Traceability within the leather value chain is a crucial mechanism for ensuring robust socio-environmental safeguards and strengthening accountability and transparency from the farm to the finished product. It enables the verification of sourcing practices, production processes, and compliance with sustainability standards, addressing key concerns related to animal welfare, environmental integrity, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change, while fostering stakeholder trust. Conversely, the absence of effective traceability can undermine these objectives, allowing unsustainable practices to go undetected, weakening due diligence systems, and rendering sustainability commitments unverifiable.

The growing global recognition of the leather industry’s environmental and social impacts has prompted the development of regulatory frameworks to ensure leather is produced, sourced, and traded responsibly. The industry’s ability to meet emerging legislative requirements depends on robust, verifiable traceability and transparent reporting. The Baseline Survey assesses the challenges and barriers that exist in the adoption of traceability technologies amongst the 16 organisations that make up the project cluster for the Leathertrace Bangladesh project. The findings will provide key evidential insights in identifying the challenges and barriers that exist in relation to the adoption of traceability technologies within a Bangladeshi context.