Enhancing livelihoods

In 2017 we made steady progress across the three pillars of our Enhancing Livelihoods goal – Fairness in the Workplace, Opportunities for Women and Inclusive Business.

Our business contributes to the economic livelihoods of many people and communities across our value chain. In developing and emerging markets, we have an even greater impact. Our supplier and distribution networks involve millions of smallholder farmers, distributors and retailers, many of whom are women.

We want to deliver both business growth and positive social impact. We are embedding human rights across our business and are using the power of our brands to advocate important social issues to our consumers.

Three pillars of our Plan support our big goal to enhance livelihoods for millions. These commitments are fundamental to the way we aspire to do business and support our continued growth.

Our approach, which directly supports a number of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, focuses on:

• Driving fairness in the workplace – by implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights throughout our operations, and working with suppliers who commit to promote fundamental human rights
• Advancing opportunities for women – empowering 5 million women by advancing opportunities for women in our operations, promoting safety, providing up-skilling and expanding opportunities in our retail value chain. And challenging the harmful gender norms that can hold women back
• Developing an inclusive business – by improving the livelihoods of 500,000 smallholder farmers and the incomes of 5 million small-scale retailers, and by increasing the participation of young entrepreneurs in our value chain.

In order to achieve these commitments, we need to work in our own operations, through our extended supply chain and our distribution channels. We want to see fairness in the workplace, opportunities for women and inclusive business as standard in the business world and aim to work in partnership to create wider movement in the industry.

^†Independently assured by PwC

^††The description of the implementation activities for human rights in 2017 and the series of activities to create the Framework for Fair Compensation have been independently assured by PwC. See Unilever’s Basis of Preparation (PDF | 6MB) for the description of activities.

^* In 2017 we amended the way we assess compliance with the RSP, hence prior years’ numbers are not comparable.

^t The number of women enabled to access initiatives aiming to promote their safety, develop their skills or expand their opportunities in 2017 was 1,259,000 which has been independently assured by PwC.

^Ж Around 370,000 women have accessed initiatives under both the Opportunities for Women and Inclusive Business pillars in 2017 .