6. Report on progress

Reporting on progress is the ongoing practice of publicly sharing relevant information on due diligence processes, activities, and impacts.

Good reporting practice requires comprehensive and regular reporting on the full range of a company’s due diligence activities.

Supply chain transparency refers to a company’s public openness about its supply chain map, including disclosure of its sourcing origins to country or sub-country level, and the names and locations of suppliers at Tier 1 and beyond.

How much supply chain transparency is “enough”? Stakeholders have different views on this. Know the Chain (a nonprofit partnership between Humanity United, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, Sustainalytics, and Verité) includes transparency measures in its methodology for evaluating food and beverage companies’ efforts to combat forced labor, and may serve as a useful benchmarking framework.

Companies reporting on their human rights due diligence actions often choose to showcase concrete activities such as awareness-raising or provision of support to farmers in their supply chains.

All elements of due diligence should be in scope for reporting on implementation. Examples include progress on embedding human rights in its business management systems, the status of efforts to assess and prioritize salient issues in own operations and supply chains, actions it is taking to cease, prevent, and mitigate human rights risks, and actions taken to remediate any human rights harms identified.

Data points should always be contextualized in reporting with relevant information such as percent of farms or volumes covered, so that readers are able to evaluate the meaningfulness of the company’s efforts. Reporting against maturity benchmarks such as those in this toolkit can provide discipline, guide development of implementation pathways/plans, and allow external observers to understand company efforts accurately.

Impact indicator reporting demonstrates to stakeholders whether company activities and systems achieve desired outcomes and confirms sustainability resources are being deployed effectively.

In the early stages of maturity, a company will likely focus more on implementation-related indicators; as the company matures in its HRDD, it will shift toward impact indicators.

Public reporting on impact often begins simply with disclosure of the salient issues identified and the key commodities and geographies the company has prioritized for addressing them. Basic data on numbers of incidents may be communicated to establish a baseline for future progress tracking. As the company’s HRDD system matures, reporting on impact should become more comprehensive and ambitious, including the impact of company efforts to address underlying root causes of salient issues. Companies should engage with affected stakeholders to verify impacts, identify unintended consequences, and continually improve program design.