, Community and Environment. If we here, for example, want to see a view of countries in Asia, we can go to the index tabs – there’s one for each of the indices. Workplace has one tab, Marketplace has one tab, and Community and Environment has one tab. So, if we go to the Workplace tab, again, you can filter to see the same topics. If we were looking at Asia and the workplace, where there is a high risk or a very high risk, we can do the same filtering when we have the same countries here.

Make sure you scroll up and down, because sometimes the information you’re looking for is set at the bottom of the page. So, here we now have the countries with the highest risk rates when it comes to the workplace, and then we can take a look at each of the topics. Within workplace, child labour is one topic, decent working conditions for all people, adults and children included, and maternity and paternity protection – and we can see here that the risk picture for these countries is pretty similar across these different topics.

But if you want to understand more about what’s behind these numbers too, you can find little plus signs at the top of the page. They will open up hidden columns for you. Here you can see, for child labour, the high risk rating for Cambodia, for example, is based on legal framework international that we talked about before.

We can also see the risk drivers here. If you remember when I talked about the numbers, 10 is a good score, so that’s a low risk, and international legal framework is basically which international conventions around this topic have been ratified – so for child labour it’s usually the ILO conventions around child labour legal framework and national is how this has been interpreted in international law, and how the judicial system actually protects these topics. The enforcement is about what structures are in place – what does it actually look like when this is implemented? Outcome is about violations or indications that this is not being fulfilled in terms of the legal protection that is there.

If you then want to understand what is behind this – because we can see here, for example, that enforcement seems to be one of the big drivers, together with outcome – we have the lowest scores here for Cambodia.

Then we go to the indicator list. Here you have all of the data around each of the indices, so you have the raw data being pulled into this. Workplace on top, then Marketplace, and then Community and Environment. The structure is the same as you saw on the index tab. Here I have filtered for enforcement – we can also look at outcome, and then we can see what is behind that higher risk score for enforcement. It’s about poverty rate, government corruption, birth registration, when it comes to child labour. So these are indicators that child labour is probably present. We know these are drivers of child labour. When it comes to outcome, if we look at child labour, it’s of course the child labour rates – the official numbers in terms of how much child labour is a problem in the country. We have also included a proxy, which is quite often used about how many children and adolescents are actually in school, because if you’re not in school, you may be illegally working.

This is how you can use the datasets, and you can explore and look around, and it can help you identify both specific countries or areas within several countries that may be worth looking into on a deeper level.

Worth mentioning, just in terms of transparency, is that the data is built on publicly available information. It takes a little while for what is going on today to trickle down into these official statistics, so you should always take care to have whatever insights you get from the Atlas combined with current information about what is happening on that topic or in that country at the moment, because it might have shifted or things might have happened related to that.

I will hand over now to Anita Househam, Vice President of Social Responsibility at Orkla ASA, who will tell us about how practical perspectives look when companies implement data in due diligence. Over to you, Anita.

Anita Househam

Great, thank you, Nina, and hi everyone. I was going to do a quick introduction to Orkla as a company and our approach to sustainability and due diligence before I then go into the specifics on how we use risk data as part of our due diligence processes. We are a Norwegian headquartered industrial investment company.

The organisation itself is quite spread out and complex, which entails different approaches with our governance. At the heart of all of this, are more than 600 brands that we’ve invested in – many of them with a strong heritage going back more than 100 years, and others are newer; and these brands and our markets span from Scandinavia, the Nordics, the Baltics, also across Europe, with also some presence in the US and across to Asia, including China, so it’s a global company.

We have a very complex and expansive value chain, where many of our products begin their journey, often far away from where we are. Not just geographically – although not in every instance, but in many instances – far away geographically, but also organisationally. In other words, many tiers up the supply chain, and as products travel down the supply chain, going through different stages of development and processing, they enter our own operations. Obviously there are a lot of risk areas throughout that stage, and also in our own operations as they’re being developed – even when they end up on the shelves of the different shops and convenience stores where our products may sit, and then are ultimately consumed by our end users or customers. So, many of our products are derived from raw materials, from agricultural activities, which is in itself a high risk area, a high risk sector, with a lot of challenges in terms of traceability.

Although much of our focus is on supply chain for those reasons, we believe that many of our higher risks are there, and it’s also hard to address, so we need to create systems to address that. We identify material areas for us that relate to children elsewhere in the value chain. We see and confirm through our impact assessments and double materiality assessments that children are a particularly important stakeholder rights holder, for instance, when it comes to marketing and consumption of several of our products, because we sell a lot of products that are high in salt and sugar content, but I’ll get back to that in more detail shortly.

