Partner Africa facilitates the AIM-Progress Africa Hub that brings together AIM-Progress Members operating in Africa (AB Foods, ABInBev, Coca-Cola, Danone, Diageo, Reckitt, SIG, Unilever and Hershey). As part of the Hub’s 2022 activities, Partner Africa designed, managed and implemented a Living Wage Pilot Project for suppliers of the Africa Hub members based throughout Africa.

• An onboarding process which included introduction calls and invitation letters to suppliers to explain their responsibilities, expectations and benefits of participating.
• Identifying Living Wage benchmarks for each of the supplier’s regions. The Anker Methodology was preferred, however, not available for many of the supplier’s regions so instead this project purchased and used the WageIndicator Typical Family methodology.
• Supplier training on the Living Wage and how to complete the IDH Salary Matrix online tool, which calculates workers’ remuneration taking into account their wages, in-kind benefits and bonuses and compares it against the Living Wage benchmark for their region.
• Partner Africa’s IDH Living Wage certified auditors visiting each of the six participating suppliers to verify the data inputted by suppliers and to make amendments and support where needed.
• The analysis of Living Wage Gap reports (automatically generated by the IDH Salary Matrix) by Partner Africa to identify overall trends, patterns, findings, learnings and recommendations which fed into a final learning paper.
• Separate annexes with tailor-made advice for each supplier on how they can get closer to the living wage benchmark were provided to participating suppliers.
• Individual calls with suppliers and buyers to discuss the findings of the project and next steps.
• A webinar organised by Partner Africa for all AIM-Progress members (not limited to those of the Africa Hub) to launch the learning paper and discuss the key findings and recommendations. Unilever and ABInBev and one of the suppliers participating in this project were amongst the guest speakers.