The Mekong Club Use Tezos To Create eMin – A Project To Prevent Contract Substitution Of Migrant Workers

 The Mekong Club

The Mekong Club, a Hong-Kong based NGO describe themselves as a:

“catalyst for change, inspiring and engaging the private sector to lead in the fight against modern slavery”.

They describe their original reasons for formation here:

The Mekong Club originally formed as a direct response to the growing number of companies looking to develop strategies to address forced labour risk through a professional forum.

Divided into industry-specific working groups, these networks meet regularly to learn, share best practices, and network with other like-minded professionals.

Member companies also work together to achieve an annual deliverable which will work towards producing tangible results in the fight against forced labour.

The Mekong Club has been working with Diginex Solutions to utilize blockchain technology in order to help achieve their goals. One of the specific reasons the Mekong Club has been utilizing blockchain technology is to protect migrant workers, especially against ‘contract substitution’.

Contract substitution is described here as:

…the process of overriding a contract and replacing it with a harsher, “substituted” one, is a dominant practice in nearly 161 countries. That is, more than 2.4 million victims of forced labor have been trafficked across the world market due to practices like contract substitution.

This “substituted” contract is a mechanism by which job recruiters coerce laborers into working under harsh conditions; conditions that exponentially differ from the ones they had originally consented to.

On February 4th 2020, the Coin Telegraph covered the eMin project and it was stated:

Emin’s ethical recruitment platform has been launched in a number of regions. Beginning in Thailand, the program is spreading to the Middle East, Malaysia, Bangladesh and, most recently, Hong Kong.

The eMin project was previously utilizing the Ethereum blockchain to help prevent contract substitution and had ran a pilot project with the help of funding from the British Embassy in Bangkok.

The Mekong Club eMin Project And Tezos

On the 17th of February, Leanne Melnyk Head of Global Supply Chains at Diginex solutions posted this:

In it she talks about the eMin project and how it is utilizing Tezos:

The Mekong Club who co-created eMin – a platform built on the Tezos blockchain protocol to prevent contract substitution of #migrantworkers.

She also mentions the Ethical Toy Program which is also utilizing the Tezos blockchain to create a virtual supply chain monitoring platform and we covered this story on XTZ News recently.

The reason for the post was to celebrate Diginex Solutions being shortlisted for the Thomson Reuters Foundation‘s #StopSlaveryAward 2021, with winners of the award set to be announced on the 25th of February.