Around 3 weeks ago, a story featured the life of a 13-year-old Clarisse Kambire which made an insight of the working of the brand Victoria Secret.

The lingerie company buys all of the cotton from Burkina Faso, under a deal that features a 3rd party monitoring that ensure that the company gets a fair deal and pure organic cotton. The root cause for this was that the 3rd party monitoring was not efficient and the cotton that was supposed to be a produced without the use of child labour. Burkina Faso is a desperately poor country and the farmers who produce cotton are too poor to afford a better life for their children. Under these circumstances Victoria Secret is equally responsible to ensure that right practices are followed throughout business chain.

One possible explanation by Victoria secret is that they shall pass some profits onto the farmers through the supply chain. But again the fundamental question is whether giving more money through supply chain will make cotton industry more competitive, even worsening the condition Burkina Faso farmers or will it actually improve the conditions of children in cotton farms? Victoria secret should understand that what management and shareholders are obliged to do for sustainable practices is not always a good thing to do.

The idea to promise the customer to have fair trade cotton, but to do fair on the promise is altogether different scenario. Victoria secret should learn from the initiatives of Nestle to dive deep into the supply chain to monitor and remediation of its plan to eradicate child labour at the farm level in West Africa.