The Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a leading alliance that promotes workers’ rights, will launch a new course on purchasing practices. The course named ‘Buying Responsibly’ will be of great help to buyers, purchasing managers, commercial teams, and ethical trade professionals in understanding the business challenges.
The course will include practical methods to review a company’s purchasing practices, prioritise and implement improvement measures. Ethical purchasing practices is the only way to ensure elimination of poor working conditions in the supply chain. It also encourages suppliers to ensure healthy working environment and conditions for workers.
It will further cover day-to-day tasks as well as overall business strategies. Course participants will also be guided upon ‘What decent work means in the context of supply chains’, ‘The impact of procurement practices of suppliers and working conditions’, and ‘A path to responsible buying’.
The course curriculum has been decided based upon the results of the surveys ‘ETI Purchasing Practices Supplier Survey’ and the ‘Guide to Buying Responsibly’. The survey jointly conducted by ILO and ETI involved over 2,000 suppliers. The ‘Guide to Buying Responsibly’ was published last year with the joint efforts of the British, Danish, and Norwegian-based ETI.
In another development on the same lines, ETI has also collaborated with ‘Better Buying’ in Bangladesh to support and promote responsible buying practices within garment supply chains. Better Buying is a unique system for suppliers to communicate with their buyers about purchasing practices that need improvement, without risking their business relationship.
