In December 2020, an operator for the Jan Sahas helpline answered a call from a man claiming that his brother and six other workers were being held in inhumane conditions and against their will at a construction site in Faribadad. The man reported what his brother had told him- that since arriving, the migrants had received no pay for their work.

The Jan Sahas team responded immediately. They reached out to the local police and District Collector (DC) of Faridabad and an investigation was launched. Quickly after arriving at the site, the inspector was able to confirm the veracity of the claim: the workers had indeed been denied wages; none had even enough money to leave the site. An application to the DC filed on behalf of the migrants resulted in an order for restitution against the employers. They were forced to pay Rs. 1,16,340 (about $1,600 USD) in back wages to the workers they had defrauded and another Rs. 9000 (about $125 USD) to cover their transportation home. The network that Jan Sahas, together with GFEMS, set up to monitor and respond to cases of forced labor had worked. The man who had made that initial call to the helpline was reunited with his brother and the other migrants recovered what they had earned. 

The network that Jan Sahas, together with GFEMS, set up to monitor and respond to cases of forced labor had worked. The man who had made that initial call to the helpline was reunited with his brother and the other migrants recovered what they had earned.

The helpline is an essential component of Jan Sahas’ strategy to reduce forced labor in India’s construction industry, but it is only one part of more comprehensive programming. While providing support to those encountering situations of forced labor, Jan Sahas is committed to changing the systems that create vulnerabilities in the first place. In partnership with GFEMS, Jan Sahas developed programming to assess risk factors for forced labor among India’s migrant workers to better mitigate those risks; to raise awareness and ensure access to government entitlements to help migrants build a stronger safety net; and, in partnership with Pratham and Sambhav Foundation, to train employers on ethical labor practices to create safer and better work experiences. These collective efforts have made a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of migrants and their families. Many thousands more are less likely to experience forced labor or exploitation because of the efforts of Jan Sahas and our partners on the ground. 

India’s construction sector

Nearly 40% of India’s population or 450 million people are internal migrants. (This reality was made clear to the world last year when news outlets broadcast the mass exodus that followed the state-issued lockdown.) India’s construction industry is the country’s second largest employer and attracts a large number of migrant workers each year. Approximately thirty to fifty million of India’s construction workers are internal migrants.

While construction work offers an opportunity to earn additional income, especially during the agricultural off-season, evidence indicates that 10 percent or more of migrant construction workers – potentially five million people- could be in forced labor.  Various factors are contributing to this high rate.

Despite an unprecedented contraction of India’s construction industry in the first half of 2020 in response to COVID-19, the sector has made a strong recovery (despite another recent outbreak), and remains one of the fastest growing construction markets in the world. This, combined with a severe shortage of skilled labor and an abundance of informal recruitment brokers and middlemen eager to fill this labor gap, has significantly enhanced migrant workers’ vulnerability to exploitation.  

Jan Sahas: Promoting safe migration and worker protection

Jan Sahas targeted the 450 kilometer migration corridor stretching from Bundelkhand to Delhi. Of the estimated two million migrants who travel this route annually, early prevalence estimations show a rate of forced labor between 7.5 and 10%.

Building a safety net to reduce forced labor risks

For many migrant workers who live in a perpetual state of transit, it is difficult to access government entitlements. Though many are simply unaware of what benefits they are entitled to, others lack the formal documents needed to access these benefits. To overcome both of these challenges, Jan Sahas implemented programming to raise awareness of social welfare entitlements among migrant workers and to help migrants navigate complex government structures and processes. 

Before pursuing entitlements, Jan Sahas organized a series of awareness-raising community meetings to educate workers on existing benefit schemes and criteria for enrollment.  Despite early skepticism from workers who had participated in surveys before but never received promised benefits, the Jan Sahas team worked to gain worker trust and helped thousands register for entitlements including food rations, pensions, and those offered specifically to construction workers under India’s Building and Other Construction Workers (BOCW). 

Registering for entitlements can be cumbersome. In some localities, workers must present in-person at labor department offices to access benefits, which often means taking off work. BOCW cards require proof of work in the same location for 90 days, a requirement that many migrant workers are unable to meet. Others simply do not have the formal documentation needed for a successful application. 

To help overcome some of these obstacles, Jan Sahas guided migrant workers through the application process, clarifying more technical language and assisting in the preparation or collection of required documents. During the project period, Jan Sahas helped over 27,000 workers and their families access direct cash or cash-equivalent benefits. While follow-up interviews with workers revealed that most would not have known about entitlements or how to access them without Jan Sahas’ intervention, these entitlements provide a safety net for workers, allowing them greater agency to choose when and where they will work. 

Jan Sahas helped over 27,000 workers and their families access direct cash or cash-equivalent benefits. Follow-up interviews with migrant workers revealed that most would not have known about entitlements or how to access them without Jan Sahas’ intervention.

Beyond entitlements, awareness-raising campaigns introduced migrant workers to Jan Sahas’ toll-free helpline. The helpline is an outlet for workers to file grievances, report instances of forced labor or inhumane treatment, seek redress for lost wages, and access legal support services. In an expression of gratitude for the establishment of a helpline, a worker in Delhi reported that he “lost between INR 10,000-15,000 ($134-200 USD) of wage payments before a helpline was operational.” 

Supporting Migrant Workers during COVID-19

When COVID-19 struck in spring 2020 and India entered lockdown, the response from Jan Sahas and other implementing partners was immediate. As the true impact of the pandemic began to show in job losses and rising unemployment, the Indian government increased entitlement allotments and issued new benefits to help mitigate the worst effects. Jan Sahas, with a tracking and communication system already in place, intensified its outreach efforts to ensure migrant workers, a group left even more vulnerable by the pandemic and subsequent shutdowns, could access needed support. A migrant from Faridabad whom Jan Sahas had helped register for government entitlements captured the dire reality for many migrant workers during COVID: “Without ration or cash transfers, we would not have survived the challenges of COVID-19.”

In addition, Jan Sahas was able to utilize the existing programmatic framework to identify and provide food relief to over 1,000 of the most vulnerable migrant households.

