Scaling up ‘ethical agents’: calling all interested parties!

A raspberry farm called Haygrove Heaven in South Africa which transforms its farm labourers into small-scale entrepreneurs through its ambitious capacity-building programme Bright Futures. A one-stop-shop supply chain partner called CottonConnect which can help you trace where your cotton comes from and solve problems across all stages of production. And an ethical supply chain intermediary called The Better Trading Company, which connects small-scale producers from the developing world with Western retailers, bringing them closer to the market and putting new, exotic products on store shelves.

What do they all have in common?

For starters, they are all successful sustainable enterprises. But the less obvious feature is that they were all ideas co-developed and co-funded by the Shell Foundation.

In a profound difference from traditional foundation activity, several years ago Shell Foundation decided to stop disbursing money to a series of disparate causes, and to start acting more like an angel investor. It began by identifying the key issues, an easy starting point given its many years of work in the development field. It then created what Alison Rodwell, the Director of the Trading UP programme, refers to as ‘ethical agents’ – companies that help developing world producers earn a secured, dignified living by acting as an intermediary that passes information, training, skills and/or the goods themselves between the producer and the retailer.

The result?

Through its work with its growing base of corporate customers, CottonConnect has trained 20,000 farmers on sustainable production methods, and has a target to train 100,000 more, and impact 500,000 livelihoods, by 2015. At Haygrove, the fields tended by the Bright Futures entrepreneurs have had a greater yield. The programme has taught employees critical skills – from better production methods to driving and reading. The farm is now attracting more high quality applicants for jobs. The Better Trading Company is a profitable enterprise supplying more than 6 major retailers and manufacturers across Europe and Australia. This season, 218 growers have been growing Tabasco Chillies for TBTC. With each farmer responsible for some 7 people, having a fixed source of demand, a fixed price, and cash payments every two weeks has helped the community with providing for livelihood essentials.

The process has not been without its challenges but the people at Shell Foundation are quick to point out that the lessons of failure are in many ways as important as the lessons of success.

In that spirit, Forum and Shell Foundation are collaborating on distilling the process of creating such ethical intermediaries, and capturing the key learnings from that process, as well as the key factors which make these business models the success stories that they are.
But the really important stage is actually getting them replicated and scaled up in different contexts – be that across other supply chains, within new organisations, different sectors, or even geographical locations. In the spirit of open innovation, we will co-develop and publish a toolkit on creating ethical intermediaries, and we are looking to start conversations with partners who are interested in replicating elements of these business models.

Do you have visibility and transparency challenges in your supply chain? Or need to improve supply chain performance in order to deliver on your sustainability commitments? Or you are looking to engage more directly with producers, in order to build capacity and reduce reputational risk and win new market share? Then perhaps a CottonConnect-like model is for you.

Or, do you have under-educated workforce? Do you want to grow a local supplier base? Do you want to use education for social good? Then the Bright Futures model might be the one.

If so, we’d love to hear from you - please get in touch!
i.gazibara@forumforthefuture.org