The technology sector is an interconnected, interdependent, and interrelated ecosystem of diverse business entities and stakeholders. While every company has the responsibility to address their own adverse human rights impacts, sustained progress on human rights will only be realized if companies and stakeholders take an ecosystem-wide view.

Just as companies in the technology industry don’t exist as self-reliant entities, so their approach to human rights shouldn’t be disconnected either. Many technology and human rights challenges are system-wide, not company-specific. Decisions made in one part of the ecosystem can have impacts elsewhere in the system, and industry actors may need to take coordinated action to address a given risk or impact. Many companies face common challenges (e.g., same industry segment, same geography, same value chain) and may be better able to address human rights challenges by working together.

We believe that the “collective whole” of action to protect, respect, and realize human rights in the technology industry is so much more than the sum of individual company actions. Rather, individual company actions need to be taken with the broader ecosystem as context, and this requires a practical resource for both companies and stakeholders.

To make good on this belief we’ve created this resource for “Human Rights Due Diligence Across the Technology Ecosystem”.