Gathering data to assess risk factors and improve programming

Foundational to Jan Sahas’ programming was the development and implementation of a longitudinal migration tracking (LMT) system. This system is designed to capture data on migrant workers to better understand risk factors for forced labor, paying particular attention to whether program interventions decreased the likelihood of exploitation.  

To build a strong evidence base, Jan Sahas conducted extensive outreach at various departure points, including home villages and transit hubs, to register workers. Successfully registering over 89,000 migrant workers, surveyors then followed up at destination sites to assess the effectiveness of program interventions- specifically, access to entitlements and operation of a helpline- on reducing the incidence of forced labor. Follow-up communication with registered workers, combined with worker interviews, revealed that Jan Sahas’ programming was making a difference. Workers who were helped to access social protection benefits reported additional income and savings while those accessing the helpline were able to recover unpaid wages, escape forced labor conditions, and generally, feel safer. Jan Sahas hopes this data will encourage greater investment in similar prevention efforts. When more is known about migrant workers and experiences and what factors increase risks of exploitation, targeted action can be taken to reduce and ultimately eradicate forced labor.

Engaging employers to reduce the risk of forced labor

While Jan Sahas supported migrants to build greater financial security and provided them an outlet to air grievances and pursue justice, other implementing partners focused on developing the capacity of micro-contractors. Micro-contractors are the primary employers of unskilled and semi-skilled construction workers, employing between 5 and 25 persons at a time. Pratham and Sambhav led an effort to train micro-contractors on ethical labor practices to reduce the risk of forced labor among vulnerable migrants. Workers employed by trained micro-contractors expressed a desire to stay on with these employers as they had taken steps to create safe and equitable work environments, including ensuring on-time wage payments, providing safety equipment for risky jobs, and helping meet essential needs such as food and accommodation at destination sites. Women working for trained micro-contractors noted especially the attention these employers paid to eliminating discriminatory gender practices in the workplace. Unlike other employers, program-trained micro-contractors paid women separately from their spouses, ensuring greater female economic agency. 

Building local capacity to effect sustainable change

Jan Sahas’ programming to address forced labor in India’s construction industry has reached tens of thousands of workers. Some have received support to exit forced labor conditions, others have registered successfully for entitlements to reduce risks of exploitation, and still others have filed grievances to recoup lost wages.  Though this program may have formally concluded, Jan Sahas set up people and systems to carry its benefits forward. They successfully trained hundreds of social advocates or “barefoot lawyers” who will continue to share information on labor laws, rights, and entitlements with migrant workers and aid in benefit enrollments. Moreover, Jan Sahas continues to collaborate with key government actors at each stage of program implementation, including India’s Department of Labor, and other stakeholder groups across civil society, philanthropy, and the private sector to sustainably end forced labor.  We are proud to be a part of this collaboration.

Jan Sahas is a community and survivor-centric nonprofit organization committed to ending sexual violence and forced labor. To learn more, please visit Jan Sahas.

This article and the project it references were funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State.

Innovative finance has been put to work for several years across international development. However, anti-slavery efforts still tend to rely on traditional grant finance from donors, whether governments, multilateral institutions, or philanthropic ventures. New funding approaches could help bring much-needed additional finance into preventing trafficking. 

Among other ideas, GFEMS is interested in outcomes-based approaches like Development Impact Bonds, which aim to use donor finance as efficiently as possible. Instead of tying traditional grant finance to inputs or activities, which may not always link to long-term change, money is tied to the achievement of tangible, long-term outcomes for beneficiaries. And instead of spending time on donor reporting, NGOs can concentrate on solving problems.

Why innovative finance?

Across the global social sector, innovative finance approaches have become relatively mainstream over the past few years. The international development community has recognized that the gap between the donor finance available and the funding needed to achieve the UN’s SDGs is enormous: between $1.4T and $3T per year. This suggests that private finance, including the global capital markets, needs to be harnessed in order to close this gulf, and that existing donor funds must be used more efficiently. For instance, impact investing, which focuses on achieving social or environmental impact as well as financial return, has become a common method of boosting revenue-generating and socially impactful sectors like financial inclusion, health, and energy; green bonds have raised investment for environmental projects; and conditional cash transfers have been used widely to support children’s education and keep them out of work.

However, we still see few of these initiatives in anti-slavery work. Funding in our space remains oriented towards traditional grant finance.While donors have worked hard to achieve impact, anti-slavery and anti-trafficking work is a relatively young part of the global agenda on social issues and human rights, and remains deeply underfunded. Today, even the most generous estimates put the total amount of funding for combatting modern slavery at approximately $700M annually, versus an annual operating budget of almost $10B for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a sector serving a very similar number of beneficiaries. 

Employing innovative new funding mechanisms can mobilize additional capital, money which is badly needed if we are to move the needle towards ending modern slavery for good.

How can innovative finance mobilize resources to propel anti-slavery efforts?  There are two primary ways that innovative finance can make a difference: 

• Innovative finance can be used to bring new forms of private capital into the anti-slavery space. For instance, blending grant finance with private investment, or providing guarantees, can reduce risk for private investors and allow capital to flow into frontier markets or otherwise risky industries. Equally, supporting private firms with grants for research and development (R&D) can help them to become investment-ready. An example might involve the offer of a guarantee or an R&D fund to incentivize private investment in a financially risky new social enterprise which works to end modern slavery, like a responsible recruiter or a worker voice technology tool. 
• Innovative finance can also be used to make more efficient use of existing grant funding. Proving value for money and enhancing impact is a crucial way of incentivizing donors to invest in a particular project or sector. Approaches which seek to maximize efficiency include conditional cash transfers, challenge funds, and outcomes-based finance, among others. Over the past year, GFEMS has been exploring the relevance of outcomes-based finance for modern slavery.

