Members

NIR’s members come together to identify common challenges and dilemmas. Swedish business collaborates with other stakeholders through NIR, with the common goal of conducting economically, socially and environmentally sustainable business.

Swedish business drives global sustainability by acting responsibly and contributing to decent work and sustainable economic growth. Our members represent some of Sweden’s largest exporting companies and the financial sector. Together, our members share a long history of conducting successful business globally.

Doing business in complex markets often involves challenges beyond laws, rules, regulations and guidelines. Local business practices can be an obstacle for conducting sustainable business. The root causes of risks related to human rights and sustainability can be complex to identify and the boundary between political and sustainability risks is often vague.

NIR supports its members in identifying markets and addressing potential risks, enabaling collaboration between members and other actors to mitigate those risks and promoting joint approaches in identified markets.

This approach supports our member companies in conducting sustainable business in complex markets while driving global sustainability by providing solutions and business models.

“At Epiroc, we experience that NIR operates as an excellent bridge in the collaboration between us member companies and public actors around both sustainability challenges but also the business opportunities the increased focus on sustainability brings. NIR is also a very good platform for not only discussing sustainability challenges in complex markets with other Swedish companies but also identifying solutions.”

Camilla Goldbeck-Löwe, Vice President Corporate Sustainability, Epiroc.

Member events

NIR organises and facilitates peer-to-peer knowledge exchanges on current trends and to address challenges and identify opportunities for a positive impact in complex markets.

Topics covered in our member events include:

⦁ Sustainability in mining
⦁ Anticorruption
⦁ EU Taxonomy
⦁ New US Iran policy
⦁ Human Rights Due Diligence Legislation

Facilitating peer-to-peer knowledge exchanges is a core pillar of our operations and results in new initiatives, partnerships and programmes.

Our members

 

Want to become a member?

NIR is a meeting point for our members and Swedish and international business peers to exchange experiences on how to conduct sustainable business, mitigate risks and foster local sustainability in complex markets. NIR provides its members with:

⦁ Support in selected markets
⦁ Training on management in complex environments
⦁ Programmes to apply in local value chains
⦁ Access to relevant networks in selected markets
⦁ Contact with the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Swedish embassies

If you would like to know more about becoming a member, do not hesitate to contact us.

UP!

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UPSKILLING OF UNION SHOP STEWARDS

A lack of enabling environment for social dialogue at the workplace level, despite the provision of legislative acts that protect and promote workplace cooperation is a reoccuring issue  in Kenya. To implement good policy there must be a fertil ground.

Therefore SWP developed the UP!  project. Together with Swedish companies as an entry point, and with unions i South africa and Kenya. 

In Kenya SWP created the SWP UP! Programme targeting skills development of the union Shop Stewards from 18 companies in the Automotive sector in Kenya during 2021. As a result, the Stewards were able to use their skills to build trust and cooperation with management in new ways to avoid conflicts. 

A second cohort of training, in close cooperation with union AUKMW, takes place in 2022.

The training allows shop stewards to step out of their daily routines and understand their role and the purpose of their union, understand the labour market context, the laws that regulate relationships and the business itself. But on a human level, many shop stewards also highlighted that they feel respected as human beings, and that they have developed the skills to engage with supervisors and management and experience respect in professional relations. The experiences had deeply impressed them and helped to project the vision of dialogue and mutual respect and their own potential as a means to change workplaces.

The intervention of the SWP programme had a direct effect at the workplaces, where shop stewards listed several cases where they had managed to intervene and secure results in dialogue with management, avert crises or find solutions based on opportunities and the communication skills obtained during the SWP training. For the Amalgamated Metal Workers Unions in Kenya, the shop stewards pointed to how the training had enabled them to design their own strategies at the workplace in relation to supervisors and staff, and to achieve many concrete results.

Based on this shop steward upskilling, I feel confident that as a union we now have change ambassadors that will grow the industry, protect, and promote decent work principles for both the employer and the employees represented. And that disputes will be dealt with at the workplace level by though consultative dialogue.

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Rose Omamo

General Secretary
Amalgamated Union of Kenya Metal Workers

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE CONTENT AND TRAININGS IN THE UP! PROJECT IN KENYA AND SOUTH AFRICA
Click Here