Toolbox
Tools on living incomes and wages
The "Tools on living income and wages" section provides resources and tools aimed at helping businesses and policymakers close income gaps for smallholder farmers and workers within supply chains. It includes practical guides and cost estimation tools that support the calculation of fair prices and wages necessary to achieve a sustainable, living income across various agricultural sectors.
About the Tool
On many farms or plantations, at least some workers do not earn a living wage. There is a gap between the actual wage paid and a living wage.
The GIZ Living Wage Costing Tool addresses this issue and offers various simulations and scenarios for closing wage gaps, including the corresponding cost implications.
The tool helps producers in particular to determine the additional costs of paying a living wage and thus strengthen their negotiating position. From 2022 onwards, the tool will be tested in pilot measures of the German Retailers Working Group for the banana sector and continuously improved on the basis of the learning experiences gained.
The tool can also be used by other supply chain actors. To do this, the producer must share the completed idh Salary Matrix with the supply chain actors for the upload into the tool.
How does it work?
If at least some workers on a farm or plantation do not receive a living wage, there are various ways to close the gap between the actual wage paid and a living wage: Strong trade unions and workers' representatives are an important lever to work towards improved wage and working conditions in the long term within the framework of collective agreements. Companies can also make a proactive contribution through their procurement practices and reward producers for high wage and labour standards. For example, through an additional price premium to cover the extra costs of paying living wages.
The GIZ Living Wage Costing Tool offers various simulations to analyse the direct cost implications for producers to pay workers a living wage. Different scenarios take into account the existing wage structures, i.e. differences in the remuneration of different activities on a plantation or farm. The cost implications of the respective scenarios and changes in the wage structure are clearly presented and can be compared with each other.
The data basis for the analysis is the idh Salary Matrix. The completed Excel file is to be uploaded into the costing tool. Information on living wage benchmarks and salary data is automatically transferred to the tool.
The tool contains a brief instruction for use on the first page. A training video will follow shortly for a detailed explanation of the tool's use and functions.
The digital version of the GIZ Living Wage Costing Tool is based on version 5 of the Excel Costing Tool and includes the following features:
- User-friendly transfer of data from the idh Salary Matrix via an upload function
- Choice between two scenarios:
1. Calculation of the additional costs of closing the gap by raising all wage categories below a living wage to a living wage
2. Calculation of the additional costs of job category specific wage increases to enable job and gender specific interventions
- Detailed guidance on the different scenarios
- Choosing the allocation of the additional costs to the different wage categories (base wage, bonuses and in-kind benefits)
- Calculation of the costs for a specific buyer
- Improved presentation of the results
The tool is also available in Spanish. The GIZ Costing Tool and Training videos are available in Englisch and Spanisch .
GIZ aims to continuously improve and expand the tool. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us at sasi@giz.de.
The copyright is held by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.
Developer: Nicola Nuecken, Tim K. Loos and Till Ludwig
About the tool
The German Act on Corporate Due Diligence in Supply Chains identifies responsible procurement and buying practices by companies as a key factor in counteracting human rights risks. This includes, among other things, the payment of fair prices and premiums that enable a life in dignity.
But how big is the gap between actual income and different national and international benchmarks such as e.g. minimum income or living income? What is a fair price?
The Living Income Reference Price Estimator developed by GIZ is designed to help companies and other users answer exactly these questions. The tool enables the calculation of reference prices in up to 3 different production scenarios at once. Thus it serves to estimate the price required to achieve various income benchmarks such as living income under different conditions.
The data basis of the tool is the ALIGN database, which contains different national and international poverty benchmarks that are retrieved and updated for different countries and regions on a regular basis. For its analysis the tool requires information on the household composition as well as aggregated annual gross margin data. A short manual can be found on the first page of the tool.
Since the beginning of 2022, the tool is being used and tested in pilot measures of various projects. Based on the learnings gained, it will be continuously improved.
This is the first version of the GIZ Living Reference Price Estimator. Please make sure that you save the excel file in a secure folder, as macros are used. If you have any problems, please contact your company's IT department.
Improvements and additions to the tool are planned. Please contact us for questions or feedback at johanna.deckers(at)giz.de.
The copyright is held by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.
Developer: Tim K. Loos and Nicola Nuecken
Publisher: Fairtrade Advocacy Office und Sustainable Food Lab
The Role of Governments in Enabling Living Income in Global Agriculture Value Chain - Guidance for public policy makers
This Toolkit was created as guide for policy-makers interested in providing support to smallholder farmers, in an effort to close the gap between actual incomes and a Living Income in agricultural value chains. The document provides considerations and guidance in relation to both production (supply-side) and consumption (demand-side) public policies.
INATrace Toolbox
INATrace is a digital traceability solution for agricultural raw materials — from production to the final product. With the increasing demand for sustainable agricultural products and the growing importance of corporate due diligence (e.g., through the EU Deforestation Regulation, EUDR), there is a pressing need for transparent and traceable supply chains.
However, available traceability solutions are often not adaptable and lack interoperability with other systems. Typically, these applications are not open source, creating a dependency on the respective IT provider. Small-scale farmers, in particular, face challenges in this context: they often have very limited influence over the use of their data or the selection of traceability solution providers.
INATrace software’s source code is openly available, allowing IT companies and supply chain actors to adapt it according to their needs. The "Principles for Digital Development" form the foundation of INATrace, particularly the principle of "Design with the User."
In this sense, INATrace enables farmer organizations to digitally record all production steps, manage their own data and transfer relevant traceability data to subsequent supply chain actors. As an extension of the INATrace web app, an offline INATrace App offers the opportunity to create farmer profiles and map farmers' fields. This data is then automatically synced with the desktop version and a first deforestation check can be conducted for each polygon. This is made possible through an interface with the FAO's WHISP ("WHat IS in that Plot?") tool and the use of unique anonymous geo-IDs provided by the "Asset Registry" of the AgStack project by the Linux Foundation.
The toolbox equips you with a comprehensive overview of the essential resources required to implement INATrace within your supply chain or project. To ease the development, flow and implementation of your project, the toolbox equips you with the latest version of the open-source code, tools and guidance needed to integrate, use, and scale INATrace effectively.
- Open-source Code on GitHub
- Download the INATrace App
- INATrace Mapping Guide
- INATrace User Guides for Buyer companies, Exporters und Producers
- Take a look at the INATrace Training videos in English, French and Spanish
- INATrace Pricing Guide
- FAQs in English and Spanish
Guidelines for digital supply chains
The DIASCA Traceability Trust and Transparency Guidance document proposes a framework for interoperable digital traceability systems that can enhance trust and transparency in agrifood supply chains. It examines supply chain regulation as a means to support human development and environmental sustainability, using supply chain integrity to manage the interactions among policy, technology, society, and environment. The paper applies this framework to a real-world case, offering practical insights and recommendations for solution providers and policymakers.
This DIASCA Forest Monitoring Guidance document aims to promote a shared understanding of forest monitoring among diverse stakeholders such as supply chain partners (from producers to retailers), and service and data providers. Regulators and authorities tasked with reviewing and verifying due diligence statements may also find this reference useful, as it represents the culmination of insights from many experts representing producers, traders, and service providers among others. This paper focuses on the semantics and syntax related to forest monitoring, with a focus on EUDR compliance.
The DIASCA Farmer Income and Cost of Production Guidance document aims to support sustainable agricultural supply chains by helping stakeholders understand and improve farmers' incomes through effective monitoring of production costs. It seeks to establish standardized methods for assessing income and cost factors, enabling more accurate planning and interventions that support farmer livelihoods.