Case Study: Outcomes Based Finance

Traditional grant finance, which is common in anti-slavery work, may not always be the most effective or efficient way to achieve long-term, systemic change for our beneficiaries: survivors of modern slavery. Traditional grant finance has historically tended to focus on defining program inputs; measuring success in outputs that are easy to count; and closely managing grants. However, this approach fails to align funding with long-term outcomes for beneficiaries. For instance:

• In the water and sanitation sector, donors may find it preferable to focus on developing infrastructure, such as water pumps and latrines, rather than measuring whether or not beneficiaries have the safe, sustainable water sources that they need. To have sustainable water sources, beneficiaries need regular operations and maintenance of their water points. This, however, may be harder to plan for and measure than how many latrines or water pumps are installed. 

• In education, it is common to measure success through assessing rates of school attendance or elements of the classroom environment. However, this may not reflect whether students are learning or the quality of education. To provide the best educational environment, students need good teachers, the right learning materials, and attention paid to unique needs- a complex and difficult-to-measure set of factors.In modern slavery, it is often simplest to measure the number of participants or people engaged in a particular program, such as a reintegration program providing skills training, or a behavior change communication program to educate people about risky migration. However, program participation does not guarantee results. What we need to measure is whether skills-training participants can support themselves in reintegration, or whether behavior change communication results in reduced risk of modern slavery.
• In modern slavery, it is often simplest to measure the number of participants or people engaged in a particular program, such as a reintegration program providing skills training, or a behavior change communication program to educate people about risky migration. However, program participation does not guarantee results. What we need to measure is whether skills-training participants can support themselves in reintegration, or whether behavior change communication results in reduced risk of modern slavery.

Much of the traditional grant finance approach has been driven by an understandable aversion to risk when spending public money. However, traditional grant finance isn’t risk-free: prioritizing inputs over outcomes is unlikely to ensure value for money in public spending. It can create heavy administrative burdens for grantees and typically doesn’t incentivize innovation in service delivery. Traditional grant finance tends to reward NGOs which are best able to meet reporting requirements, rather than those with the strongest track record or best potential to achieve outcomes. 

Outcomes-based finance, on the other hand, involves donors paying for long-term outcomes, rather than inputs or outputs. When donors can find a way to prioritize long term outcomes, they can make sure their money is being spent on exactly what’s intended: the achievement of long-term impact in the lives of beneficiaries.

When donors can find a way to prioritize long term outcomes, they can make sure their money is being spent on exactly what’s intended: the achievement of long-term impact in the lives of beneficiaries.

Importantly, funding in this way allows service providers to focus solely on achieving outcomes, rather than sticking to the inputs and activities which are specified in a donor’s logframe. They can be flexible, adaptive, and data-informed in their implementation. Instead of spending time on donor reporting, they can concentrate on solving problems.

Two questions naturally arise from this idea: first, how does the donor know if outcomes have been achieved or not? Donors typically employ independent third-party evaluators, who are used to running Randomized Control Trials and similar evaluation exercises which rely on objectivity and accuracy. In the examples above, this might involve measuring the educational attainments of a group of children, perhaps through testing readiness for the next grade; or running surveys to analyse whether families have been able to access the amount of safe water that they need. Donors then only pay out if the evaluator assures them that the program has been successful. 

Second, who funds the program up front? Is the service provider expected to fund it themselves, and take the risk that they won’t be successful? This may be possible, depending on the size and financial security of the service provider. But in most cases, a social investor – an organization with a joint social and financial mandate- gets involved to provide working capital to the program. If the program is successful, the investor is repaid by the donor, plus a below-market return. One of the first and most successful examples of this approach in international development was used to fund the Educate Girls Development Impact Bond in India, which sought to keep girls in school and improve their learning. The investor in this case, UBS Optimus Foundation, received an internal rate of return of 15%, to compensate them for the risk they took in funding the project up-front.

Among other innovative finance approaches, GFEMS is interested in piloting outcomes-based finance in the modern slavery space for the first time. We believe it may be particularly effective to explore skilling models for survivors, since long-term outcomes in skilling are relatively straightforward to measure: these could include job starts, sustainment, progression, or satisfaction, and could be paired with measurement of mental health outcomes to ensure a holistic consideration of reintegration. We are also interested in trialing outcomes-based finance to prevent child labor or child marriage, given the success of outcomes-based finance programs in education, as seen in India’s Educate Girls.

We are looking to test and understand whether this innovative new funding model really can help grant finance work harder: can it better serve program beneficiaries and move us closer to ending modern slavery? We think it can. 

If you are interested in learning more or contributing to our thinking, please contact olivia@gfems.org.

For migrant workers across the globe, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and nation-wide lockdowns have taken a heavy toll. Confronting job losses, reduced work hours and salaries, and a rise in deportations, migrant workers are also coping with the mental effects of a pandemic that has left them isolated in a foreign place and uncertain of their future and that of their families. Coming out of the pandemic, people the world over are starting to ask how we can do things differently. How can we build back better to ensure safety and security for migrant workers? SafeStep is one answer. 

SafeStep is a digital tool to promote safe migration. Collaboratively developed by our partners ELEVATE, Diginex Solutions, and Winrock International, SafeStep recently launched in Bangladesh in a virtual event attended by government officials, and representatives from key stakeholder groups including international development organisations and national NGOS, recruitment agencies, and migrant rights groups. Former Secretary General of the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA), Shamim Ahmed Chowdhury Noman, expressed the need for embassies and destination countries to adopt the app, citing “digitalisation in the entire migration sector” as the key to ending migrant exploitation. Barrister Shamim Haider Patwary, MP, called the app a “real milestone in the migration sector...a modern approach and landmark in the migration justice system.” 

Installed on any digital device, the SafeStep application allows migrants to input and upload relevant migration data and provides important information and guidance for safe migration. While simplifying a complex migration process, SafeStep empowers migrant workers with knowledge and resources to make informed decisions and ultimately to take greater control over their migration journeys.

Risky Migration: Bangladesh to the Gulf

Bangladesh has one of the largest emigrant populations in the world. Nearly 8 million of its 160 million residents live abroad; more than half – or approximately 4.2 million– of these emigrants work in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. These migrant workers contribute significantly to Bangladesh’s economy. In 2019, remittances totaled U.S. $18.3 billion or 6% of the country’s GDP, 73% of which came from the GCC countries. For many Bangladeshi families, remittances are the primary source of household income. 

