Catalyzing Investor Action to Reduce Harmful Impacts of Nickel Mining in Indonesia through a Social Enterprise Model

Rights CoLab is a U.S.-based organization building a Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (HREDD) database grounded in community-sourced data from Indonesia, the world's largest nickel producer. Nickel mining has expanded fast across Sulawesi and the Maluku islands, and it has come with real costs for the people living closest to it: land taken, water contaminated, labor abuses, and indigenous consent eroded. Most of what investors, corporations, and regulators see about these conditions still comes through corporate self-reporting or periodic third-party audits.

In this capstone workshop project, the SIPA team developed a business plan to bring the database to market. The team looked at three potential buyer groups: electric vehicle automakers, institutional investors, and ESG data providers. All segments were weighed against regulatory pressure, stated commitments, and how willing the group would actually be to pay for this type of data. Deliverables include a weighted ranking of EV automakers, a tiered investor segmentation built from PRI, Preqin, and Bloomberg data, a competitive read of the ESG data provider landscape, and a go-to-market strategy. The aim is to help Rights CoLab identify the buyers most likely to act on community-level data, and to make the commercial case for paying for it.