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13 March 2019

Meet the Buyer Event Barcelona: advancing social responsiblity in ICT

The Make ICT Fair Market Engagement Series continued with a Meet the Buyer event in Barcelona, 27th February at Pati Manning. The half-day event draw in over 30 participants ranging from ICT suppliers and resellers such as Telefonica or Saytel, NGO representatives and public procurers. Back-to-back with the Mobile Social Congress, the event enabled the discussion around social responsibility in the ICT supply-chain starting at the mining stage.

Procura+ Participant, Barcelona City Council kicked-of the event by introducing the audience to the overarching vision and purpose behind leveraging public procurement to increase the engagement with the topic. Namely, to address poor working conditions and human right violations in this global, complex supply-chain.

A presentation by Electronics Watch built on the introduction by providing further context as in show casing successful examples where socially responsible procurement made a lasting impact on the welfare of workers. However, the focus of the event was the exchange between suppliers/resellers and the public authorities. This was facilitated for example by an introductory presentation of HPs social responsibility policies, a panel discussion and open floor Q&A.

I was pleasantly surprised at the interest shown by the suppliers and companies. It shows that it really is a topical issue. It is a good time to move forward.” – Carla Canal, Project manager Policy Coherence for Development, Direction of Global Justice and International Cooperation, Barcelona City Council

Looking ahead, the next Meet the Buyer event, will focus on an upcoming tender on workplace hardware of Gemeente Haarlem – 15th April 2019, register here to secure a place.