Most Bangladeshi migrant workers are unskilled and from impoverished regions. They leave their homes to earn more money abroad and secure a better future for themselves and the families they leave behind.  However, migration offers no financial guarantees. What is certain is that migration is a decision that carries heavy risk.

One of the greatest threats to safe migration in Bangladesh is the dalal- an unlicensed recruitment agent or broker who charges migrants exploitative and unlawful fees to facilitate overseas migration.  Without a better understanding of the migration process, migrants pay these recruiters to arrange job placements and contracts and manage the logistics of migrating abroad. Dalals may make grand promises but migrants often find that jobs do not match the recruiter’s description or, in some cases, that a job doesn’t exist at all. 

SafeStep is intended to reduce migrants’ reliance on dalals and empower migrants to make their own decisions. With a better understanding of the end-to-end migration process and tools to make this process easier, migrants are less vulnerable to exploitation and better prepared for work and life overseas.

SafeStep’s Features:

Users can first select their preferred language; the application is available in both English and Bengali with a third language option, Arabic, currently in development. Users then have access to five primary features:

1. Profile: The profile feature allows migrants to input relevant information on previous work experience and professional skills. Developers seek to improve this feature by including data on which jobs and skills are in highest demand in destination countries and mean salaries for various positions. This add-on will guide migrants to make better-informed decisions. 
2. Migration Checklist: While sixty percent of Bangladeshi migrant workers do not migrate with employment contracts in place, this feature enables users to track, collect, and manage important documents and files in a centralized location, or what the app refers to as a user’s digital library. In the absence of a more formal contract, migrants are encouraged to record and upload audio or visual files that capture what has been promised and what has already been paid. In building this digital evidence trail, users are also able to upload identity documents for safe-keeping and verification.
3. Budget Calculator: This feature creates awareness of the true costs of migration to help migrants decide whether or not to go. Users are prompted to input financial data- i.e. loans and fees, salary expectations, planned remittances- to calculate whether migration makes financial sense. Data to support this calculation is crowd-sourced, meaning it is collected in real-time to provide migrants the most current and accurate information.
4. E-Learning: Migrants can access a series of custom videos, available in both English and Bengali, to learn more about what to expect during the migration process and how to prepare for that journey. Recent uploads target migrant workers in the hospitality sector and the domestic service industry where women make up 80% of the workforce.
5. Help: Safestep’s Help Center is powered by artificial intelligence. While a chatbot delivers real-time responses, its functionality improves with each question asked. The Help feature includes information on emergency services and directs users to a live operator in instances of urgent need. 

An Application for Migrants, By Migrants

To be useful, a digital tool must be accessible. To be useful to migrant workers in Bangladesh, SafeStep had to be written in Bengali. But other country-specific, user-specific factors had to be considered if migrants were really to benefit from the app.

Android has the largest mobile operating market share in Bangladesh. Thus, developers built the app on the Android operating system to optimize the user experience for Bangladeshi migrant workers- SafeStep’s intended user base. Less obvious considerations became apparent during the early scoping and development phases. On the ground in Bangladesh, for example, the SafeStep team learned that many migrant workers lacked reliable access to charging stations, or sometimes electricity, for their mobile devices.  At pre-departure or training sites in particular, it is common that a single outlet serves dozens of migrant workers. To address this challenge, developers configured SafeStep to operate fully in a night mode setting, helping users conserve battery life while still being able to access critical resources.

Even with significant progress made on SafeStep’s development, the ELEVATE team and its partner organizations continued to solicit input and recommendations from migrant workers to make it work better for them. It was from worker feedback and that of other stakeholders that the budget calculator – perhaps the most useful feature for migrant workers- came to be included in the application. If the goal of migration is to earn more money, then being able to calculate the “true” cost of migration empowers migrants to make more informed migration decisions. 

Technology’s Potential to Democratize Migration

Migrant workers are easily exploited because they often lack access to information. With a determination to migrate but without a true understanding of how to do it safely, migrants turn to dalals and other sources of misinformation to navigate them through the process. Though internet usage in Bangladesh is low (below 50%), mobile remains the primary means of internet access. Efforts to increase both internet usage and digital literacy have expanded in recent years. According to a 2020 GSMA study, smartphone penetration rates will reach 69% by 2025 (compared to a current rate of 41%.) As the country moves towards greater digital capability, digital tools such as SafeStep have the potential to democratize access to information, thereby wresting power from those who seek to exploit migrant workers and installing it with migrants themselves.  

Despite its democratizing potential, SafeStep has thus far attracted many more men than women. While this can be partially attributed to the fact that fewer women migrate to the GCC countries than men, it is also reflective of the broader digital gender divide. In Bangladesh, the gender gap in internet usage is 55.6%, meaning men are 55 times as likely to use the internet than women. Before the pandemic, women in low- and middle-income countries were already 8% less likely than men to own mobile phones- a statistic that has only widened as women and girls continue to be disproportionately affected by COVID disruptions to education and economy.  In Bangladesh, many women, especially women in rural areas, can access the internet only through shared connections, meaning they have less control over when they can connect and for how long. 

The SafeStep consortium is advocating for solutions that facilitate greater access of women and girls to mobile internet and disrupt gender stereotypes that keep Bangladeshi women out of public spaces such as digital centers. They continue to research how they might get the app to more female migrants and eventually achieve true gender representation in the SafeStep user-base. Technology, like that deployed in SafeStep, has the power to change broken migration systems but its ultimate success is tied to uprooting other systems of inequality.

At a recent launch event, a Winrock official reiterated that the current application is not the final version and that more features are being added. Additional functionalities and features will target recruiters and employers in GCC countries. The goal is to make migration safer for workers from beginning to end. While thousands of Bangladeshi migrant workers have already downloaded and are using the SafeStep app, other stakeholders are recognizing its potential to change harmful migration trends. Implementers of the “Strengthened and Informative Migration Systems (SIMS)” project, an initiative funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) supporting Bangladeshi migrant workers to make informed migration decisions, is incorporating SafeStep’s budget calculator in its trainings. Winrock expects that this initiative will reach 100,000 potential migrants. Empowering migrant workers with information and sharing what works with others in the field is how we create safer migration pathways. It is how we protect migrant workers and reduce vulnerabilities to exploitation. It is how we change systems that perpetuate modern slavery.

