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      Companies have a crucial role to play in upholding the human rights of their employees, workers in their value chain, communities impacted by their operations, and consumers and end-users. Children are at heightened risk of adverse impact by business as they are vulnerable across all sectors and geographies.

      Children under 18 years old account for almost one third of the world’s population[1]. In many countries, children and youth make up almost half of the population.

      It is therefore crucial that businesses recognise children as a key stakeholder group that must be actively considered and represented throughout their human rights and environmental due diligence programmes. Companies must also reflect this in their annual reporting on sustainability, in order to communicate how they’re accounting for the rights of children in their business activities, and the progress that is being made.

      UNICEF have campaigned for the rights of children since being founded in 1946. This year, UNICEF wanted to explore the status of reporting on children’s rights within corporate sustainability reports, and compare this to the status of reporting assessment that they had conducted twelve years ago[2]. To enable this, UNICEF was looking to examine a vast volume of reports across industries and geographies, for which it requested KPMG’s support.

      Amita Basu
      Amita Basu

      Director

      KPMG in the UK

      By combining our Sustainable Supply Chain team’s human rights expertise with our proprietary Generative AI tool ‘Cognitive Contract Management’, we were able to support UNICEF in this important project that looks to advance the ambition on children’s rights reporting.

      The challenge

      UNICEF identified 1,000 of the world’s largest companies to include in its research report, spanning all sectors and geographies. These documents were large, and varied in their formats, languages, and structure, making the qualitative review task even more complex.

      UNICEF defined fourteen key research indicators covering a broad range of topics, including inclusion of children’s rights considerations, employment, child safeguarding and protection, product safety and marketing, and communities, environment and land acquisition.

      This research task was therefore complex due to the number of documents, format variation, language variation, and detailed level of qualitative research required to cover the topics in scope.

      The approach

      We combined our Human Rights expertise with our technical team’s capabilities (in the form of KPMG’s proprietary AI tool ‘Cognitive Contract Management’ - CCM), leveraging AI to read the sustainability reports and evaluate the research indicators, rather than humans. CCM is built on a flexible AI platform that has computational capabilities such as Large Language Models, which imitate human cognitive faculties, and ingest and analyse documents at high speed and accuracy.

      We conducted two interrelated research activities as part of this project:

      Research questions

      • We used CCM to machine-read these reports, understand them akin to human intelligence, and answer 14 questions that were relevant to the 14 key research indicators. These covered a range of topics including:
        1. Commitment to respecting children’s rights & their identification as vulnerable or marginalised stakeholders.
        2. Working conditions of parents and caregivers.
        3. Protection of children in business activities and facilities.
        4. Impact on children related to digital products and services.
        5. Effects of marketing and advertising practices on children.
      • CCM provided qualitative responses to the research questions, leveraging its GenAI capabilities when scanning the documents.
      • Each answer was backed by data evidence, outlining the data in the report that led to the machine’s conclusions.

      Key word search terms

      • CCM also conducted a search for 16 key terms, which UNICEF had developed. These words covered a range of children’s rights-related topics.
      • CCM captured data on the frequency of each indicator, and the combinations of term occurrences.

      The outcome

      The research outcome provided insights extracted from over 794 sustainability reports, to a high level of accuracy with unprecedented speed.

      The use of AI technology enabled us to rapidly cover a significant number of reports across industries and geographies. In addition to scale, the quality and depth of research would not have been possible without the use of this transformative technology.

      The research allows UNICEF to communicate the progress on corporate reporting on children’s rights, and identify examples of good practice and high-level gaps. The objective will be to further strengthen the integration of children’s rights into sustainability reporting.

      Read the report UNICEF published by clicking here: ‘Corporate Reporting on Children’s Rights: A global review of the current state of children’s rights disclosures’

      UNICEF does not endorse any company, brand, product or service.

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