Human Rights Day: turning rights on paper into real orders for African suppliers
In a town in northern Ghana, Mariama joins a six-month programme for women entrepreneurs. She learns to make gentle skincare products using local oils and plants. Volunteers help her design labels. At the final event, donors take photos with shelves full of creams and soaps.
Everyone claps. Mariama is proud.
Six months later, most of those products are gone and sold in tiny quantities to neighbours, given as gifts, or left unsold. There is no steady buyer, no supermarket order, no clinic partnership.
The programme talked about “women’s economic rights” and “financial inclusion”. On paper, it was a success. For Mariama, the right that matters, the right to earn a decent living from her work, still feels far away.
Rights are also about markets
Human rights instruments talk about the rights to health, to work, to an adequate standard of living and to be free from discrimination. In our sectors, these rights are shaped by simple market questions:
- Can clinics and consumers find safe, verified products instead of dangerous counterfeits?
- Can women-led and youth-led enterprises be seen and treated as serious suppliers?
- Can farmers access quality crop inputs on time and at a fair price?
- Can cooperatives move beyond one-off grants into real, repeat business?
When these things fail, rights start fraying long before any court ever hears a case.
Three quiet ways rights are undermined
- Unsafe products: cheap, untested creams that damage skin or fake pesticides that ruin crops quietly undermine the right to health and livelihood.
- “Beneficiary forever” thinking: programmes train people like Mariama but never connect them to buyers or procurement channels, reinforcing the idea that they are there to be helped, not to trade.
- Invisible discrimination: women-led, youth-led and rural suppliers are often labelled “too informal” or “too risky”, even when their products and track records compare well with larger firms.
How OpenMarket Global can help close the gap
OpenMarket Global cannot rewrite constitutions, but it can help answer one human rights question: “If I do the work to create a safe, useful product, can I realistically reach buyers?”
On the platform:
- A cooperative like Mariama’s has a simple storefront with photos, product details, locations and WhatsApp contact, instead of sitting in a PDF.
- A clinic buyer can search for verified skincare or health products and see both large companies and small cooperatives side by side.
- NGOs can show donors not just “200 women trained” but a living catalogue of businesses they helped build.
Verification partnerships with labs and field programmes help ensure that what is visible is also safe, protecting the right to health while supporting the right to work.
From rights language to concrete steps
Turning rights from slogans into daily practice requires a few shifts:
- Governments and human rights institutions: treat access to safe health, skincare and crop products as part of the right to health; invest in regulators and labs; and use digital marketplaces to spread information on verified options.
- NGOs and development partners: make “beneficiary to supplier” a standard metric; build market access into programme design; and list graduates on neutral platforms so buyers can actually find them.
- Businesses and cooperatives: frame your work as advancing rights (safer products, fair jobs, inclusion of marginalised groups) and use digital tools to prove reliability.
- Platforms like OpenMarket Global: keep interfaces low-data and WhatsApp-friendly, highlight inclusion tags like “women-led” or “youth-led” alongside quality signals, and maintain strong data protection.
Call to action
For Mariama, rights will feel real not on the day she receives a training certificate, but on the day her cooperative receives a steady order from a hotel, supplies a clinic because her products are verified and visible, and hires another woman at a fair wage.
Human Rights Day is a design question: are we building programmes and platforms that stop at training, or that carry people into real markets? Every time a programme lists its “beneficiaries” as suppliers, every time a clinic chooses a verified local product, and every time a marketplace like OpenMarket Global makes a small cooperative visible, that gap between rights on paper and rights in practice gets smaller.