Learning and Implementation Community

A group of garment brands and retailers committed to improving purchasing practices are gathering regularly as a peer-learning community, working together with supply chain partners, to practically implement changes.

Latest news: Watch our public meeting 'Implementing Responsible Purchasing Practices: Sharing Progress and Lessons Learnt'

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Latest news: Watch our public meeting 'Implementing Responsible Purchasing Practices: Sharing Progress and Lessons Learnt' -

This involves meetings for sharing good practices and learnings (from experts, manufacturers and companies) and developing and sharing practical tools, resources and guidance to support companies in their progress. An essential element of the community is the involvement of supply chain partners of participating companies and manufacturers proposed by The Sustainable Terms of Trade Initiative (STTI), to find practical solutions that are workable in the supply chain.

The overall desired outcome of the community is improved purchasing practices, in order to give scope for improved supply chain working conditions, through peer learning and determined efforts to implement the Common Framework for Responsible Purchasing Practices.

The community will meet for a period of 2 years from October 2022 after which the resources developed will be made publicly available to support the journey of improved purchasing practices in other companies. The MSI Working Group on Responsible Purchasing Practices is open to refining the framework in the future based on the learnings and outcomes of the Learning and Implementation Community (LIC), if necessary.

Dowload LIC factsheet

The MSI Working Group recognises that there is a need for a number of streams of parallel action on purchasing practices such as The Better Buying Institute, The Sustainable Terms of Trade Initiative and ACT, amongst others. The MSI Working Group believes that all of these activities are valuable and complementary to work towards the shared goal of implementing responsible purchasing practices and ceasing purchasing practices that drive human rights issues.

The LIC is funded by the Initiative for Global Solidarity (IGS) implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH (supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development) and the Sustainable Textile Initiative: Together for Change (STITCH) (supported by the Dutch Government).

Implementing Responsible Purchasing Practices: Sharing Progress and Lessons Learnt

Halfway through the community's journey, the Learning and Implementation Community (LIC) hosted a public meeting to share progress and learnings. Publicly available tools developed by the LIC were shared, including learnings on working with supply chain partners on improvements and exercises designed to establish a shared understanding of current purchasing practices and their impacts and to prioritise actions. Speakers included commercial team leadership from the participating brands, a Pakistan-based manufacturer, and representatives of the organising MSIs.