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Our approach to sustainability is about delivering impact faster with more focused, urgent and systemic action across our four sustainability priorities: climate, nature, plastics and livelihoods.
Our actions to improve livelihoods fall into 3 main areas:
We’re working to improve the livelihoods of the people who grow, make and sell our products – and who are so important to our success.
This includes earning a living wage that can cover the essentials of daily life. And that they have work that’s secure, dignified and fair.
Not only does this support people’s standards of living and drive wider economic growth, it also makes our business more resilient.
While we’ve been working to create change in this area for many years, we’re now focusing on three aspects of our value chain where we can have the biggest impact.
We’re helping the smallholder farmers who grow our key crops increase their incomes.
We’re supporting them with capacity-building and regenerative agriculture programmes that lead to better crop yields and quality, while building their resilience.
And through enrolling farmers in certification schemes, we’re improving traceability and helping them make a better and more sustainable living.
Our ultimate aim is for all Unilever suppliers to pay a living wage.
To move towards this, we’re asking suppliers to sign our Living Wage Promise, committing to assessing the gap between what they pay and a living wage, and to taking steps to close it.
We’re also ensuring that paying a living wage is included in contracts with factories that exclusively make Unilever products.
And we’re driving collective action, working in coalition with others to create a shared understanding of living wage and momentum towards better practices.
We help the network of millions of small businesses that sell our products improve their business success, while they help us reach consumers with our brands.
To unlock growth, we’re rolling out digital platforms that facilitate ordering and stock management.
And we’re helping small retailers increase profits and strengthen their businesses by supporting access to financial services and skills.
There is a limit to what we can achieve on our own.
We’re working with partners on the ground to create real change to people’s lives and livelihoods through access to knowledge, skills and technology.
And through local and global coalitions, we’re pressing for private sector action and government policy shifts that support decent livelihoods and level the playing field for living wage.
Our longer-term ambition is for everyone in our value chain to have a decent livelihood, including by earning a living wage by 2030. To move towards this, we’re focusing our energies and resources on three critical priorities for our business, with clear roadmaps for each goal.
Help 250,000 smallholder farmers in our supply chain access livelihoods programmes by 2026
Suppliers representing 50% of our procurement spend to sign our Living Wage Promise by 2026
Help 2.5 million SMEs in our retail value chain grow their business by 2026
See our Annual Report (PDF 6.16 MB) for recent progress against these goals.
We’re helping smallholder farmers grow their incomes through better farming practices and certification schemes. Because with the right support, smallholders can be at the forefront of global efforts to protect and regenerate nature.
We’re focusing on the farmers who grow our key crops, with an approach tailored to each crop and country’s context. Working through a range of local partners, we help farmers improve their incomes through income growth programmes and regenerative agriculture programmes.
Our income growth programmes support people growing palm, coconut, tea, cocoa and vanilla by providing access to training, information and financial support. This helps farmers diversify their incomes, access credit and become more productive. We’re particularly focused on including more women in these programmes.
For example, through agroforestry initiatives in Côte d’Ivoire, we’re helping cocoa farmers diversify their incomes by integrating various crops and tree species, improving soil health and creating new income streams. We also provide training on climate-smart agricultural practices, to support smallholders' financial resilience.
Our regenerative agriculture programmes help smallholders working with dairy, vegetables, tea, coconut, black soy, cereals and spices conserve water, look after the soil and use fewer chemicals. This boosts yields and builds farmers’ resilience, while also replenishing the land.
Our Jasmine Rice project in Thailand is resulting in lower costs and higher yields for farmers, as they replace expensive chemical fertilisers with more sustainable alternatives which also improve soil quality. This supports increased incomes and the overall long-term resilience of the farms, protecting future livelihoods.
We’re helping the farmers who grow our products become certified and enjoy the benefits this brings. Schemes like RSPO, trustea, Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade help farmers increase their incomes and support more sustainable farming practices. Certification also improves the traceability of our crops and helps us enhance our support and impact.