Just a brief overview of our approach to sustainability and human rights. Orkla has a long history of commitment to human rights and sustainability. It simply has become something that is a must in order to be a trusted brand, a trusted business partner, both upstream and downstream – and also as a trusted employer.

So it really is embedded in many of our processes. We have all of this set out in internal and externally available policies, and these are commitments. We have our sustainability policy, for instance, and there are commitments and requirements that we set on our companies, and these expectations are also mirrored in the supplier code of conduct, which all of our suppliers are expected to accept as part of becoming business partner with us. Those areas include decent working conditions, human rights, and human rights due diligence.

We also require that due diligence is not just done, but it’s also incorporated in other relevant policies and manuals internally as well. All of our companies are expected to conduct regular due diligence and report progress on this on an annual basis to their respective boards, and it’s not just about the process, but also the risks that are being identified and the action plan for how to address it. So, the reporting to the board on a regular basis is also very much about the progress on the action plan.

I want to show you the sustainability targets as well, because these are also heavily informed by our impact assessments, which are also informed by risk data. We have two levels of targets that we’ve set for 2031 as foundational sustainability topics – these really reflect Orkla’s license to operate, and they express clear expectations from the group to our portfolio companies on how to manage their impacts, risks, and opportunities in a structured and timely manner. They include very many must-haves, including under social, for instance, that you’re expected to pay adequate wages to all employees, ensure a decent and safe workplace and working conditions, and also that you need to demonstrate that our company is, regardless of what they’re producing in terms of consumer goods, making efforts to improve health, and the health profile – so obviously all of these also very clearly link to children’s rights – children are an important rights holder.

We have the strategic targets as well, and these require a transition; a strategic change in a way of working. Again, climate and biodiversity are included – all these topics also impact and are relevant to children’s rights. In particular, I want to highlight ensuring that prioritised high risk raw materials are certified, or addressed with programmes. This is high risk in terms of child labour and forced labour – and these risks are addressed.

Moving onto how risk data can be used in due diligence: we do rely on risk data for a number of our due diligence processes, and some of this is well anchored in our existing system enablers. Admittedly, there are areas where we know that access to relevant risk data is still needed. It is always a question about availability, having the data easily accessible and easily comprehensible – that it’s trusted, and provides that initial assessment and comparison that you can make for different areas of your work.

To share a little bit about the system enablers we have in place and how we use risk data to assess our suppliers: we have two approaches; one for tier one suppliers and sites, and one for beyond tier one, or raw materials level – and it’s really in order to be able to assess suppliers, tier one suppliers and sites, and to inform our decision making to take a risk-based approach, with proportionate efforts made to address any risks identified.

We’ve developed a platform that onboards suppliers, so all our suppliers as a mandatory requirement go through the system automatically, in a risk identification phase, where they are screened as a risk inherent assessment, which is provided through Sedex. As a member of Sedex, we use the Risk Radar, which leads to categorisation of the risk level for the supplier: high, medium, low, or ultra high.

In fact, that will then guide the next steps for the supplier and the practitioner at Orkla, who’s onboarding the supplier. What that would typically be is if it’s for high-risk suppliers, the supplier is requested to provide more information. They are onboarded into the management platform – the aesthetics risk management platform – where they provide more information and become part of an ongoing process where they are regularly audited as well, and it’s up to Orkla to follow up with those audits and monitor those as we go along.

We also see that there are other solutions that work just as well or can strengthen this process, so we are also looking at how this can be complemented through site visits and direct engagement with the suppliers, to build capacity – to try and have an influence, or raise awareness with the supplier of our expectations.

For the Beyond Tier One supply chains, we map out what we’re buying – what kind of raw materials are we actually buying to develop our products – and then we need to understand where they derive from, so we’re doing a geographical risk assessment of where these raw materials come from, and then we make an assessment, through the review of publicly available sources. We have a long list of those sources as well, and the Atlas also provides a very comprehensive list of sources to identify, for what we would then determine as being high-risk raw materials.

We have category experts that sit in our central procurement company who continually assess this, but we also see a potential need for additional tools or resources to help enable procurement practitioners in our companies to make assessments or evaluations. If there are, for instance, raw materials that our portfolio company hasn’t reviewed, what can we do to build more capacity and availability – provide more availability of risk assessment tools for the practitioners in our different business units.

