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A new company founded by a unique team of measurement experts, human rights specialists and experienced entrepreneurs. Big Village Data produces the best data on social impact related risks and opportunities for investors and companies.
What we measure, we report. What we promise, we do.
We will always stay independent from companies that we measure.
Numbers are the foundation of our work. Fairness helps us use and interpret those numbers.
We focus on identifying risk that has the potential to significantly impact the stock price of the entities we measure.
“Sam Muller, Marc Eichmann, Juan Carlos Botero, Martijn Scheltema, and Martijn Kind (The Hague, Bogota, and Vienna) – brings together many years of international experience in measuring justice and human rights, advising on business and human rights and standard setting, setting up and running organisations, and strategic engagement.”
Sam Muller holds a law degree and a doctorate from Leiden University and taught there. He worked as legal adviser for the UN in the Middle East and for the Yugoslav Tribunal. He was actively involved in the setting up of the International Criminal Court and set up 3 new NGOs. In 2005 he set up HiiL, a social enterprise that works on justice innovation and with which he drove the development of a new, more data driven, evidence based and innovation focussed way of working, which is now gaining traction. In 2013 he set up the Wildlife Justice Commission and the Justice Leaders foundation. Sam is CEO of HiiL and chair of the supervisory board of WWF The Netherlands and a member of the International Board of WWF. He served as Senior Adviser to the Task Force on Justice and was active within the World Economic Forum on the topics of rule of law and justice, chairing two Global Agenda Councils. Sam is an alumnus of the Future Leaders Programme of the French Foreign Ministry and of the High Performance Leadership Programme of the IMD. In November 2022 he was awarded the Tällberg SNS Global Leadership Award.
Marc Eichmann is a Mechanical Engineer from McGill University and an MBA from the Darden School of Business (University of Virginia) where he received merit based scholarships. After working for Enron in its Government Relations Department, he assessed investments worldwide by presenting them in detail for approval of the board of directors of the company. He then worked in M&A and project funding in Latin America at Metrix Finanzas, as the corporate controller of Telefónica in Colombia and as the President of UNE EPM Telecomunicaciones ( a TELCO group with USD 2.8 billion in revenues). He later accepted a position as president of Urbansa, the fourth largest real estate development company in Colombia. His expertise in capital markets, risk assessment, project development and emerging markets is complemented by his role as a post graduate professor in finance in multiple universities.
Juan Carlos Botero is an advisor to the team and holds a law degree from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), a master in law from Harvard University, and a doctorate from Georgetown University. He has over 20 years of experience developing indicators to measure justice and the rule of law worldwide. He led the development of the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index and was one of the original members of the team that developed the World Bank’s Doing Business project. Dr. Botero’s experience also includes government service as Chief International Legal Counsel at the Colombian Ministry of Commerce; international trade negotiator; head of the Colombian Trade Bureau in the USA; and Judicial Clerk at the Colombian Constitutional Court. He has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Expert Network for over a decade and is a former Vice Chair of one of its global agenda councils. He currently serves as dean of the Law Faculty of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia.
Martijn Kind is a development economist with a MSc. degree in International Development Studies from Wageningen University. He started his career at Oxfam Novib as a Specialist Impact Measurement and Knowledge and evaluated the impact of several programmes and projects. He then worked for HiiL as a Justice Sector Adviser and was heavily involved in the measurement of access to justice, development of the methodology, and the launch of the first version of the justice dashboard. He currently works for the United Nations on a range of issues related to social protection, income inequality, social inclusion and statistics. He was part of the core writing team of the World Social Report 2020 and 2021 editions – one of the flagship publications of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Currently he works on statistics for the Sustainable Development Goals at the UN Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva. His expertise lies in data analysis, sustainable development, statistics and overcoming technical challenges.
Martijn Scheltema holds a law degree and a doctorate from Leiden University and taught there. He has joined the Dutch law firm Pels Rijcken and has been admitted to the Dutch Supreme Court bar. He has been counsel in several landmark human rights cases at the Dutch Supreme Court, such as the Srebrenica and Urgenda cases. He chairs the business human rights practice group of his firm.
He is a professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and active in the business human rights field. He helped set up the Erasmus Research Platform on Sustainable Business and Human Rights. Martijn was one of the founding members of Access, an international organization advertising and facilitating access to remedy through non-judicial mechanisms in the business human rights arena, and is involved in the establishment of an international trust fund to facilitate access to remedy. He is the chair of the dispute resolution mechanism of the Dutch International Responsible Business Agreements in the Textile and Natural Stone sectors and of the German Textilbündniss. Furthermore, he served as a member of the international drafting team of the Hague Rules on Arbitration on Business Human Rights. He also served as chair of the business human rights committee of the International Bar Association.
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