Certification schemes include programmes to help farmers improve their productivity and capabilities, fair pricing and incentives for sustainability, support for workers’ rights, and active community engagement.
We’re working across industry to understand how we can come together to overcome the barriers to increased farmer incomes. We’re involved in a variety of collaborations such as the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH) Business Action Committee to share knowledge and best practice towards this objective.
For a business like ours with respect for human rights at its core, paying a living wage is a priority. Not only does this improve people’s lives, it also enhances our supply chain resilience and increases workers’ productivity.
We’re proud to have been paying a living wage throughout our own operations since 2020 and to have been accredited as a living wage employer by the Fair Wage Network since 2021. Now we’re working to support our many suppliers around the world in paying a living wage.
Our Responsible Partner Policy includes a mandatory requirement for our suppliers to pay a living wage (PDF 4.45 MB) to their workers by 2030.
We are working with suppliers to evaluate any living wage gaps and implementing plans to close them. Nearly all factories that produce only for Unilever have a contractual requirement to pay a living wage.
To move towards our longer-term ambition, we’re focusing on countries where the living wage gap is the biggest, where the social safety net for workers is weakest, and where we can make the most impact based on our presence and scale.
We’re asking key suppliers to sign our Living Wage Promise: committing to evaluating their wage gap and to taking steps towards paying a living wage. With support from the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), we’re providing training, tools and other resources to help suppliers understand what a living wage is, why it’s so important and how to get started.
For the widespread adoption of living wages, we need a true collective effort.
So we’re asking governments to review minimum wage policies to ensure they reflect living wages. We’re working with business peers and civil society to amplify the message that living wage is good for businesses, society and the overall economy. And we’re pushing investors to put living wage at the heart of their environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria.
Through access to skills, finance and technology, we’re working to increase income opportunities and raise living standards across our network of millions of retailers around the world.
Supporting the extensive global trade network that sells our products strengthens our business. And by helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) grow, we can create an impact beyond our value chain so that families and communities can benefit too.
Our digital tools allow retailers to browse products, prices and promotions, place orders, and see which products are selling well. This creates a better experience for our customers and helps them increase their sales.
By the end of 2024, there were 2.58 million small stores using our digital platforms. We’re expanding these programmes in places like Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam, aiming to add another 600,000 stores by 2026.
Helping retailers access financial services and improve their financial skills helps them grow their business and increase profits. And this builds resilience – both for their businesses and ours.
We have a range of programmes around the world working to expand financial and digital literacy, cashless payments, and access to credit and working capital. Our ongoing work with impact measurement experts 60 Decibels independently verifies the impact of our SME growth initiatives.
We’ve also joined forces with organisations like the Better Than Cash Alliance to expand financial access among underserved groups such as women and small businesses.
TRANSFORM is an impact accelerator supporting visionary enterprises across Asia and Africa. Over its lifetime, the partnership has supported more than 160 impact enterprise and research projects across 19 countries, reaching over 20 million people.
As a joint initiative led by Unilever, alongside the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and EY, TRANSFORM brings together public-sector resources with private-sector capabilities. It helps entrepreneurs and researchers to test and scale innovative solutions which tackle a wide range of social and environmental issues, including:
TRANSFORM creates opportunities for Unilever to explore new routes to market, pilot business models such as refill, and identify innovative suppliers.
Having delivered its intended outcomes, TRANSFORM will conclude at the end of 2026. It leaves behind a legacy of impact and insights to inform future collaborations. These learnings are captured in How to collaborate for impact, a playbook designed to help other organisations apply the public-private partnership model.
We’ve been working hard to create a circular economy for plastic packaging for a number of years. We’ve learnt that transformation takes time. Given the size of this challenge, we’re using our innovation capabilities to find new, scalable solutions.
Climate action has long been a part of how we do business. But the world must move faster to avoid the worst effects of climate change. We've set more ambitious climate targets and identified clearer actions to respond to this challenge.
The world – and our business – needs resilient natural and agricultural ecosystems to thrive. We’re committed to contributing to the protection and regeneration of nature, within and beyond our value chain.
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