Listening to the Workforce: How &Wider is Transforming Global Supply Chains
Published: 2025-07-22 | Author: VisionariesNetwork Team
In today’s globalized economy, where the products we use often pass through a dozen hands across continents before reaching store shelves, one critical component is frequently overlooked—the workers behind the work. From agriculture fields in rural Asia to garment factories in Latin America, countless laborers face hidden exploitation, lack of visibility, and minimal say in the conditions of their employment. And yet, without their voices, efforts toward responsible sourcing, sustainability, and human rights compliance remain incomplete.
We introduce you to &Wider, a purpose-driven company born not from a polished tech incubator, but from the sobering aftermath of tragedy. Since its founding in 2014, &Wider has committed itself to a singular mission: increasing visibility and improving working conditions along global supply chains by listening directly to workers.
A Company Born of Tragedy and Purpose
The story of &Wider begins in the wake of the Marikana tragedy, a violent incident at a platinum mine in South Africa that claimed the lives of 34 striking workers. For &Wider’s founders, this was a turning point. They saw firsthand how disconnected companies could be from the lived realities of the people within their supply chains. Determined to close this gap, they started working with their first client—a multinational fishing company—by engaging face-to-face with workers.
These early interactions laid the foundation for &Wider’s core method: trust-building through listening. With input from workers themselves, they created unique metrics to measure what constitutes a “decent working life.” These weren’t abstract indicators drawn up in a boardroom but grounded insights shaped by those on the frontline.
From Face-to-Face to Digital Transformation
While &Wider began with in-person engagement, the team quickly realized the importance—and potential—of scaling their approach through technology. They experimented with an app, then partnered with an external tech provider. After multiple iterations and hard-learned lessons, &Wider decided to take matters into their own hands.
The result? A custom-built, in-house digital platform designed to gather, analyze, and share real-time feedback from workers in any geography. With development and support teams based in Cape Town and operational headquarters in Amsterdam, &Wider now serves clients across Europe and North America, offering tailored solutions that turn worker feedback into business intelligence.
Addressing the Invisible: The Problem at Hand
Global supply chains often stretch across countries with varying labor laws, enforcement capabilities, and cultural norms. This complex web enables invisible working conditions to flourish—conditions that not only violate basic human rights but also threaten long-term business sustainability.
When companies don’t know what’s happening on the ground, risks multiply. Poor working conditions lead to high turnover, decreased productivity, reputational damage, and in extreme cases, legal liability. More importantly, it keeps millions of workers trapped in cycles of poverty and exploitation.
The &Wider Mission and Solution
At its heart, &Wider’s mission is simple yet profound:
Listen to workers, learn from their feedback, and help businesses make things better.
But achieving that requires the right tools, expertise, and commitment. &Wider’s platform uses scalable technologies, strong data integrity, and human-centric support to unlock greater visibility into working conditions. With this, companies can take actionable steps to improve both their operational performance and their human rights impact.
Whether it's a multinational corporation or a mid-sized business looking to improve ethical sourcing, &Wider supports them in tracking, assessing, and responding to real-time data from the people who matter most—the workforce.
Flagship Tools: Turning Data into Impact
1. Business-Level Monitoring
This is &Wider’s flagship service, enabling organizations to monitor working conditions whenever and wherever needed. Through periodic feedback collection and advanced dashboards, companies gain high-quality, actionable insights into how workers experience their jobs.
Monitoring frequency and pricing are customized based on the size of the workforce and the client’s specific goals. Most importantly, the data is not static—it’s live and ongoing, designed to enable continuous improvement.
2. Landscape Assessments
While business-level monitoring provides a company-specific view, Landscape Assessments offer a broader sectoral perspective. These assessments span an entire year and cover specific sourcing geographies or industry sectors, tracking human rights risks and improvements using feedback directly from workers and smallholders.
Going Beyond Data: Add-ons That Drive Change
&Wider’s primary role is as a human rights data provider, but they also recognize that data without action is just noise. To that end, they offer a range of value-adding services, including:
Lea Esterhuizen: Driving Visibility in Global Supply Chains
Lea Esterhuizen, Founder and CEO of &Wider, is a data scientist with a passion for justice. With over 20 years of experience researching state-sponsored violence, forced labor, and child exploitation across South Africa, the Balkans, the MENA region, and the UK, she has built a career designing scalable systems that turn complex human rights issues into actionable insights. Moved by the 2012 Marikana mining tragedy, Lea founded &Wider in 2014 to bring visibility to invisible working conditions by listening directly to workers.
Today, &Wider operates across 12 sectors and 68 geographies, using real-time data to help companies improve human rights in their supply chains.
“We conduct due diligence and monitoring of working conditions along global supply chains and in companies' own facilities.”
Browse our most recent publications
