Harvard’s public health graduate school has teamed up with Levi Strauss & Co. for a new blockchain-based system designed to augment outside auditors of factory health and safety with self-reporting by workers, Reuters reports.
It was revealed that Consensus will provide the project’s blockchain solution and it will be funded through a grant from the U.S. State Department. Tomicah Tillemann, founder of the Blockchain Trust Accelerator (BTA) at New America in a statement, that the solution will be providing “a secure, standardized, auditable, and transparent platform through which worker survey data can be aggregated and analyzed.”
Dr. Eileen McNeely, director of Harvard T.H. Chan’s Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise, also reported for the past 25 years workers in supply chains have been monitored mainly by audits and the system alone is not effective. She noted that a distributed system of inquiry on the blockchain that goes right to the source and offers a new solution.
The project’s first pilot will notably be tested in factories in Mexico in the second quarter of 2019 and another pilot is currently planned for 2020.