Our progress so far

There are four key pillars to THIRST’s work. Generating inclusive and constructive dialogue; sharing and generating knowledge, insights and expertise; collaborating to find and develop innovative and practical solutions; and calling on decision and policy makers to put those solutions into practice. Here is how we are doing so far against those four pillars.

Generating inclusive and constructive dialogue

Year on year, we expand our network of individuals and organisations who share our vision of a resilient tea sector in which tea workers and farmers are empowered and their human rights are realised. These include smallholder farmer organisations, plantation owners, brands and retailers – and those that advise and support them. This ensures that all our work is based on the perspectives of the whole tea value chain, and informed by expert knowledge and opinion, and puts tea stakeholders in touch with each other.

We have facilitated dialogue between them through regular roundtable discussions, talks and webinars. THIRST’s Alternative Approaches case studies webinar series proactively invites tea sector practitioners to ask questions, challenge and learn more from the innovators themselves. We’ve also provided a platform for knowledge exchange on a range of issues including the use of technology to enhance human rights in tea, whether the cooperative model enhances human rights realisation, whether tea and forests can healthily coexist.

But most importantly, our international, multistakeholder roundtables have focused on the findings of our human rights impact assessment (HRIA), ensuring that at every stage it is informed by multiple stakeholders perspectives. Read more about the HRIA below.

Sharing and generating knowledge, insights and expertise

Knowledge and understanding of the human rights issues affecting tea plantation workers and smallholder farmers has historically been patchy. Individual retailers and brands were commissioning human rights impact assessments of their tea supply from specific regions. While useful, these studies did not address the underlying, systemic drivers of human rights breaches in the global sector. Identifying this critical gap, THIRST initiated a human rights impact assessment of the global tea sector.

We reviewed over 200 resources, engaged with nearly 200 tea industry experts and stakeholders throughout the value chain through interviews, focus groups, surveys and field visits and analysed the results with the help of a group of expert advisors. As mentioned above, at each stage of the HRIA we held international, multi-stakeholder roundtable discussions to gain feedback and validation for the findings which were incorporated into the final reports.

The resulting series of reports, Human Rights in the Tea Sector – The Big Picture, is the first of its kind. It provides the industry and its stakeholders with a strong evidence base – which they themselves have contributed to – for any work designed to improve the living and working conditions of the women and men who work in tea and their families.

I want to reiterate that this is such an important and impressive piece of research. I think you are diving directly into very important, systemic and widespread issues that are at the root causes of the human rights violations that we see in this sector. Thank you for taking up this work. This is so useful and hopefully can contribute to changing this system that seems unchangeable…

In addition to this major piece of work, we have built up a resource bank of over 140 resources on human rights and environmental issues in the tea sector which you can find in our Knowledge Hub. We have also been providing a more-or-less monthly newsletter with a round-up of news items from around the world on human rights and climate issues affecting tea workers and farmers around the world.

Collaborating to find and develop innovative and constructive solutions

THIRST responds to the most pressing needs in the tea sector. A prime example is our briefing produced in collaboration with Women Working Worldwide and with tea industry expert, Michael Pennant-Jones. We produced the briefing in response to a number of media reports on sexual abuse of tea workers first in Malawi and then in Kenya. We were concerned that these were being treated as isolated incidents, rather than as indications that such abuse was endemic in the industry and largely driven by systemic issues such as low pay, power imbalances and employment practices.

Our report was designed to support tea companies on identifying and understanding the risks of violence and harassment that women throughout the tea sector face. This briefing provided some of the grounding information for Typhoo’s groundbreaking Fear Free Tea campaign. Although the company sadly went into administration before the campaign could take off in earnest, it demonstrated that a leading brand could openly challenge human rights breaches in the industry and – through its purchasing practices and project funding – help producers to tackle them.

Calling on decision and policy makers to put those solutions into practice

Our understanding of the systemic drivers of human rights abuses, our additional expertise on gender issues and our international network of trustees and collaborators puts us in a strong position to call on decision-makers and policy-makers to bring about meaningful change.

An opportunity to do so arose when one of the men featured in a BBC exposé of sexual abuse on a Kenyan tea plantation emerged as a candidate for factory directorship in the Kenyan smallholder sector. Kenyan women’s rights organisations strongly objected to his election while the allegations against him remained unresolved.

THIRST collaborated with a group of other international NGOs to add our voices to calls on the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture to annul his election and ensure that the due process of law was applied. These calls were ultimately successful and the court case against the man are ongoing. We have kept UK based tea brands and NGOs informed of progress and are supporting the survivors by helping to coordinate and transfer funds to the organisation that was helping them.