Trauma-informed care is crucial to the empowerment of survivors. It ensures survivors are not re-traumatized during legal proceedings or while receiving recovery services; provides self-ownership over their own recovery; and helps them to lead safe and empowered futures. Yet, it is frequently not implemented by governments, law enforcement, judiciary, or care providers, who are frequently survivors’ first point of contact in the recovery process. GFEMS prioritizes trauma-informed care curriculum development and implementation to ensure that survivors have the tools and care they need for long term recovery and success.

In Maharashtra, India, GFEMS has partnered with International Justice Mission (IJM) to strengthen trauma-informed care in the state’s child welfare system. Child Welfare Committees (CWCs) are quasi-judicial bodies that support children in need of care and protection, including trafficking victims. IJM has trained all CWC members in Maharashtra on safe placement and case management, ensuring that stakeholders directly responsible for survivor rehabilitative care are equipped to make the best decisions in the interest of the child and operate as efficiently and responsibly as possible. To further build on this training, IJM has instituted a state-wide mentorship program with care experts, who have provided CWC members with guidance on over 260 cases. Facilitating regular case management roundtables, the project includes collaborative problem solving and case discussions for CWC members, ensuring that survivors receive comprehensive rehabilitation and support. The project has also made a series of infrastructure upgrades to selected CWCs, developing models for child-friendly spaces in the state.

By building the capacity of state institutions, including the CWCs, to deliver effective survivor care, the program is a blueprint for the provision of trauma-informed restoration that is replicable across other states in India and beyond. These types of care practices are needed globally to eliminate modern slavery and human trafficking for good.

This article and the project it references were funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State.

GFEMS provides seed funding for ethical businesses to grow their market share, shifting demand away from exploitative recruitment to more ethical practices. Working with Seefar, we have created TERA (The Ethical Recruitment Agency), India’s first ethical recruitment agency.

TERA aims to reduce forced labor by pioneering research, making a business case on profitability of ethical recruitment, and piloting an ethical recruitment agency. Based in in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India, the pilot agency offers exploitation-free work opportunities to vulnerable communities. To date, Seefar has signed contracts with several large employers, published a guide for profitable ethical recruitment, and stress tested pre-departure trainings and worker welfare protocols.

Seefar is identifying large gaps in existing research including lack of:

• A consensus on the definition and theory of ethical recruitment
• Quantifiable impact
• Understanding around unintended consequence.

Seefar’s research focuses on the effectiveness of ethical recruitment in reducing forced labor and the economic, social, physical, and mental effects of ethical recruitment on workers and their families. Preliminary findings from key informant interviews and case studies show overwhelming positive effects on workers and their families in the following dimensions: economic, social, physical and mental health, and human rights. Specifically, there is a direct relationship between lower recruitment fees, lower debt, and higher remittances to families and communities. Ethical recruitment can help migrant workers achieve upward social mobility in the long term and enhance their social status in their communities. Better customer service offered by ethical recruitment is a reliever of stress and concern at the individual and family levels. It also has important implications on mortality and morbidity of migrant workers abroad. Finally, ethical recruitment enhances knowledge of workers’ rights and safeguards those rights during, and often after, recruitment.

Seefar will continue The Ethical Recruitment Agency and accompanying research and offer evidence based and practical research to donors, governments, commercial actors and civil society members.

This project, and others in our portfolio like it, are working to show that ethical recruitment practices are better for everyone, including recruiters themselves. This shifts market demand for ethical recruitment agencies and ensures the long-term sustainability of ethical recruitment solutions.

Global supply chains are a major perpetrator of modern slavery. With over 16 million victims in the private sector, business involvement is key to sustainable, systems change that eliminates forced labor. In the apparel sector, a lack of transparency between buyers, suppliers, and manufacturers is what often allows modern slavery to go unnoticed.

International apparel brands, particularly those in the ready-made garment (RMG) or “fast fashion” sector, monitor their legally registered Tier 1 suppliers in India. Due to the low pricing and quick turnaround production pressures of the industry, Tier 1 suppliers often sub-contract to unauthorized and unregistered factories that are hidden from brands in order to meet demand. This creates a lack of transparency between buyers (brands) and suppliers, leading to poor monitoring of deeper supply chain operations and allowing forced and child labor to thrive.

To enhance monitoring and make supply chains more visible to buyers, GFEMS and ELEVATE, a business risk and sustainability solutions provider, are creating innovative apparel brand monitoring and remediation systems in India.

ELEVATE has built and tested a predictive analytics tool to detect risks of unauthorized sub-contracting and forced labor practices. The tool uses institutional knowledge, third-party data supply chain data, and new procurement audit data to identify which Tier 1 suppliers are at high risk of using unauthorized contracting to meet their production orders.  Along with identifying high-risk suppliers, ELEVATE has also developed remediation processes for brands, Tier 1 suppliers, and informal/unauthorized factories to collaborate to improve labor practices, ensuring that factories are incentivized to participate and remain transparent.

Despite a slowdown in the apparel industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, ELEVATE has already generated significant brand interest in hosting social compliance audits. To date, the project has:

• Established partnerships with four key global brands
• Completed 22 on-site assessments
• Generated 13 supplier reports on risk of unauthorized sub-contracting.

Five monitored suppliers have indicated varying levels of extreme to medium risk of unauthorized sub-contracting. Two of those suppliers have agreed to deliver a remediation plan, including onsite capacity building with suppliers.

By offering both modern slavery risk identification and effective remediation plans for suppliers who are at risk, the tools developed in this project both allows buyers to make smarter decisions about their suppliers, and provides suppliers with plans to improve their practices and continue operating. Both are essential for generating and maintaining systems level change that eliminates forced labor from supply chains.

