one step closer to living wages.

The German development organisation GIZ is committed to a future worth living, everywhere in the world. An important part of this is improving the production conditions for small farmers and workers in the supply chains of rubber, cocoa, coffee, bananas and soy.

IDH – The Sustainable Trade Initiative – makes international trade chains more sustainable: it develops programmes and tools, seeks financing and brings stakeholders together around the global sustainability goals (SDGs). Since 2020, us. has been the digital technology partner of IDH.

GIZ developed a 'Living Wage Costing Tool' to motivate and help owners of plantations, farms and supermarkets pay a living wage to their employees and partners. us. was commissioned to turn the existing Excel tool into a user-friendly digital version.

That digital version builds on the IDH Salary Matrix, which us. previously developed for IDH. Together, the two instruments form a two-step process: the Salary Matrix calculates the gap between the paid wage and a living wage, the Costing Tool calculates ways to close that gap.

The IDH Salary Matrix helps farmers and cooperatives make all aspects of remuneration – salary, bonuses, in-kind benefits – transparent and compare them against the benchmarks for living wages. Users enter their remuneration data, and the system calculates the gap against living wages.

In 2021 we developed the tool at all levels: UX, front-end, business logic, database and cloud infrastructure. By the end of 2021 we redesigned and rebuilt the entire user interface, to better align with the requirements of certification organisations and to scale with the strong growth in the number of participants.

In 2022, additional features followed, such as the ability to work offline, expanded reporting and functionality for data accessibility and auditing. In the long term, the Salary Matrix aims to be the go-to instrument towards living wages for many more sectors.

us. digitalised all functionality of the existing Excel version and created a secure and user-friendly interface for the GIZ Costing Tool, built with Angular and NestJS on the Google Cloud Platform. An api takes care of the integration with the IDH Salary Matrix and other IT solutions.

Both tools are logically connected, but can also be used as separate applications. Users easily integrate the results of both instruments, making their application more efficient and effective.

With this project, GIZ wants to contribute to open source software: source code and documentation are publicly available via GitHub. us. writes all code in line with internationally accepted best practices and remains GIZ's partner for future improvements, maintenance and hosting after delivery.

This is what our programs offering is all about: software that strengthens the substantive work of programme teams. We build and maintain the tools, IDH and GIZ stay in charge of substance and impact – bringing living wages within reach for more and more supply chains.