James Finlays Kenya has fired two contractors who were featured in a BBC expose detailing sexual exploitation of female tea workers at the company.
It has also offered direct jobs to the contractors’ employees.
“We have terminated our agreement with John Chebochok’s company Sislo Holdings. All 300 contractors who were working with us through Sislo have been offered direct employment to ensure their livelihoods are not affected – 98 percent have accepted,” said the firm in a statement.
“We have also suspended John Asava. Both individuals have been barred from entering James Finlay Kenya,” it noted.
The firm also added that it had reported the BBC‘s allegations against them to the police.
After spending months undercover at Finlays’ tea plantations, which supply the beverage to many of the world’s leading retail chains, the BBC’s Africa Eye documentary featured shocking accounts of sexual exploitation from women working there.
The documentary, titled Sex for Work: The True Cost of Our Tea, includes footage of the two contractors who worked on Finlays’ farms allegedly engaging in serious sexual misconduct.
It depicts them coercing desperate women looking for work into performing sexual favours in exchange for work.
The company also said it has launched an independent investigation to “fully understand what happened and where we can improve”.
According to the multinational, it has hired the Kenyan law firm Bowmans to investigate the cases raised in the exposé.
It has also hired Partner Africa, a firm that specialises in identifying risks to people and implementing strong protection standards, to help it strengthen its policies against sexual exploitation.
It said that the experiences shared by the women in the BBC investigation “clearly show that we need to go further and do better”.
“While the investigation is underway, we are reminding all Finlays workers of the existing safeguarding measures in place,” said the company.
Finlays has promised that the investigations will be “wholly independent,” and that management across the company will ensure that the Partner Africa teams have full access to everyone who works at James Finlay Kenya, as well as the firm’s records and all processes and procedures in place.
“We are wholly committed to taking decisive action on the investigation findings to prevent any experiences like this happening in the future.”