Risk data is clearly stated in the Atlas. It’s only one piece of the puzzle, and we expect our companies to take action. In order to mitigate risk, it says child labour risks there – but obviously it’s all risks in the value chain, all high risks that need to be acted upon, and given that our companies do vary in both products that they develop and the way they’re set up, some are very big and have many high risk raw materials or suppliers. They need to perhaps prioritise more, and it’s really important that we provide both the sensible requirements of what they have to do, but then also guidance on how they can do it and what makes the most sense.

So, the prioritisation piece is really important, and that’s again where obviously performing the risk assessment is so important. It’s important that data is available, that it’s trusted, and that it’s easy to understand – and that helps you as a practitioner to understand what the risks are. How can you know that you compare it with other things, other areas, and that that will help you prioritise where to focus first? We do, as mentioned earlier, expect that we engage with our suppliers, either directly or through a third-party, or also more recently, we encourage our companies to explore other collaboration projects as well, so you know, really calling on our companies to engage with other companies and organisations who have a local presence as well. As an example, we have Orkla Snacks, who joined the International Cocoa Initiative last year, and are working closely with them to help identify cases of child labour and provide support to remediate instances of child labour.

Before I conclude, just to highlight material areas to Orkla that are also impacting children: the supply chain workplace, in particular, is always going to be a big priority for us, given that we do see a lot of our salient issues or risks located there. But also in our own operations, own workplace as well – by setting targets, ensuring that you know everyone is paid an adequate wage, ensuring that they have, for instance, family-related leave, that there’s equality in the workplace, and ensuring that workers, parents, or caregivers of children are also enabled to have good working conditions and support their children and their families.

But the other areas where perhaps we are very aware of materiality in terms of children, but perhaps are less systematic in our approach is in marketing and advertising. Now, arguably, a lot of this is also controlled and guided by national legislation, but we do also have companies who have taken their own initiatives in terms of marketing, for instance, and have set up internal standards in compliance with regulation – trying to promote it even more and raise awareness internally, and trying even to have a higher standard. With some of the regulations, a lot of it is about raising awareness internally and capacity building as well. So, for instance, on marketing at RSA level, our legal and compliance team have, over the last couple of years, taken steps to train and raise awareness internally of what the legislation means and what needs to be considered in those areas.

Product safety is another area that is material for children’s rights, and this is one way of addressing this. Product safety is obviously something on which we have strong standards anyway. It’s very important to our business case that our products are safe, but we’ve also set targets to encourage or enable our companies to become more health driven. On nutritional issues with young people and children, all of our companies set targets to reduce, for instance, salts and sugars in their products, and have to report on that on a regular basis.

On community and engagement, we are looking at where we are operating, selling our products, where our supply chains are, and what communities are there. We assess that we typically have a lower impact there than other industries and other companies, but we nevertheless look at community engagement programmes.

We have many examples of how our companies engage locally to promote health and well-being, and social inclusion of children and young people. Examples include contributing or supporting organisations on the ground, like the Norwegian Childhood Cancer Society, but also a collaboration with organisations providing skills and training through apprenticeships in local communities.

There are different efforts there, but again, there’s a lot of that knowledge and understanding on where to focus your attention which comes from local know-how and contextual understandings. Obviously it’s also useful when you look forward, especially if you want to start engaging in long-term projects in the community – having data available to assess where the risks are highest, where it’s meaningful for Orkla to engage to address those risks.

In conclusion, all of these areas require risk data to help identify, assess and prioritise where to start, and obviously also to monitor the risk as we go forward. They are part of a bigger picture, and I can also see that this is something that certainly the Atlas could be a great tool for, especially as we try and decentralise, enable and empower our colleagues in the different business units to make these assessments – the tool can certainly be a useful one for them to have.

Nina Vollmer

Thank you, Anita. So with that, we hand the microphone over to Ines Kaempfer, CEO of The Centre for Child Rights and Business, who will guide us through what this looks like on the ground, and some real-world due diligence and impact assessment.

Ines Kaempfer

Hi everyone, thanks for giving us the opportunity to join this launch, it’s always great when there are tools out there that put the emphasis on children’s rights.

I can talk mostly about what in your Atlas is often covered under the workplace area, because that’s where the Centre for Child Rights and Business is working with companies across the globe and within supply chain – understanding the impact on children and finding ways to create a positive impact on children through the way we manage our supply chain, and we manage risks. Having a tool such as the Atlas, which puts the emphasis on that, is always really important.

I am going to take a step back, because I think we’ve said a lot about how the Atlas has been structured, and how it can be used. I just want to really emphasise some short thoughts on why these considerations on the risks to children are so important for businesses when they’re deciding how to set up their human rights due diligence practices.

