As the US Government begins drafting a landmark National Action Plan on business and human rights, it is facilitating a series of consultations across the country. One of four was hosted at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business this month. An impressive mix of industry, government and civil society attended.

Companies with complex supply chains and financial institutions made important requests for “tools” that will equip them to evaluate their human rights impacts. This is a difficult request to parse. NomoGaia has been developing and publishing human rights due diligence tools for over 7 years, and organizations like BSR, GBI, DIHR and Foley Hoag have been privately supporting companies in assessment of human rights impacts. Practitioners have reached a level of consensus over what makes for adequate due diligence, which includes direct and ongoing engagement with rightsholders themselves. In general (though with important exceptions), corporations have been reluctant to acknowledge this central reality.

Companies have expressed interest in tools like human rights reporting mechanisms. Reporting tools that currently exist include consideration of whether companies identify salient risks to human rights. However, none employs the recognized international human rights instruments as a framework for benchmarking performance on a right-by-right basis. That weakens their ability to truly evaluate whether human rights are respected at the operational level.

As Dean Richard Lyons wrapped up the Berkeley consultation, he described an evolution the Haas School underwent after the 2008 financial crisis. Soul searching led the institution to question whether it had contributed to the crisis, failing to prepare MBA graduates to enter the business world responsibly. He said the school reformed its admissions process and stopped relying on perfect GMAT scores as a shoo-in for admission. Students needed to be evaluated on characteristics that couldn’t be conveyed in test scores or resumes. Interviews became part of Haas’ evaluation procedure.

Dean Lyons didn’t link this new admissions process back to human rights due diligence, but if he didn’t mean it as a metaphor, he should have. There is no way to make human rights due diligence a tick-box exercise. There is no way to know that a business’s practices are responsible without digging beneath the policy statements and sustainability reports. Not yet, anyway. NomoGaia has found this to be demonstrably true at every operation we have assessed.

The US Government’s team is committed to making the National Action Plan useful and concrete to swiftly impact the way corporate human rights responsibilities are understood. To meet that goal, we suggest that the Plan include requirements for companies to directly engage affected rightsholders. The government’s ongoing engagement with the American public in the Plan’s drafting can be seen as leading by doing.

NomoGaia will be contributing input to the National Action Plan based on our practitioners’ knowledge and experience. If you have insight that might tip the scales toward improving human rights outcomes for populations affected by American businesses abroad, send comments to NAP-RBC@state.gov.

Last week Human Rights Watch published its 25th annual World Report, including a full chapter on Jordan. It tackled a range of civil and political rights violations but made no mention of Jordan’s most longstanding and systematic risk to human rights: water scarcity. The Middle East saw enough human rights violations in 2014 to fill a whole report on its own. As refugees have sought safe-haven from violent conflicts, many have fled to Jordan, where, HRW points out, they face a range of treatment, from forced detention, to denial of entry, to denial of refugee status. To hear Jordanians and authorities tell it, inhospitality is really incapacity: Jordan just doesn’t have enough water for the million-plus refugees that have poured through its borders.

Jordan is the fourth water-poorest country in the world, with aquifers being drained at an average rate of over 1 meter per year. Among registered Syrian refugees living outside of camps, one third receive water less than once per week. A survey of 40,000 refugee households published this month found that two out of every five households lacked toilet facilities or a shower.

Meanwhile, camps guarantee access to latrines and a minimum of 20 liters of water per day, actually putting refugees at higher water access levels than average Jordanians. Not surprisingly, this has caused resentment, and water conflicts have been reported in the northern regions where Syrian refugees are concentrated. The government has declared the capacity and quality of certain aquifers “state secrets,” making it impossible for Jordan’s already beleaguered journalists to report accurately on the country’s water crisis.

This may have contributed to the water sector’s latest boondoggle, a $1.1 billion project, funded primarily by US and European investment banks, which has recently been found to have only a fraction of the water reserves anticipated, and radiation levels that far exceed WHO standards.

Yet Jordan continues to use 60-80% of its water reserves for agriculture, which contributes 3% to GDP and primarily produces crops for export. Wealthy farmers sell oranges to Europe for profit, while Jordanian citizens and refugee populations scrape to find drinking water. Is the Right to Water being denied to civilians out of lack of water, or lack of will to reallocate resources?

A favorite buzz word in international development is “scalability.” People want to know that, if $10 will make a difference in one life, then $1,000 will make a difference in 100 lives.

The average number of people directly affected by our fieldwork is about 1000, and it takes us roughly $6,000 to do a holistic analysis of human rights conditions to persuasively argue to a company that changes are needed.

But that’s not where the value of that study stops. Because NomoGaia publishes everything we do, we have the most copied methodology for human rights impact assessment in the world. If we were running a business, obviously that would be a problem.

We’re not. We’re doing this because we want to be copied. The more our work is recognized, the more leverage decision-makers have to push companies to be better.

By publishing our work in academic literature and putting our assessments online, this year alone we’ve secured the ear of the US Government’s Department of Labor and Rights, the UN  High Commissioner on Human Rights, the World Bank and the Tanzanian human rights commission, among others. These national and international decision-makers have a tool on hand to prove companies can do better because you’ve made our work possible.

Your donations can protect this cattle’s watersheds and grazing lands for its owner! But your donation can’t donate her to anyone.

Your donation to NomoGaia will not ensure that any one child goes to school or that any one family has dinner this month. Instead, it will ensure that the school near any one of our research sites is sufficiently staffed and funded (by a company, not by you) to meet the corporate standard of “do no harm.” It will ensure that the wages of any employee or contractor at our research sites is sufficiently compensated to feed his family, pay school fees, fund transportation to seek medical care, and live in an adequate house. Your dollars to NomoGaia fund the research that elicits commitments from multinational corporations. These companies have the presence, financing and incentive to make lasting change for local communities, and we can make sure those changes happen.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you for making it through this week and for being so generous with your support.