Target 5.3: Eliminate child marriage and harmful practices
Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Child, early and forced marriage and FGM are driven by poverty, norms and weak legal enforcement, so this target belongs mostly to governments, communities and civil society. A documented corporate link exists. In Maharashtra's sugarcane fields supplying PepsiCo, cash advances from contractors lead parents to marry off girls as young as 12 so they can work as couples. Debt bondage and coerced hysterectomies occur alongside. In November 2024 BNP Paribas Asset Management and Mercy Investment Services filed a shareholder resolution asking PepsiCo to report on human rights in that supply chain. In February 2025 PepsiCo asked the SEC to exclude it. Purchasing practices of food, beverage and apparel buyers can sustain child marriage, and shareholders have already used the proxy. Owners hold a lever that helps at the margin while governments, communities and civil society carry the outcome.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
1 campaign on record
Report on how well the company's human rights standards are actually working in its sugar supply chain in India, covering forced labor, child labor, the way workers are recruited through cash advances, and the pressure on women cane cutters to undergo hysterectomies.
With BNP Paribas Asset Management, Congregation of St. Joseph, The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust
Result: Filed in November 2024. PepsiCo asked the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to leave it off the ballot, arguing that its Indian sugar operations account for less than five percent of its assets, earnings and sales. On March 17, 2025 the staff said it would not object, and the proposal did not reach a vote at the annual meeting on May 7, 2025.
we found no documented change
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.