[25 November 2025]

On the sidelines of the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights 2025 and in partnership with our trusted partner, the Heartland Initiative, TrustWorks hosted a closed-door, investor-only workshop at our offices in Geneva entitled: Advancing Investor Stewardship in CAHRA: Guidance for Portfolios & Engagement.

Objective

The main objective of the workshop was to peer review a guidance note produced by Heartland and TrustWorks on the topic of advancing investor stewardship in conflict-affected and high-risk areas (CAHRAs). The meeting was divided into three parts:

Part One: Portfolio analysis

In the first session, Sam Jones, President and co-founder of Heartland, opened with a summary of the current global conflict and fragility landscape, challenges facing responsible investors, and the benefits of the “saliency-materiality nexus” as a contextual lens for portfolio due diligence. Sam introduced Heartland’s three-part methodology (i.e., geographic, relational, operational) for assessing corporate proximity to human rights harms in CAHRAs and a set of recommendations for investors to consider when addressing CAHRA-based risks from the portfolio to individual company level. This presentation was followed by a group discussion and helpful suggestions for improving the guidance.

Part Two: Investor-led engagements

In the second session, Josie Lianna Kaye, CEO and founder of TrustWorks, introduced TrustWorks’ proprietary benchmarking methodology, leveraging this to highlight the type of questions investors can ask when engaging companies in a systematic, versus controversies-based approach. She provided examples of common responses companies may provide and why such responses may indicate that a conflict-specific due diligence process is not yet being undertaken meaningfully.

Part Three: Conflict-specific due diligence for companies

In the third and final session, participants was taken through a fictitious case study leveraging TrustWorks proprietary conflict-specific due diligence methodology designed for companies with business activities in CAHRAs. The case study highlighted core differences between HRDD and hHRDD processes with a view to enriching investor understanding of conflict-specific due diligence and the expectations investors should have of companies.

Next steps

The guidance note will be made public in 2026 following inputs from the investor community.