Understand your suppliers, protect workers’ rights & strengthen responsible sourcing
If you source fresh produce, wine, agricultural products or other processed goods from South Africa, you will know that managing responsible sourcing across a diverse supply chain is no small task. With suppliers spread across multiple provinces, commodities and production seasons, understanding their social and environmental performance can be challenging.
Information is often scattered across audit reports, spreadsheets, emails and different platforms. Questionnaires are completed in different formats, while labour practices, environmental management and corrective actions require ongoing attention.
How can you gain a clearer, more reliable view of your suppliers’ compliance without adding to the administrative burden? This is where the MySIZA platform comes in.
One Platform. Greater visibility.
A buyer, whether a local retailer, grocer, exporter, importer or international supermarket, who subscribes to MySIZA can access a consolidated view of its South African supply chain. The platform brings together information and data suppliers have already provided, helping buyers assess performance, prepare for their upcoming season by identifying trends or gaps, and generate reports relevant to their sourcing requirements.
Information is made available in accordance with supplier permissions and applicable platform arrangements. Buyers can access the platform through an annual subscription, with no additional charge for the reporting functionality covered by that subscription. For details, see the SIZA subscription fees for 2026/27.
Most buyers are committed to responsible sourcing, but limited visibility across multiple systems can make it difficult to identify emerging risks and respond effectively. This is particularly relevant in agriculture, where seasonal employment, changing production demands and environmental pressures can influence supplier performance throughout the year.
Responsible sourcing requires an understanding of both people and planet: how workers are treated, whether their rights are protected, and how businesses manage their environmental impact.
How SIZA supports responsible sourcing
SIZA brings together several complementary elements to help buyers and suppliers manage social and environmental compliance more effectively.
- Third-party audit programmes: Developed for South African agriculture, SIZA’s standards and auditing approach reflect local legislation, agricultural working conditions and labour realities, as well as relevant buyer and international requirements.
- Audit oversight and local support: A dedicated South African team provides programme oversight, technical guidance and assistance to stakeholders.
- The MySIZA platform brings together supplier profiles, audit outcomes, compliance information, and environmental performance data in a single digital environment, making relevant information available to buyers in accordance with applicable permissions.
- Capacity building: Training, templates, posters, videos, legal guidance and other resources help suppliers understand requirements and strengthen their management systems.
Together, these elements provide a practical foundation for assessing supplier performance, identifying areas of concern and supporting improvement.
Understanding social and environmental risks: Protecting workers and supporting better working conditions
Social compliance goes beyond policies and documentation. It concerns the people who plant, harvest, pack and process the products that reach local and international markets.
Agricultural businesses may experience significant changes in workforce requirements during harvesting and packing seasons. These pressures can create challenges relating to recruitment, wages, working hours, occupational health and safety, accommodation and fair employment practices. For buyers, it is therefore important to understand not only whether a supplier has been audited, but also what the findings reveal and whether identified issues and seasonal challenges are being addressed.
SIZA’s Social Standard and audit programme help identify areas requiring attention, while corrective-action processes support suppliers in addressing non-compliances. The Voice for All initiative further promotes worker awareness and access to grievance mechanisms, providing channels for raising workplace concerns and remediation. This broader perspective helps buyers consider social compliance as an ongoing management responsibility rather than a once-off audit requirement. It also encourages constructive engagement with suppliers to improve workplace practices and protect workers’ rights.
Improving environmental performance
Environmental management is equally important to responsible sourcing. Buyers increasingly need to understand how suppliers use water, energy and agricultural inputs, manage waste and measure their environmental impact.
SIZA’s Environmental Standard and related programmes provide a framework for assessing environmental practices and identifying opportunities for improvement.
Through SIZATrack360, participating suppliers capture monthly information from their own records, including water, energy, agrochemical and waste data. This provides a more structured basis for assessing resource use and calculating efficiency indicators than relying solely on estimates. The usefulness of the resulting information depends on the completeness and accuracy of the underlying records. Combined with social compliance information, these environmental insights provide buyers with a more comprehensive understanding of suppliers’ sustainability performance.
Reporting that meets your needs
Every buyer has different priorities. A retailer assessing supplier risk may require different information from an importer reviewing prospective suppliers or a business preparing sustainability disclosures. The MySIZA platform, supported by the SIZA team, enables buyers to request customised reports based on available supplier information and their specific requirements, subject to applicable permissions.
Examples include:
- Social and environmental audit outcomes and non-compliances, filtered by region, commodity or audit type.
- Corrective-action status and progress in addressing identified issues.
- Suppliers with completed audits, overdue audits or outstanding requirements.
- Water, energy and waste performance across a supply base.
- Suppliers with completed carbon footprints.
These reports help buyers identify patterns, prioritise engagement and determine where additional attention or support may be needed. The aim is to turn available information into practical insights that strengthen sourcing decisions.
Reducing duplication across the supply chain
Suppliers are familiar with audit and questionnaire fatigue. Repeatedly providing similar information to different buyers and platforms can create unnecessary administrative work and divert resources from implementing improvements. To help address this challenge, SIZA maintains agreements and working relationships with various global platforms and programmes, including Sedex, GLOBALG.A.P., LEAF Marque, WIETA and others, where applicable arrangements allow information to be shared or requirements to be aligned. This approach can support more efficient access to relevant social and environmental information, audit outcomes and environmental data, reducing duplication where possible.
For suppliers, less repetition means more time and resources can be directed towards strengthening workplace practices and environmental management. For buyers, it offers a more practical way to obtain relevant information without repeatedly requesting the same data in different formats.
From compliance monitoring to continuous improvement
An audit is an important assessment, but its long-term value lies in what happens afterwards between audit periods. Identifying a non-compliance is only the first step; addressing its underlying cause and preventing recurrence are equally important.
MySIZA helps buyers understand audit outcomes and corrective-action progress, supporting a more informed approach to supplier engagement. Where issues are identified, buyers can work with suppliers to encourage appropriate corrective action and strengthen management systems, while continuing to meet their own sourcing responsibilities.
This approach offers several benefits:
- Better-informed risk management: Greater visibility helps buyers identify social and environmental concerns and focus attention where it is most needed.
- Constructive supplier engagement: Audit findings can inform practical discussions about corrective action, capacity building and long-term improvement.
- Reduced administrative burden: Making better use of existing supplier information can minimise unnecessary duplication.
- Improved reporting readiness: Available supplier data can support sustainability reporting and environmental assessments, subject to applicable data quality and verification requirements.
The result is a shift from viewing compliance as a checklist towards using information to guide engagement and support measurable progress.
One supply chain. A shared responsibility.
South African agriculture is diverse, complex and central to many local and global supply chains. Behind every product are workers whose livelihoods depend on the industry, businesses that need to remain economically sustainable, and natural resources that must be managed responsibly.
Understanding this supply chain should not require reinventing the wheel or duplicating it. A SIZA buyer subscription provides greater visibility across social and environmental performance, helps reduce unnecessary duplication and supports more informed sourcing decisions.
Through SIZA and the MySIZA platform, buyers can gain a clearer view of their South African suppliers, strengthen responsible sourcing practices and support continuous improvement across both people and planet.
