Achieving long-term progress on better jobs in agricultural supply chains requires change at multiple levels. At the ground level, it means concrete projects that improve wages and working conditions farm by farm, company by company. At the sector level, it means bringing brands, buyers, and producers together to build the shared tools, roadmaps, and commitments that no single actor can create alone. And at the systemic level, it means shaping the regulation, public finance, and global indicators that set the floor for everyone. Over 2021–2025, IDH has worked on all three: building the evidence, mechanisms, and shared infrastructure that make better jobs both a business case and a sector-wide commitment. With the right conditions in place and the right actors at the table, we believe that protecting workers and strengthening supply chains can become the same investment.
Introduction
In many agricultural and manufacturing supply chains, decent work remains the exception rather than the norm. Workers continue to face poverty wages, unsafe working conditions, and insufficient protection from exploitation, discrimination and harm. These are not only social risks. They are also business risks. Poor labour conditions affect workforce stability, productivity, regulatory compliance and sustained market access.
In 2025, we saw supply chain disruptions, tightening due diligence regulation, rising investor scrutiny and shifting consumer expectations begin to move decent work considerations into procurement decisions and risk registers across sectors. Among leading companies, social impact is increasingly moving beyond sustainability teams into procurement priorities, risk management and leadership agendas. Wages, safety, worker voice and protection from gender-based violence and harassment are becoming part of how companies understand supply continuity, reputation, compliance and long-term resilience.
What is needed for Better Jobs
IDH Better Jobs work is organised through a set of four interconnected objectives. Together they define what decent work means in practice across the agricultural and manufacturing value chains where we operate.
What’s happening through our partnerships
*Cumulative results for 2025 against the 2021-2025 funding cycle
Better Jobs in numbers
Across our Better Jobs portfolio, the 2021–2025 cycle closed with the following cumulative results. Nearly 46,000 workers saw a reduction in the living wage gap, reaching 91% of the cycle target. Across the portfolio, 1.8 million workers experienced improved working conditions, with women accounting for 1.23 million of the total number.
Over 440,000 jobs were supported across sectors, substantially exceeding the target, and 1.9 million farmers and workers received training, 858,000 of them women.
What is driving progress
The business case for decent work
Markets transform when companies have a reason to act on decent work. In 2025, IDH worked with private sector partners to build that case through hands-on projects in tea, bananas and apparel, generating evidence of what change looks like in practice, and where the returns justify the investment. Earlier evidence pointed in this direction: through our joint programme with CGAP on Accelerating Business to Empower Rural Women in Agriculture (ABERA), the company SolTuna gained approximately USD1.58 million annually in additional revenue from workplace improvements and productivity gains.
In tea and banana supply chains, we saw companies paying voluntary living wage contributions move from commitment to payment at scale. In 2025, an additional twelve retailers began paying contributions in proportion to their sourcing volumes. In the tea sector, three buying companies continued reducing living wage gaps related to their volumes at three producers. Voluntary contributions, however, are a first step and not the endpoint: they require significant coordination and are difficult to sustain at scale. Embedding higher wages in remuneration systems will depend on social dialogue and responsible purchasing practices. This is work IDH began in 2025 through social dialogue projects across Africa and Latin America, and supplier assessments of retailer purchasing practices.
A second line of evidence connects workplace safety to productivity. In India's tea sector, the Women's Safety Accelerator Fund (WSAF) showed that gender-based violence accounted for 10% of worker absenteeism, while improved access to support services was linked with a 71% reduction in productivity loss.
IDH's ability to work across sectors and geographies means that a finding from tea estates in India can shift how apparel companies in other countries understand the business case for a safe workplace. IDH brought that finding to Kenya's textile and apparel sector, convening a private sector event that connected gender-based violence directly to absenteeism, workforce retention and workplace productivity. This is one many example where IDH was able to translate such learnings.
Lastly, a third insight came from our work with Kenya's textile and apparel sector: a skills gap was limiting the industry's ability to grow and retain workers. Through the Generation Kenya (Kazi Bora) program, IDH worked with sector partners to deliver industry-validated skills training with guaranteed job placement. By the end of 2025, 3,210 youth and women had been enrolled and trained, superseding the target of 2,450. Of those, 68% were women and 74% had been successfully placed in employment. Companies participated because they had a direct commercial interest – the sector needed the workers. This illustrates a clear business benefit and delivers new employment opportunities.
Throughout these examples, we see forward-thinking companies are willing to invest, experiment and take on early risks, even before there is a proof of concept. But even the most committed company cannot move a market alone.
Five years of pre-competitive action: the Roadmap on Living Wage
Closing a living wage gap across an entire supply chain or sourcing region is a challenge larger than a single company.