This project was funded through a grant made by the U.K Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO). Any opinions in this article do not reflect the opinions of FCDO.

Ethical business means better business. This is the message that our partner, Fair Employment Foundation (FEF), continues to share with businesses and recruiting agencies across the globe. 

Founded on the belief that “forced labor is a solvable world problem,” FEF works to fix broken recruitment systems and build market solutions to end the forced labor of migrant workers.  FEF is pushing back against agencies and training centers that focus more on the business of migration than the migrants themselves. With an eye on profits, recruiters are often incentivized to place those who are willing to pay rather than those who are best fitted for a job. They are also less invested in making sure migrants are prepared for work abroad –if a worker quits or gets fired, the agency can simply charge another worker the same fee. In other words, it is on the backs of migrant workers that recruitment agencies and training institutes succeed.

To begin to transform a recruitment system that harms both workers and employers, FEF established its own placement agency in Hong Kong in 2014. Two years later, the Fair Training Center opened its doors in Manila, Philippines.  In becoming both placement agency and trainer, FEF is transforming industry standards and driving change to end forced labor. 

Forced Labor in the Domestic Service Industry

While one in eight Hong Kong households currently employs a migrant domestic worker, this number is only expected to grow as the country learns to cope with a rapidly aging population. The Filipino government estimates that one in four of the 11.5 million migrant domestic workers in the world are Filipina women; Hong Kong alone is home to 200,000 Filipina domestic workers. Despite laws governing the sector, the domestic service industry has the largest share of forced labor in the private economy, accounting for nearly 25% of cases. Debt bondage – often the result of exploitative fees — is one of the most prevalent forms of forced labor.  Domestic workers are especially vulnerable to abuse as they are employed in private households, their labor unseen and therefore unregulated. 80% of domestic workers are women.

Given the high prevalence of Filipinas in the domestic service industry and the high rate of exploitation in this sector, we partnered with FEF to scale its ethical recruitment model. From our shared commitment to systems change, we are working to build sustainable and scalable solutions that address the problem at each stage of the recruitment process, from pre-departure to placement and beyond. 

Training for Work AND Life Overseas

The Filipino government currently mandates that migrant workers obtain a certificate affirming skill level from the country’s Technical Authority (Technical Education And Skills Development Authority or TESDA) before departing. Though training is not required, most migrants choose to participate to prepare both for the skills assessment and for life overseas. Training is rigorous, requiring participants in TESDA- accredited domestic service programs to complete at least 218 credit hours and master a set of “core competencies” that includes cleaning rooms, washing and ironing clothes, and preparing hot and cold meals. (In collaboration with ILO and Fair Training Center, TESDA recently launched a pilot hybrid-learning program that shortens the training period for the Domestic Work certificate to 12 days.)  However, despite intensive skills training, many migrant domestic workers struggle with the experience of living and working abroad. Between 30 and 40% of first-time Philippine domestic worker placements overseas are terminated or break their employment contract in just the first few months. Without a job, migrant workers become even more vulnerable, pressured to quickly find another job or leave the country. 

In addition, training costs money– a lot of money. Excessive fees force many migrants into debt before they are ever introduced to a recruitment agency. OneTESDA-accredited training school for domestic workers going abroad, charges $368 in tuition and another $10 for the test. The average monthly income in the Philippines is about $290. Though migrants pay these fees for the chance to work abroad and earn higher wages, debt is not something that is easily overcome, especially for migrant workers. Separated from home and community, migrants often struggle under the weight of perpetual debt, a struggle that puts them at greater risk of exploitation. 

As part of its mission to ensure safer migration for overseas domestic workers, FEF opened Fair Training Center in Manila in late 2016. Built from the same commitment to ethical recruitment, the Center provides a more comprehensive curriculum for overseas workers, one that takes into account employer expectations and local or country-specific conditions. While training helps overseas workers hone technical skills such as cooking and cleaning, it also supports development of soft skills such as communication and professionalism. Migrants are educated on their rights and receive training and advice, not only on how to cope with the challenges of living overseas, but on how to thrive as migrant workers in a foreign country. From the 30%-40% termination rate, Fair Training Center boasts dramatically reduced rates of early termination. Less than 10% of overseas domestic workers trained at the center are terminated or break their contracts in the first three months of employment. The UN’s International Labor Organization refers to FEF’s program as “the gold standard for pre-migration training.”

Ethical Recruitment: An End-to-End Solution

While the Fair Training Center helps migrants avoid training fees and provides more comprehensive training, it is only one piece of FEF’s ethical recruitment model. Migrant workers confront the threat of exploitation at nearly every step in the migration process. It may begin at the point of training, but it lingers throughout the process of recruitment and placement as agencies in both the Philippines and Hong Kong exploit migrant workers by charging exorbitant fees. 

To address the issue at the site of origin, FEF partnered with Staffhouse, one of the largest recruitment agencies in the Philippines and one similarly committed to ethical recruitment and zero-fee charging. As Staffhouse has ranked as the Top Deploying Agency for skilled workers by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) for three consecutive years, FEF is confident this new partnership will be transformational for the entire industry in the Philippines. 

At the destination site, FEF already operates Fair Employment Agency (FEA), an ethical placement agency. With an emphasis on full transparency and matching the right employee with the right employer, FEA has built a reputation as one of the region’s most trustworthy recruiting sources. In 2020, FEA placed its 4000^th domestic worker, helping these migrant workers collectively avoid an estimated US $7.5 million in recruitment debt. 

With GFEMS support, FEF was able to scale up its recruitment services. Additional investments in staff and resources needed to interview and place workers, process visas, engage with employers, and monitor placements enabled FEA to safely place hundreds more migrant workers. By 2021, FEA achieved its 5000^th placement. Half of these placements have been Filipino domestic workers. None have been charged a fee.  

Every year, millions of workers leave their homes for better opportunities abroad. However, the circumstances that push migrant workers out are often the ones that make them most susceptible to exploitation and abuse: poverty, low wages, low-skill, and general lack of economic opportunity. Our investment in FEF and its ethical recruitment model has helped thousands of Filipino workers forge successful migration paths. It is a model that is replicable and scalable (see sidebar) and one that has the potential, not only to disrupt business-as-usual practices that harm migrant workers, but to really begin to change systems that enable modern slavery.

