Companies pay consultants for one-off assessments that can be put on a shelf and forgotten. As a nonprofit funded by individuals like you, NomoGaia can not only publish the human rights impact assessments we conduct, but we have donor funds to conduct follow-up monitoring to track changes in human rights conditions over time.

This year we carried out our fourth monitoring mission at a Green Resources plantation in Tanzania. In 2008 we found that wages were too low, housing conditions were too poor, and union busting was too rampant to meet human rights standards. We’ve found steady improvements every year since then.

Conditions in local villages have improved markedly with our recommended wages increases. The lucrative forestry industry has brought new political power to the people of Uchindile, which they are using to secure improvements in schools, water access and other infrastructure. Housing conditions remain a challenge for workers living in dormitories – dormitories evaluated in previous years now meet human rights standards, but Green Resources’ newest dormitories are host to some of the same human rights violations that characterized previous assessments. The company has committed to make changes. As ever, monitoring will allow us to validate that commitment.
Read about it here!
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If human rights were part of financial due diligence…

… the US development bank, OPIC, might not have helped supply Jordanians with radioactive water.

Jordan is the second most water-poor country in the world, pumping just enough water to reach most Amman households for one day a week. It’s also resource poor, so relies on donors and lenders to keep its economy afloat.

The Overseas Private Investment Corporation, America’s development finance bank, joined with European banks recently to bankroll a new water supply project in Jordan.
It seemed like a winning plan — Jordanians get water, the government gets infrastructure, and lenders get to reap revenues from the project.
The Disi water pipeline was built without a full analysis of the human rights risks it could pose to Jordanians. Those risks, we found, were real.

Reem, one of Jordan’s finest reporters

Your donations helped us partner with an investigative water reporter, to go neighborhood to neighborhood looking at complex connections between civil disobedience and access to water. Beyond the politics of water allocation, we obtained water quality results revealing that Disi water radionuclide levels exceed safe levels. We can’t turn off the pipeline, but we can ensure that treatment processes are adequate to safeguard public health. That work is ongoing, while we also establish recommendations for financial institutions planning future engagement in Jordan’s challenging water sector.

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For almost 70 years, UNICEF has been protecting children from famine and disease. They’ve only recently recognized the role of global business in that objective. NomoGaia has been helping UNICEF engage with businesses on children’s rights.

In September we ran a workshop, hosted by UNICEF and the Mining Association of Canada, to help mining companies recognize children’s rights issues, building on our field experience witnessing an incredible array of impacts on children that mines had no idea they were having:

Unsecured mine sites have been breached children paid by local gangs to syphon fuel from tractors or steal vital environmental liners – they break in when workers have been cleared from site for safety, because the pits are about to be dynamited.

Children sledding on environmental protection liners, removed (unwittingly) from key mine areas.

Mines that ignored HIV in the workforce have triggered increases in disease spread in remote, rural areas, and babies born to unwittingly seropositive mothers missed the opportunity to receive proper treatment.

Pediatric ward (the company here is actually actively supporting HIV management)

Mines can cause population influx that overwhelms local schools, leaving teachers powerless to educate future generations.

Crowded secondary school classroom after population influx.

Yong miners and contractors seduce girls living far from home at secondary school dormitories, who are shunned by their communities and forced out of school if they become pregnant.

This sign is actually from the primary school. The risks for young girls interacting with mineworkers are yet higher.

UNICEF produced a tool this month for “engaging stakeholders on children’s rights” that drew direct input from our workshop. It’s available here.

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The World Bank lends $35 billion each year to countries in the name of reducing poverty and promoting development, but they currently have no mechanisms for evaluating the impacts their projects have on the actual humans affected by these investments (not even, curiously, for evaluating the effects of development loans on poverty).
With your support, NomoGaia is changing the way the World Bank does business in Burma.

A rubber tapper from the local area, affected by the power plant.

Your donations employed a political prisoner to be our guide as we began research into the human rights impacts of a World Bank-funded power plant in Mon State. Our research triggered an ongoing investigation at the World Bank – they have hired an external reviewer to evaluate the risks we identified.

Shell, a political prisoner for 8 years, was our incredibly brave and insightful guide.

We are seeing some signs that the World Bank is modifying its broader approach to Burma to account for the risks we brought to the fore in this small investment.
Our report was cited by Human Rights Watch in their reviews of World Bank operations, broadening the reach of our work well beyond our means.

Read more here.
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Our year in review is coming your way

Just a heads up that Human Rights Day is in the middle of next week. Human Rights Week is also the week you get an email a day from NomoGaia, filling you in on what we’ve done with your donations and asking you to continue supporting our operations in the coming year. For being an all-volunteer organization with only one full-time volunteer, we get a shocking amount of work done.

If you can find a few minutes to read next week’s emails, awesome. If you can’t, enjoy the photos. If you click the donate button, know that you’re not buying anyone a sheep, a meal, or a law suit, but you are helping global business operate without violating human rights. That’s a pretty big deal, since global business represents much of the world economy, and it’s probably responsible for the screen on which you read this, the clothes that keep you warm, the sugar in your holiday cookies and the lights on your trees (or candles in your menorahs).

You can also make Amazon donate by doing your holiday shopping online through this link: http://smile.amazon.com/ch/33-1203791