Scaled progress requires shared infrastructure: industry benchmarks, common tools, agreed metrics and structures that keep them credible over time. Building that requires a neutral convener like IDH that is trusted by competing parties, understands the technical substance, adapts as challenges evolve, and can sustain progress across years. IDH has been seeding pre-competitive action across the Better Jobs portfolio over the last five years, and 2025 showed what that accumulation makes possible.
Solutions that were initially inspired by IDH’s Sector Initiative Program grew to become the Roadmap on Living Wages – a sector-agnostic platform to strengthen international alignment on living wages. Developed with leading retailers, brands and producers, and guided by a Technical Advisory Group of standards bodies and experts, it provides companies with a structured, five-step approach to tackling living wages in their supply chains: from identifying a reliable living wage benchmark, through measuring and verifying current gaps, to finding solutions and sharing learnings across the sector. By translating solutions from our field experience to shared practical tools and resources, we enable widespread solutions available for all.
What makes the Roadmap particularly powerful is that any company or organisation can adopt it, not just those IDH works with directly. The more companies that use it, the stronger the signal to the whole sector: living wages are not a competitive disadvantage but an emerging standard. In that sense, the Roadmap is designed to spread, turning what leading companies prove is possible into an expectation that the whole sector moves toward.
The strength of the Roadmap comes from three governance committees: a Steering Committee of leading retailers and brands, a Technical Advisory Group, and a Stakeholder’s Group. Additionally, the Salary Matrix User Group provides specific guidance on this tool. From 2026, a renewed committee structure will guide the Roadmap's next phase building on what the initiative has proven and ensuring its tools continue to evolve with the sector.
Embedded within the Roadmap is a suite of practical tools. The IDH Salary Matrix allows companies to calculate the gap between current wages and living wage estimates by country, sector and job type. Auditing guidelines support verification of this data to build trust among the stakeholders that must collaborate to close these gaps. The Living Wage Action Guide helps companies find solutions together with their supply chain partners to close those gaps. And the guidance on Making Credible Living Wage Claims support companies that need to make verifiable claims.
We see that there is an increasing traction for these tools. The Salary Matrix onboarded over 1,000 new users and training materials were translated into French, extending its reach into West and North African supply chains. Companies are increasingly approaching IDH for advice on Living Wage implementation: how to frame their approach, how to measure gaps in supply chains, and how to implement voluntary contributions and support wage increases. That demand is now met through IDH Solutions, which provides hands-on assistance to companies moving from gap measurement to concrete action.
The bi-annual Living Wage and Living Income Summit has become a key moment in that journey. Co-hosted in 2024 with GIZ and the UN Global Compact, it brings together over 400 guests from more than 250 organisations to share progress, build alignment, and push the field forward. In 2026 it takes place for the fifth time - a signal of how far the movement has come, and a platform for ensuring these tools reach the actors who need them most.
From sector commitments to global standards: living wage enters the institutional framework
Even the most ambitious pre-competitive actions operate within the bounds of the private sector. Sector trends, metrics, shared tools, and industry commitments can move companies but they alone cannot unlock barriers such as minimum wage policy, international labour standards or control investment criteria. For progress on decent work to reach workers at scale and last, the regulatory, institutional and financial conditions that maintain that market, i.e. the enabling conditions, need to shift. This is why IDH works not only with companies but with governments, international organisations and increasingly more with financial institutions. By engaging the actors who shape these conditions, while staying connected to those who monitor them, IDH ensures that on-the-ground experience informs decision-making in global institutions.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO), the United Nations agency responsible for setting international labour standards, is central to defining the business mandate on decent work. Governments and businesses globally look to the ILO for guidance on what decent work requires and how it should be measured.
In 2024, a landmark tripartite agreement on living wages marked a turning point: for the first time, governments, employers and workers' organisations formally agreed on a definition of a living wage. In April 2025, the ILO published its own living wage estimate methodology and launched a program in several countries to support governments in setting living wage estimates and strengthening social dialogue.
These developments directly reinforce the work IDH and its partners have been doing across agricultural supply chains. For the companies we work with across agricultural supply chains, the absence of a shared, credible definition of a living wage has been one of the most persistent barriers to meaningful action. With the ILO now providing that foundation, a major obstacle is removed, and the path to implementation becomes considerably clearer
In 2025, IDH was invited to attend several ILO events and became a member of their newly launched Global Coalition for Social Justice as well as the Initiative on Living Wage. Progress further accelerated in November 2025 at the Second World Summit for Social Development in Doha where IDH, alongside several key partners (the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA), the UN Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and the Governments of the Netherlands and Germany) hosted an official Solutions Session. Living wages were included in the Doha Political Declaration, signalling global political commitment to living wages as a driver of social development.
Following the adoption of the Doha Political Declaration, we will continue to engage with the Commission for Social Development (CSocD) - the UN body responsible for reviewing progress on social development commitments, including decent work and living wages. As a first step, IDH co-organised an online side event at CSocD64 alongside UNGC, the World Benchmarking Alliance, and WBCSD to keep living wages on the global social development agenda.