To learn more about FEF, please visit https://www.fairgroup.org/. 

Programs referenced in this article are funded by a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author[s] and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.

Ethical recruitment is a high priority for GFEMS, as it is for many other organizations fighting modern slavery. Ethical recruitment is a solution that offers great promise to ensure that labor migration leads to successful outcomes, and not to exploitation.

One in four victims of forced labor is an international migrant — nearly six million people. The vast, complex system of overseas labor recruitment is a key driver of outcomes for labor migrants. Transforming these systems requires a holistic approach, of which we believe ethical recruitment can be a cornerstone.

Within ethical recruitment, we take multiple approaches that we see as complementary. We engage at the policy level, as our partners International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Blas F. Ople Policy Center are doing in the Philippines and International Labor Organization (ILO) in Vietnam. We engage at the industry level, as IOM and Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) have done in multiple geographies with us. We even engage at the individual and community level, to change perceptions and behaviors related to ethical recruitment, which our partner ASK India is doing in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, for example. And we lead with evidence from start to finish, conducting prevalence estimation, worker voice studies, and synthesizing our learnings across academia, private industry, non-governmental organizations, and the public sector. 

One approach the field needs to see more of is ethical recruitment startups, be they startup agencies or other relevant businesses. Social enterprises like these have tremendous potential for impact. They may not offer the same breadth as industry-wide engagement, but they offer direct, deep impact as well as second- and third-order effects that can drive industry-wide change (e.g., driving up market prices for employers, which leads to lower worker turnover). But to realize their potential, we need more social entrepreneurs to pursue these models, and we need more funding that is the right fit for them.

An ethical recruitment startup can be many things. It can be a recruitment agency. Running a recruitment agency may sound unglamorous to some aspiring social entrepreneurs, but it offers direct, tangible impact and simpler models that may appeal to entrepreneurs whose strength is in management and execution. They also often have low startup costs and low barriers to self-sufficiency.

GFEMS has already had some success with the startup approach. Fair Employment Foundation (FEF) and Seefar’s TERA are great examples of ethical recruitment agency startups. They demonstrate that an ethical recruiter can be an excellent business. It is hard to even call FEF a startup anymore, now that they have one of the leading agencies in Hong Kong and have influenced the entire market. Other pioneers and precedents are cause for optimism, too. Staffhouse, an ethical recruiter since before it was a named phenomenon, is the largest agency in the Philippines. Pinkcollar, a startup in Malaysia, was profitable less than a year after launching.

Recruitment agencies are not the only path, though. Recruitment platforms, enterprise software, migrant worker engagement tools, and other non-tech service solutions all have the potential for profitable, impactful business models that give ethical recruitment a leg up on the unethical competition. These startups will appeal more to the entrepreneurs out there who are looking for novel models or who want to apply tech skills. For example, GFEMS partner Diginex Solutions (another example of an organization that has perhaps graduated beyond the startup nomer) is developing a range of digital tools that improve the cost-effectiveness of ethical recruitment, and similar thinking could inspire other products capable of supporting a social enterprise. Sama, a migrant recruitment platform, raised over a million dollars in 2020 and has the potential to reach a scale that dwarfs even the largest of agencies.

The concepts have been proven. The precedents to believe in these approaches exist. What we need now is more. We need more social entrepreneurs entering this space. We need ethical agencies in every country of origin and destination, forming a global network of end-to-end ethical recruitment. We need an ecosystem of non-agency players who are equipping the agencies, if not offering fundamentally different models.

Equally important, we need more funders fueling these social entrepreneurs. Prevailing modes of funding are not designed for these types of ventures.

Commercially driven investors, including impact investors, are looking for the hockey-stick growth trajectory and exit timelines that do not fit the financial life cycle of an ethical recruitment agency, despite otherwise attractive economics. That could change if any of the current pioneers have breakthroughs that ignite investor attention, but we cannot wait for breakthroughs. We have to make them happen.

More frustrating, ethical recruitment startups are too unconventional or too business-like for many grant-based funding mechanisms. They are generally set up to be run like businesses, not like typical NGOs. Grant-based funders need to overcome technical hangups, like trying to fit continuous business processes into project-based intervention frameworks, and recognize the potential for large-scale, sustainable, and deep impact at a low cost. Even foundations of modest means could kickstart an ethical recruitment agency that has immediate benefits for workers and long-term impact on a larger scale.

Worth noting is that FEF, with the support of some forward-looking supporters, has launched what could be an elegant impact-investing solution that combines equity and debt to better match the needs of investors and ethical recruitment agency startups. Put this initiative in the ‘one to watch’ category (or the ‘one to support now’ category if you are a funder).

The bottom line, though, is that the anti-modern slavery field should be motivating more social entrepreneurs to pursue ethical recruitment ventures and should be supporting them with appropriate financing to be successful. They won’t necessarily all be successful. And they won’t necessarily be enough to solve all the problems of labor migration. But they offer enormous potential impact that the field has under-explored for far too long.

GFEMS looks forward to providing updates on this project and sharing our learnings with the anti-trafficking community. For updates on this project and others like it, subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

GFEMS recently funded a prevalence study in Karamoja, Uganda to determine the proportion of children in households (age 12-17) who have been sexually exploited for commercial gain. Although analysis is on-going, the data indicate that the prevalence of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in Karamoja is gender agnostic. In other words, there is no statistically significant difference between the proportion of boys and girls that have experienced sexual exploitation. This runs counter to conventional thinking in the field of modern slavery (as well as a large body of evidence) that girls are more often victims of CSEC than boys (though researchers acknowledge that less is known about the scope and nature of CSEC among boys). 

So why are boys in Karamoja more vulnerable to CSEC? Why do findings in Karamoja seem to contradict those of other studies? 

