For the past five years, Fairphone has been an zippy participant in a wholesale coalition within the Dutch gold sector aimed at ensuring greater respect for human rights, the environment and biodiversity in the gold value chain. This “gold covenant” was spearheaded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and co-signed by a variety of groups with an interest in the gold sector, including HIVOS/Stop Child Labour, Philips, Closing the Loop, and the Dutch Gold and Silver Federation (FGZ), as well as other parties like trade unions, importers and recyclers. Fairphone chaired the Gold Agreement task gravity on improving artisanal gold mining and responsible supply during the elapsing of the initiative. In June, this covenant came to an end; now comes the time to wield the lessons learned and make responsible gold the norm.
Increased transparency: the first step towards fairness
Transparency has unchangingly been a cadre Fairphone principle; it is an important first step towards fairer supply chains. The gold covenant was well aligned with this principle by requiring yearly due diligence reports from its signatories and then rating their quality. These reports enable companies to openly explain their due diligence tideway and share a map of their supply chain. The gold covenant awarded Fairphone the highest possible score for our last rated due diligence report 20/21.
Our mission, however, drives us to go vastitude due diligence; to develop scalable solutions that can momentum real impact for the people in our supply chain. We do this by, for example, investing in suppliers who are most marginalized, towers their topics to reach required quality and sustainability standards, and connecting them to our supply chain. This comes with higher risks, of course, but with greater positive impact, which we hope inspires others in our industry to do the same.
You can read increasingly well-nigh how we are driving impact in our material supply villenage and vastitude in our recently published 2021 Impact Report.
Sharing lessons learned from our child labor project
Between 2017 and 2021, Fairphone led a consortium of companies and organizations in a project in Busia, Eastern Uganda. Our aim was to modernize and support the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) communities in the zone by eradicating child labor and establishing a sustainable gold supply uniting that creates a largest future for miners and their families.
Together with our partners, we piloted a holistic landscape approach, in which all key stakeholders — including polity members, mining groups and supply uniting actors — joined efforts to write the root causes of child labor. The project provided valuable lessons on how to weightier engage with mining groups to modernize and sustain safer production methods, while introducing these miners to the international supply uniting of minerals. These lessons were shared widely with the gold covenant members, and are stuff unexplored by the second phase of this project in the form of Project Access.
Leveraging feedback of gold covenant members
One key speciality of Project Access—developed by Fairphone and our partners—is a route-to-market model aimed at improving artisanal gold from East Africa through sustainable investment and market access.
Using feedback we received from members of the gold covenant, we have chosen to develop a typesetting and requirement model, where companies can purchase credits for their gold consumption and this money is invested in improving the sustainability of artisanal gold mines. Government representatives of the gold covenant have endorsed the model and one member, Diamond Point, has once single-minded to purchasing credits to contribute to improving artisanal gold mining!
This is a unconfined milestone and raises the bar for the other gold covenant and industry members to follow suit. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if your visitor is interested in improving the sustainability of artisanal gold mining too!
The post Five years of responsible gold appeared first on Fairphone.
