Human Rights Impact Assessments
The Fair Labor Association conducts targeted studies, known as Human Rights Impact Assessments (HRIAs), in supply chains where risks related to working conditions—like a lack of fair compensation and the presence of vulnerable worker groups—are often prevalent yet underexplored.
HRIAs not only help understand the scope of existing risks, but also identify root causes and enable more targeted, sustainable solutions. They inform future activities and projects, providing essential research for understanding where targeted interventions are needed to improve workers’ livelihoods.
Since 2010, we have conducted assessments on 25 commodities across diverse supply chains spanning 15+ countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Past commodities have included agricultural products, natural ingredients, extractive materials, and circular goods.
Findings are consistently mapped against national and international standards, and assessment teams combine international and local experts, bringing both technical expertise and local contextual knowledge and language capabilities. Supplier and stakeholder engagement is core to the methodology.
These HRIAs provide practical, actionable recommendations, drawing on more than 25 years of FLA’s experience supporting companies on human rights due diligence (HRDD) systems. Our track record reflects technical competence, institutional learning, and methodological consistency, and demonstrates our ability to scale HRIA delivery alongside action planning.
Approach
Our approach operates across supply chains, adapting the depth of assessment and methodology to each company’s operations’ scale, the number of suppliers and locations, and supply chain characteristics.
Each HRIA examines both potential human rights risk and impacts on rightsholders. The assessment prioritizes salient risks and positions itself as a core input to a company’s HRDD system rather than a standalone exercise. Findings are translated into prioritized remediation and improvement plans that suppliers can implement directly.
Methodology
Our methodology is grounded in a rights-based, action-oriented approach aligned with international frameworks including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Due Diligence Guidelines. It builds on our established risk assessment methodology, which emphasizes the identification of salient human rights risks, root cause analysis, and actionable remediation.
The approach combines desk-based analysis and field-level data collection, structured in a six-step process across two complementary phases:
- Phase 1 focuses on supply chain, stakeholder, and risk mapping, including a review of the regulatory environment, internal management systems (IMS) where applicable, and existing data, to identify priority risks, data gaps, and leverage points.
- Phase 2 deepens this analysis through rightsholder-centered field engagement, including stakeholder and key informant interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, and participatory tools with workers, producers, communities, and local stakeholders, supported by task- and risk-mapping as well as gender-disaggregated analysis to reflect how risks affect women and men differently.
Throughout, FLA employs mixed qualitative and quantitative methods and triangulates findings from multiple sources to ensure robustness and credibility. Building on the planning phase, FLA strengthens the evidence base through field-level data collection, root-cause analysis to trace back to underlying drivers rather than symptoms, and time-bound, durable remediation and action planning.
The assessment acknowledges and manages contextual limitations related to informality, traceability gaps, and seasonality. The methodology is adapted accordingly rather than assuming complete or static data.
Action planning
Every HRIA leads into action planning. The action plan translates assessment findings into a structured set of recommendations for companies to both address and mitigate the risks and remediate the issues identified during the HRIA.
The recommendations are designed to be corrective, enabling, and remedial: correcting the conditions that create risk, enabling companies and suppliers to build lasting management capacity, and remedying harm already experienced by rights-holders.
Action plans are typically built around the following areas:
- Strengthening Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (HREDD) and internal monitoring systems
- Improving farm level worker registration and documentation
- Establishing age verification and child labor prevention and remediation systems,
- Improving worker wage, farmer income, working hours, and overtime practices
- Promoting occupational health and safety standards at farms and processing facilities
- Establishing and promoting grievance channels accessible to all supply chain actors
- Awareness-raising among workers, farmers, and communities
To learn more about HRIAs, contact:
Burcu Kuğu, Vice President, Innovation, at bkugu@fairlabor.org
Zümrüt Aydin, Program Manager for Europe and the Middle East, at zaydin@fairlabor.org