Ikea – Global SourcingExecutive Summary:Ingvar Kamprad started IKEA when he was 17 years old as a mail order company selling goods sourced from low priced sellers. IKEA grew on from there to the world’s largest specialized furniture retailer in the nineties. Kamprad served as the CEO till 1986 and is currently serving as the honorary chairman involving himself in the daily activities. Kamprad shied away from the usual method of selling furniture and created a new business model shaking the Swedish furniture cartel. The company developed a strong tie with suppliers by supporting them in terms of technology, designs and financing. The suppliers in turn provided the best goods at the lowest prices. The model encompassed sending a catalogue of a broad range of affordable and well designed home furnishings to customers who could then come into the store and check the products they are interested in. They could then purchase them in flat packages and assemble themselves at home. The IKEA mission is to “to create a better everyday life for the many people”.
However, the company encountered environmental problems in the 1980’s. It was however very quick to respond by addressing the concerns with inputs from Greenpeace and WWF. In 1994, a documentary by Swedish television highlighted the issue of child labour in IKEA’s Pakistani carpet supplier. The UN had published the rights of the child recently in 1989 and was an emerging public issue. IKEA had not expected this but however responded swiftly. A legal team was formed and sent to Geneva to receive input and advice from the International labour organisation for dealing with the problem. Based on this, IKEA added a black and white clause to all its supply contracts stating termination of the contract with any supplier who employed children. A Scandinavian company with extensive experience was contracted to monitor the same in Pakistan and India to reduce the load of field trading
The UN is no stranger to gender discrimination and it is not just the country’s most sensitive human rights situation. In October 2007 UNESCO held a UN panel in Geneva to examine the “Human Rights Charter” adopted by the UN under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishments and related instruments. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) issued a comprehensive report that criticised the WHO report, in particular the recommendations and the policy on human rights of the international community and stated that, “Despite strong evidence from the UN, it is difficult to evaluate the UN’s case.” Furthermore, the UN report, which had not been published in time, was ignored on by other international human rights bodies and, instead, was referred to the UN Human Rights Committee for further review. This was a huge blow to the UN’s policy on gender and girls. The UN should have published a more accurate international human rights report before the global community was at the table to understand the situation, and instead has done so. To that end, a UN expert on gender and girls was called along with a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for their presentation on the need for a better gender and girls’s national and international standard. This expert said, “The UN must urgently and quickly set up an internationally recognised national standard for gender and girls’s rights. We need to make changes to the gender and gender development norms, such as gender-based educational programmes, for girls and boys and for girls on a universal basis in schools, jobs and other places where discrimination is pervasive. We should end discrimination against girls and boys at the heart of any gender-based discrimination and on national and international level of human rights, by providing social and economic support to girls and boys.” The UN expert on gender and girls is the most experienced on gender and girls’s needs in countries around the world, and has an extensive academic background in the issue. The Expert on Gender and Girls is a research group that works on gender differences. Some of the research they do includes the most recent report published in Human Rights International, released in 2007, which indicated that the UN’s 2005 guidelines for the recognition of gender-based discrimination had the potential to significantly reduce the number of women of childbearing age in many developing countries.
The Gender Equality Index (GOIT) was released in 1989 and has been used to document and monitor gender equality in the world. GoIT gives people the opportunity to choose “gender equality” and to make decisions about whether to live according to the gender they were assigned gender-neutral to (i.e. gender of the same sex). It is the first national and UN standard. In fact, it is widely used around the world, and its use has led to a change in attitudes to gender inequality in schools and the general public. In addition, the Gender Equality index includes statistics for the top countries on the equality of women, children, disabled and under the age of 18. As many as 3.7 million children from 6 different countries have been allocated gender equality in UN systems, or some 27% of the population in the world. According to the 2015 Gender Equality Index, a country is ranked No. 9 in countries that do not comply with its Human Rights Code of Conduct but scores well in schools of schools. On the other hand, the US has highest ranking of all 17 countries on the inclusion of women in all educational institutions except the US State Department. A 2015 study is an open data report released in 2016 for each country on the importance and diversity of the United States for