Enriching rightsholder engagement:
Gurdeep Mall

19 November 2025

The twentyfifty team work with global companies to deliver on their commitments to respect human rights.

In this edition of ‘Meet the Impact Makers’, we sit down with Senior Consultant Gurdeep Mall, who joined twentyfifty in 2022.

Gurdeep talks about his legal roots, how to build trust with rightsholders (a person or group whose human rights are or may be affected by a company’s activities or its value chain), and what sustainability teams can do to drive impact.

Tell us about your career to date. What brought you to twentyfifty?

My background is in law. I knew that the corporate law firm route wasn't going to be for me, and that I wanted to do something in human rights and social impact. But I didn't know what a career in that looked like.

I moved to Geneva and worked at the International Organization for Migration as a legal researcher. While working on a project around the reintegration of migrants when they go back to their home countries, a very specific point of law around Business and Human Rights came up. I got interested in this area – it felt like something that could be impactful, and that it sat at the nexus of lots of different sectors.

So, I moved to London and worked for the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. I worked first on the Modern Slavery Registry, and then the Labour Rights team where we convened stakeholders like businesses, unions, NGOs and investors to address issues impacting people in supply chains.

I got more interested in working with companies and then explored consulting. That's how I came to twentyfifty.

What does a typical day of work look like for you?

I have two types of days. The first looks like a typical day in the life of a consultant: emails, client calls and ticking off 'to-do list' items

The other half is on the ground following client supply chains right the way down to the farm level, where we're engaging with farmers, farm workers, communities and community stakeholders like teachers, healthcare workers, religious and cultural leaders.

For me, that's where the theory of Business and Human Rights and the UN Guiding Principles really become practice. It's all about having open, encouraging and safe conversations and trying to understand different people's perspectives.

It’s a huge privilege to have those conversations, to understand what the day-to-day looks like for rightsholders in our clients’ supply chains, and then taking their voices, bringing them back to our clients, and making sure that the voices of those rightsholders are represented in the clients’ human rights and sustainability decisions and their strategy.

How do you help rightsholders to open up and share their perspectives?

Our approach at twentyfifty is unique, and we have a few different ways of engaging which are tailored to each situation and the time available.

We have one-on-one interviews: so that would be one researcher, for instance me, or one of our trusted network of In-Country Consultants who bring deep local knowledge and diverse perspectives.

We also conduct focus group discussions. That's where we bring together multiple members of the same rightsholder group. You introduce a theme into the group, and then people almost throw it around like a ball.

This helps us get a rich understanding of what the impacts in the supply chain look like. People are comfortable among their peers and encourage each other to speak up. They enrich and add to the narratives that all of them are sharing. Often the sessions are fun for rightsholders as well. It might be the first time that they've talked about their work in an explicit or overt way, and people really enjoy that.

A third type of engagement, which I really enjoy, is unstructured community exploration where we walk around the community and stop and chat with anyone. I’ve taken this approach on projects in Brazil, Indonesia, India, Italy, Azerbaijan and more. It’s always valuable and we get so many insights and spontaneous interactions.

What advice would you give to Human Rights teams who are looking to make a greater impact?

We often talk about the power of listening to rightsholders – but it’s just as important to apply this internally to other teams within your business.

Sometimes sustainability teams might feel frustrated about their other colleagues and other departments not always agreeing with them. It’s important to listen to these other colleagues, understand what their reservations are and then bring them along on the journey.

Most people want to do the right thing – and so it’s not about convincing them to do the right thing, but more about helping them see the roles that they can play in doing that thing.

What tip would you give to anyone who might be interested in pursuing a career like yours?

There's no single career path into a job like the one that we do. Our colleagues come from so many different types of backgrounds.

But what's becoming increasingly true is that Business and Human Rights is part of everyone's job, whether you start out in procurement, or agronomy, or law – and regardless of what your formal training has been about.

The reality is that we need people in this space that have different insights. We can all listen and learn from each other's perspectives.

Finally, where might we find you when you're not at work?

I want to say something that will make me seem cool. Is ‘travelling’ a bit cliché?

I like travelling – and I like going on long train trips. I like to try to find the longest journeys I can do just by train, and then do them. And I go to railway museums. I'm just going to lean into being geeky.

Thank you for your time, Gurdeep!

Like many of our colleagues, Gurdeep brings great expertise in rightsholder engagement. If your company is looking for guidance, get in touch with us at info@twentyfifty.co.uk.

To learn more about our approach to rightsholder engagement, read Gurdeep's article Meaningful rightsholder engagement: the key to effective human rights due diligence.