A first thought, I know this seems kind of evident, but I do think it’s always good to remind ourselves that we can see in the development of human rights due diligence the interpretation of the duty of care that we see in courts. This relates to the level of vulnerability that we are finding in, for example, a context of operating as a business, and the bigger the vulnerability is, the bigger our responsibility becomes.

As a result, thinking of how we impact children, who are very often the most vulnerable kind of group in communities that are impacted by business, is really crucial. Data that gives us more information about the situation of children in a country and lets us understand the context in which their children live is really important for us, so we can target our efforts towards these vulnerabilities.

Just to give you one small example, here is a result from a child rights impact study that we did in a home-working context in Vietnam, where we could directly show how, for example, the pressure that was pushed through the supply chain to the producers, was pushed to the collectors, and that then was pushed to families who were in this case weaving baskets – how that pressure was then ultimately pushed on the children. Because of the low pricing structure that the families lived in, and particularly when contextual risks increased, material costs increased. Families immediately had to use the help of all the children to make ends meet.

Children get involved in work, and children ultimately dropped out of school, and it ended up in full-time child labour situations that were rather harmful to both the health, as well as their development. I think that with that kind of process, it’s just really important we remember that when we’re looking at child rights data, and why this data is so important.

As a second thought, I do want to stress that child rights data is crucial, and it’s becoming more crucial, because we definitely see that human rights due diligence legislation is taking a stand for child rights. The LKSG, for example, the German due diligence law in their guidelines around child labour, makes a clear statement, not just on the prohibition of child labour, but a clear statement to the respect of the Child Rights Convention. We have a direct reference to the Child Rights Convention in the CSDDD, the EU FLR is referring to the rights of children as the very general concept, as well as the battery passport in their explanations.

This is actually quite interesting, because I don’t think that has always been the case. Sometimes children’s rights were an afterthought, but in the meantime – with this legislation making it very clear – companies’ consideration for children’s rights, also due to their particular vulnerabilities, is crucial.

I want to point out another, actually very positive thought around children’s rights and data: what we observe is that for children’s rights, we have somewhat competing legislation. At the same time, we see, when it comes to child rights, universal consensus matters. And here are just a couple of pictures from supply chains within international companies, where those international companies and buyers decided to invest into their supply chains to support families and children.

We have the picture of a family-friendly workplace project in a factory in China. This is a day when children were allowed to visit the workplaces of their parents, and this is an investment that the company has made.

The other picture is in Turkey, where the factory has invited the children of their workers to join the family day. I’m not going to mention all of them, but we see when we’re doing human rights due diligence work with companies that focusing on children’s rights can be a real door-opener, and a very positive way of starting discussions. It can increase employee engagement and can help us to tackle more difficult and maybe more contentious topics, such as freedom of association, by starting with something that maybe is less heavily loaded politically.

My last thought is: what obviously also relates to the Atlas, and the data that is out there for companies, is it’s so crucial to find ways of prioritising their investments. We see that this is a scary process for many companies, because companies are worried that they might miss a risk – that they maybe looked too closely in one place, and then missed another place.

I think tools such as the Atlas – and the Centre for Child Rights and Business also has a specific tool on child labour – these kind of tools can help us to start to filter and have a very objective, formalised process on how we prioritise that can allow us to explain to legislators and people who ask questions, why you’re focusing here and not there.

These tools are really helpful for us to do a rather quick prioritisation of where we want to look. None of these tools, I think, that are out there, are perfect – they all have gaps. I think we have seen quite a few questions about some of the data gaps. How do we deal with it if we have too little data, for example? That needs to be taken into account. At the same time I think the tools allow us to do the best we possibly can, and prioritise – prioritise where we want to look – use the tools, and then act.

We’ve seen a lot of companies who are so stuck in the assessments that they never really manage to get to the actual implementation on the ground, and on the other hand, we see those companies who dare to do, really creating a fantastic impact and making a difference to the people that are impacted by their supply chains.

Nina Vollmer

Thank you to both Anita and Ines for supporting the launch and sharing your experiences.

We really hope that you go ahead, download, explore the Atlas, and very importantly, give us feedback, because this is a first iteration of the tool, and what we really want is to understand what is useful. How do you see the use case for this within your operations or your area of work? We want to understand where to make improvements or tweaks to the tool, so that it really answers the questions it needs to answer.

I also want to mention our newly launched Impact Network, because within this community of companies we will work more with the Atlas – we will use the network to deep-dive into the Atlas data and how to use it, and together with experts, further explore what it means.

Thank you all for joining us today, and we really look forward to continuing this conversation and continuing to learn together.