The project will facilitate sustained, sector-wide change in labor practices through an integrated strategy. The project centers on the creation of a global compliance system and toolkit to enable industry actors to implement robust and sustainable social compliance systems, along with guidance materials and trainings for key stakeholders in the global coffee sector to reduce child labor, forced labor, and unacceptable working conditions in business operations and supply chains. A subset of these tools will be piloted with private sector and industry association partners in three key coffee-producing countries (Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico). The pilots themselves will generate significant impact and provide opportunities for expansion and replication, and lessons learned from these pilots will be used to refine the global compliance system and toolkit.

A key aspect of the proposed strategy is assembling a powerful coalition of major international coffee brands, coffee traders and producers, industry associations, certifiers, and other key stakeholders in the United States and pilot countries in order to establish a social compliance system and toolkit to eradicate forced and child labor, and wage, hour and health and safety violations from their supply chains.