WikiRate helps the OECD assess company reporting on minerals due diligence
WikiRate helps measure companies’ uptake of the OECD Minerals Guidance aimed at assisting companies to respect human rights and avoid contributing to conflict. Discover the key findings from the OECD report on companies’ mineral due diligence performance and access the underlying data on WikiRate.
A new OECD report — powered by WikiRate research — shows company reporting trends on steps they take to avoid contributing to conflict, human rights abuses and financial crime when producing, sourcing and using minerals.
Mineral supply chains — the mining, transport, trade and use of mineral resources — can be connected to serious human rights abuses like child and forced labor, as well as financial crimes such as money laundering. In addition, several minerals used in a range of everyday products like electronics, are known as ‘conflict minerals’ (i.e. gold, tantalum, tin, and tungsten) which originate from conflict-affected areas where the risk is high that the proceeds of minerals sales fund the conflict.
For these reasons, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a “Minerals Guidance” in 2011, outlining specific steps — known as due diligence — that companies should take to avoid contributing to problems linked to the mineral supply chain.
Fast-forward to today, and the OECD’s Responsible business conduct team, who prepared the guidance, were eager to learn about the guidance’s uptake and impact on companies’ minerals due diligence.
Together with minerals expert Raphael Deberdt, the WikiRate team was tasked to help translate the guidance into an assessment methodology. The WikiRate research team then applied this methodology to measure the uptake of the guidance’s 5-step framework by companies sourcing or trading minerals.
Key Findings
WikiRate’s research helped discover crucial reporting trends from a diverse sample of 503 companies. Using the Minerals Guidance’s framework as the methodological anchor, WikiRate uncovered the following insights:
- The share of companies disclosing increased from 30% in 2014 to 53% in 2018.
- Companies across sectors consistently progress in disclosing minerals sourcing policies (Step 1), increasing from 28% in 2014 to 50% in 2018.
- However, the study found weak disclosure on identifying risks (Step 2), 5% in 2014 to 13% in 2018, and responding to risks (Step 3), 9% in 2014 to 19% in 2018.
through their disclosures by four steps of the 5-step Framework (OECD)
These top-level findings show the progress made by companies and highlight areas that need to be addressed.
We worked with the WikiRate team to develop an assessment methodology that measures the uptake of the OECD Minerals Guidance by companies producing, sourcing, or using minerals based on their disclosures. The trends uncovered show some company progress on implementation but also important shortcomings on identifying and responding to risks that need to be addressed.
Benjamin Katz, Responsible business conduct — mineral supply chains team, OECD
Data now available
The research about companies’ mineral due diligence comprises thousands of data points. All of the raw data, sources and companies are now live on the WikiRate platform. This means that the data is available and reusable for everyone, and you can export data in bulk and connect to it via API.
The data for 2014 and 2018 was collected from sources such as company sustainability and annual reports, conflict minerals reports, modern slavery statements, SD filings and public membership records from industry initiatives. The data findings and source documents are available on WikiRate as a public resource.
With thanks to…
The research methodology and data of this project, like many others on WikiRate, result from a joint effort of the WikiRate open data community.
We want to thank a few individuals for their crucial contributions to this research; specifically, Raphael Deberdt for facilitating the essential work of defining the company sample and translating the OECD guidance into a standardized assessment methodology, and Svenja Stropahl and Sydney Strelau for their work to review company disclosures against the assessment framework.