The scope and nature of modern slavery varies greatly by geography and socio-economic context, so one simple answer could be that the region is an outlier. Another consideration is that this is the first study of CSEC in Uganda to use probabilistic sampling. Previous studies  have used convenience sampling, meaning that results are not representative of the population. Another possible cause (and the focus of this blog) could be the study’s use of Audio Computer-Assisted Self-Interviewing (ACASI). This interviewing tool is new to the field of modern slavery prevalence estimation and may address some long-standing challenges related to response accuracy.

While prevalence estimations are critical to understanding the scale and scope of modern slavery, ensuring their accuracy is inherently difficult. Prevalence estimates are derived from large-scale surveys in which social desirability bias (respondents’ conscious and unconscious desire to answer in a socially desirable way) presents a significant challenge. Respondents are asked about their involvement in what are considered culturally taboo and often illegal activities. In the case of this study, we are asking children from conservative, rural communities about sexual acts. The survey inquires on the exchange of sex for money, third party facilitation of sex acts, and sexual violence; concepts which are generally considered inappropriate to discuss with adults, even more so unknown survey enumerators.  

While there are no perfect solutions that ensure response accuracy to sensitive questions, ACASI offers an alternative approach to traditional face-to-face interviews (FFI), enabling respondents to share information independently and without having to directly engage with an interviewer. This additional degree of response confidentiality helps to reduce social desirability bias and can ultimately produce better estimates

Audio Computer-Assisted Self-Interviewing (ACASI): How It Works 

The most sensitive questions of the prevalence survey were grouped into a tablet-based, self-administered ACASI module. When the interviewer reaches this module, a tablet and a pair of headphones are given to the child respondent. The interviewer explains how the module will work and that the answers are completely confidential. Following this explanation, the tablet-based software guides the child through an interactive training. The training shows the prompts and images that will be used and explains how to proceed through the module (2).  The child must provide responses that show comprehension before proceeding to the module.

Once the module begins, the child hears an audio recording of each question. Potential answers are associated with neutral images on the screen and the child is instructed to select the image that corresponds with his or her answer. The child then clicks on an icon to proceed to the next question (3). 

Once the child is finished with the module, he or she hands the headphones and the tablet back to the interviewer, and they continue with the rest of the questionnaire. The interviewer will not be able to access a child’s answers after they are recorded.

ACASI is adapted from the public health field where it’s widely used to gather data on sensitive topics like drug use and sexual risk behavior (4). Several studies indicate that ACASI can serve to reduce social desirability bias in survey responses. For example, a study of injecting drug users (IDU) in Sydney, Australia asked respondents a series of 5 questions relating to injecting and sexual behavior that could induce social desirability bias. These questions were first administered via FFI, then readministered to the same respondents within a week using ACASI. Researchers then measured the extent of discordance (i.e. difference) between the two response sets. The study found that FFI yielded what could be considered more socially desirable responses than ACASI. This includes a statistically significant higher mean age of first injection, a lower prevalence of recent syringe sharing, and a longer duration since the last occurrence of unprotected sex (5). Even more telling is that respondents who reported a history of sex work were more likely than other respondents to provide discordant responses on the duration since last occurrence of unprotected sex (42% vs 25% x2= 4.56, p<0.05).

To our knowledge, this prevalence study is the first time ACASI has been applied to the field of modern slavery, and more research is required to determine if it’s effect on social desireability bias will transfer across fields. However, we suspect that the use of ACASI is a contributing factor to our unique findings. CSEC buyers tend to be male, so in a conservative culture (like Karamojong) where homosexuality is not commonly accepted, there is likely a greater reluctance for boys to admit to sexual exploitation than girls. We believe the use of ACASI helped to mitigate this reluctance, leading to more accurate responses. This, in turn, revealed that CSEC in the region is as commonplace for boys as it is for girls. 

Although many challenges remain to ensuring the response accuracy of prevalence studies, ACASI represents a new and promising tool as GFEMS, its research partners, and like-minded organizations continue to expand the boundaries of modern slavery prevalence estimation. We encourage other CSEC and modern slavery researchers to employ ACASI, and if possible, test it experimentally. Doing so can provide us with greater insights into the efficacy of this tool and how to apply it optimally. This, in turn, can ultimately provide us with a more accurate and nuanced understanding of modern slavery and the socio-economic drivers that underpin it.

GFEMS looks forward to continuing to share our learnings with the anti-trafficking community. For updates on this project and others like it, subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

1. This study was conducted by ICF and Makerere University and made possible with funding from the Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (J/TIP) under the Program to End Modern Slavery 2 (PEMS 2).
2. These images and prompts are also presented and explained to the child during the interviewer-administered portion of the survey using showcards to ensure that he or she understands how to proceed through the module.
3. A small-scale pilot test of children aged 12-17 was conducted to assess developmental appropriateness and the ability to train children to use the instrument, and the social workers from Karamoja provided input into the cultural relevance of the shapes and colors.
4. Willis, Gordon B, Alia Al-Tayyib, and Susan Rogers. 2001. “The Use of Touch-Screen ACASI in a High-Risk Population: Implications for Surveys Involving Sensitive Questions.” In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, 6; Falb, K., Tanner, S., Asghar, K. et al. Implementation of Audio-Computer Assisted Self-Interview (ACASI) among adolescent girls in humanitarian settings: feasibility, acceptability, and lessons learned. Confl Health 10, 32 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-016-0098-1; Villarroel, Maria A., Charles F. Turner, Elizabeth Eggleston, Alia Al-Tayyib, Susan M. Rogers, Anthony M. Roman, Philip C. Cooley, and Harper Gordek. 2006. “Same-Gender Sex in the United States Impact of T-Acasi on Prevalence Estimates.” Public Opinion Quarterly 70 (2): 166–96.
5. M. Mofizul Islam , Libby Topp , Katherine M. Conigrave , Ingrid van Beek , Lisa Maher , Ann White, Craig Rodgers & Carolyn A. Day (2012): The reliability of sensitive information provided by injecting drug users in a clinical setting: Clinician-administered versus audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI), AIDS Care: Psychological and Socio-medical Aspects of AIDS/HIV, 24:12, 1496-1503.