Small-scale producers play a vital role in sustainable production and land use — but too often, they lack the resources and economic resilience needed to adopt more sustainable practices.This case study highlights practical approaches that are helping bridge this gap by creating incentives that bring climate, environmental and social benefits, including premiums, incentives and recognising and rewarding community stewardship.Part of a series exploring promising approaches for enabling small-scale producer market access and shifts to sustainable production:

Sustainability systems are uniquely positioned to advance human rights protections for workers in global supply chains through the identification and verification of risks and instances of forced labour. This core and often elusive step of due diligence is critical to ensure compliance with emerging human rights legislation and credibility of sustainability labels and claims in the global market. 

This round is now closed. In August 2025 The ISEAL Innovations Fund invited Expressions of Interest for projects that respond to the theme: Market mechanisms for transferring value to small-scale producers and SMEs.This Call for EOIs document contains all the information our members need to apply. Please note: EOIs must be submitted by an ISEAL Community Member, though non-member organisations can be named as project lead. Please also find links to download a brief Summary of this Call, as well as additional guidance documents for this funding round.

Sustainability systems are positioned to advance human rights protections in specific geographies and commodities through verification and remediation of human rights violations, such as forced and bonded labor. However to ensure impact, detecting those violations is central and often elusive. This report captures project learnings and shares general recommendations for those working to improve FBL detection in different sectors.

A compilation of the lessons learned from four pilot projects in remote auditing from Responsible Jewellery Council, LEAF Marque, Beter Cotton Initiative, and Fairtrade USA. LEAF Marque and the Responsible Jewellery Council looked at the extent to which remote auditing could provide an alternative to in-person on-site visits, while the two other pilot projects used a remote phone survey based on worker voice technology to carry out interviews with workers in factory settings (in the case of Fair Trade USA) and in an agricultural setting on cotton farms (Better Cotton Initiative – BCI).

This case study forms part of the Rainforest Alliance project Use of Risk Maps for Child and Forced Labour in Risk-Based Assurance Processes, supported by the ISEAL Innovations Fund. The project sought to test the prototypes of sectoral risk maps for child labor and forced labor in Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Honduras.