slavefreetrade

We are at a crucial moment. having successfully completing our first pilots, and now having "cleared" a complete commodity chain as slavefree, we are in transition. In Q1 and Q2 2021, we are transitioning from startup to scaleup, from pilots to full operations.

We would apply the Elevate Funding to helping design and code the leading tech elements required in our assessment and monitoring system, as well as . Everything must be ready to scale, which means a great deal of tech development for what we call Libertas Core. Libertas is the business-facing system for assessment, monitoring, and analysis. Freedomer tools (audience-facing tools) including consumer apps, APIs for public procurers, and plugins for investors and e-commerce can all be developed with Elevate Prize funding. Approx 4 years of tech development with volunteer efforts can be condensed to 12 months of paid development.

We need to start telling the world what we are doing, and can achieve. There will be excitement, once we can get the message out, so we would intend to also use the Elevate Prize to help promote the solution and grow membership. The Elevate Prize will bring a global platform for us to help communicate in earnest.

Our Founder, Brian Iselin, started slavefreetrade out of frustration at the futility of existing approaches to modern slavery, the fact those most impacted had no voice, and organisations' failure to build human rights in their bottom line. He's a counter-slavery expert who has been working on the supply side (rescues, investigations) for nearly 20 years, and discovered nobody was paying attention to the causal demand side: the business decision to exploit someone.

We aim to guarantee good working conditions through rigourous testing against a universal human rights standard and communicate that those conditions to the stakeholders who can reinforce and reward that good behaviour with their buying decisions.

By 2030, we aim to have our model deployed to millions of workplaces providing real time, always-on protection to employees.

We have completed baseline assessments of the first supply chain - comprising around 1000 workers - in a cocoa chain from the UK-Colombia. From it, the world's first guaranteed slavefree cocoa will soon be on the shelves. 

And now we need to scale. We are building the system to automate the assessment and monitoring, and building the technical means to communicate results to stakeholders through mobile applications, in browsers, and via APIs.

We apply a human rights approach to ending human rights issues including modern slavery in workplaces. We have designed a behavioural loop from consumer to employer to employee and back again. We are building a distributed human rights intelligence system that assesses & monitors human rights conditions in workplaces, communicating that as decision intelligence to those whose buying decisions can be influenced, e.g. consumer/procurer/investor.

We defined a unique universal framework for decent work using international human rights law. We operationalise that as 10 principles with 100 indicators, adding tech to automate and scale implementation.

"Members" join slavefreetrade and undergo 4 continuous processes: workforce assessment, values alignment, network mapping, impact communications.

1. Workforce assessment brings the individual view of the workplace. We ask 100 questions of every person in every workplace in real-time about their experiences and observations of their workplaces.

2. Values alignment brings the corporate view of the workplace. It is a desktop legal and policy cmpliance process, making sure

3. Network mapping is connecting workplaces in supply chains.

4. Impact communications is telling the member's why.

We communicate the good being done in workplaces through apps and APIs, so people can choose goods proved to have harmed nobody.

We quantify human rights enabling assessment, monitoring, and comparison; agnostic to product, jurisdiction, or organisation type.

Existing responses, e.g. rescues and audits, cannot scale, are labour-intensive, and expensive. We offer scale, remote cheap coverage, and disintermediation.

Current models are easily defeated and defrauded, while we can identify fraud, false statements, coercion, and collusion. 

Workers are not involved in the majority of existing initiatives. We amplify worker voices as the best arbiters of their own conditions. 

Power in commodity chains is unbalanced. We democratise by giving workers in global value and commodity chains - the overwhelming majority - a voice.

Supply chains are disaggregated, complex, globalized, and opaque. We convert them to collaborative networks by making each member of a chain dependent on the human rights performance of the others. 

Human rights are treated as separate from the normal conduct of business, e.g. CSR or ESG. We inject human rights into the bottom line.

In-person surveys on sensitive topics don’t get the best answers: we generate trust through anonymity. 

Stakeholders like consumers, procurers and investors have not had ways to express their values through their buying decisions. We provide actionable decision intelligence to them when making their decisions.

Our Direct Beneficiaries are those directly affected by the intervention AND who chose to participate. That means all participating staff in all participating workplaces, whether they be companies or other, globally. Our impact on them is through improving trust between employer and employee, both sides becoming more aware of what fundamental human rights mean in workplaces. Our model makes the commercial success of the employer a function of the human rights performance and quality of the employer-employee relationship. 

Our Indirect Beneficiaries are people who have no direct contact with the intervention but are affected by its impact on a direct beneficiary. For now, we ONLY include immediate family (household members) of direct beneficiaries. Unlike most large NGOs, for the moment, we do NOT propose to include extended families or communities although, in most cases, they will indirectly be affected by the impact on a direct beneficiary. 

In excess of 90% of global intended Direct Beneficiaries of slavefreetrade are working in or close to primary production in enormous, globalised commodity chains. Not by coincidence, there is a perfect geographic and industry correlation between the incidence of modern slavery, the most serious of human rights abuses, and low-income work in commodity chains.