Detecting child and forced labor in today’s global, complex supply chains is a daunting challenge. The complexity, fragmentation and fluidity of most company’s supply chains limit visibility to the raw materials used in their products. Risks of exploitative labor practices, including child and forced labor, increase at the raw material level, such as farming and mining, and are typically excluded from traditional corporate responsible sourcing programs.
The U.S. Department of Labor awarded ELEVATE a $4 million cooperative agreement to enhance tracing of goods made with child, forced labor and other exploitive practices as part of a four-year project. Through this award, ELEVATE is establishing a consortium that includes the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS), Diginex Solutions, RCS Global Group, and the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI). The consortium partners will shape the development and publication of a supply chain and industry agnostic commodity traceability protocol and tracing platform to equip business and other stakeholders with tools to trace their supply chains. This enhanced level of supply chain visibility will support the business sector’s human rights due diligence efforts to source materials that are untainted by child and forced labor, as well as other labor exploitative practices.
The consortium will pilot the tools in two strategic sectors and geographies: cotton in Pakistan and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). These pilot cases were selected because of their geographic and supply chain differences and to test the transferability of existing conflict minerals traceability best practices to agricultural commodities. The methodologies and tools developed during the project will be applicable for a wide range of consumer goods industries, including information technology, apparel, and automotive.
Globally, cobalt and cotton are two of the most in-demand commodities for producing consumer goods, such as batteries and clothing. Evidence of child and forced labor in the sourcing of these commodities is well-documented, yet there is no existing solution that allows brands in multiple industries to detect the use of forced labor in their commodity supply chains. This leaves brands vulnerable to the risk of unidentified child and forced labor in their upstream supply chains.
“Businesses are facing increased pressure to trace their supply chains to the raw material level. However, efforts to date aren’t scalable, limiting corporate efforts to address increased forced and child labor risks existing at the root of their supply chains. Through this award, we intend to create a protocol and platform to make end-to-end supply chain traceability a standard element of any company’s responsible sourcing program and human rights due diligence efforts. Companies can’t address what they cannot see, which is why we want to make the unseen visible,” says Ian Spaulding, Chief Executive Officer of ELEVATE.
The protocol and platform will equip brands and retailers with actionable tools to expand their supply chain visibility to identify and address labor exploitation associated with the materials essential to making the products they sell.
All inquiries regarding this announcement may be addressed to media@gfems.org.
Funding is provided by the United States Department of Labor under cooperative agreement number IL-35808-20-75-K. One hundred percent of the total costs of the project or program is financed with USG federal funds, for a total of $4 million dollars.
About ELEVATE
ELEVATE is the leading business risk and sustainability solutions provider. We deliver improved organizational performance through sustainability and supply chain assessment and auditing, consulting, program management and analytics. We shape the industry with our innovative solutions to complex problems, by designing and implementing customized programs and technology that provide complete insight into risk and improve supply chain and sustainability performance. ELEVATE is headquartered in Hong Kong, and the company’s 650 employees oversee work in over 100 countries through dedicated offices in Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Pakistan, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UK, USA and Vietnam.
About GFEMS
The Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS) is a bold international fund catalyzing a coherent global strategy to end human trafficking by making it economically unprofitable. With leadership from government and the private sector around the world, the Fund is escalating resources, designing public-private partnerships, funding new tools and methods for sustainable solutions, and evaluating effectiveness to better equip our partners to scale and replicate solutions in new geographies.
About Diginex Solutions
Diginex builds purpose-led technology with a focus on responsible business practices. With workers at the core of our solutions to increase transparency, trust and accountability in global supply chains, we work to ensure that technology sits where it can have the greatest impact. Our team of labor rights specialists and software engineers takes a human-centric approach to develop each solution. With a track record of successfully deploying scalable technology across Asia and South Asia, our objective is to promote fair recruitment, safe migration, and decent work.
About RMI
The Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) is an initiative of the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA). The RMI is a multi-industry initiative with more than 400 member companies. Its members contribute to the development and international uptake of a range of tools and resources focused on minerals supply chain due diligence, including independent third-party audit programs for smelters, Minerals Reporting Templates, supply chain risk assessment tools, Country of Origin data, and guidance documents on responsible sourcing of tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold, cobalt, and mica. The RMI runs regular workshops on responsible sourcing issues and contributes to policy development with civil society organizations and governments. For more information, visit ResponsibleMineralsInitiative.org
About RCS Global Group
RCS Global Group is a global leader in the assessment and assurance of responsible sourcing of natural resources and the associated production, trade and transformation processes. With teams working from offices around the world, RCS Global Group also creates positive impact by providing companies with the strategy advice and tools to act responsibly and sustainably. This includes enabling companies to measure, demonstrate and report on their own – and their suppliers’ – positive impact and continuous improvement over time. For further information, please visit: www.rcsglobal.com.
The Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS), in collaboration with the International Labour Organization, is supporting the Legislative Reform of Labor Migration project in Vietnam. The National Assembly adopted the revised Law on Contract-Based Overseas Workers on November 13, 2020, which will improve protection for Vietnamese migrant workers and reduce vulnerability to human trafficking when it goes into effect on January 1, 2022. Now that the law has been adopted, GFEMS and the ILO are pleased to support the development of subordinate legislation to operationalize the reforms. Read the full press release from ILO:
HANOI (ILO News) – On International Migrants Day (18 December), the ILO welcomes the chance to improve the protection of Vietnamese migrant workers brought by the newly-revised Law on Contract-Based Vietnamese Overseas Workers. The Law, passedby the National Assembly on 13 November 2020, which will come into effect on 1 January 2022, builds upon previous Vietnamese legislation to strengthen protections for migrant workers.
In particular, the new Law has removed brokerage commissions payable by migrant workers to recruitment agencies, and prohibited charging service charges to migrant workers who use public, non-profit entities to migrate abroad. Migrant workers who pay high recruitment fees and related costs are more vulnerable to labour exploitation. including forced labor/human trafficking.
“By reducing allowable costs chargeable to migrant workers, the Law offers greater protection from these harms,” said ILO’s Regional Labour Migration Specialist, Nilim Baruah. “When workers are indebted by high migration costs, they may be less able to leave employment when they are abused, exploited or forced to work. Removing brokerage commission from the costs permitted to be paid by migrant workers goes part way to addressing this risk.”
For recruitment agencies, the new Law retains certain categories of costs chargeable to migrant workers, namely the service charge and deposits, but sets limits and will detail the amounts allowable in subordinate legislation to be developed over 2021. The Law states that service charges in subordinate legislation should not exceed the ceiling of three months’ salary, which recruitment agencies can take from workers and receiving partners. Setting this ceiling for these costs will enable migrant workers to make informed decisions about migration, and for awareness to be raised about the costs of regular migration.
The Law prohibits discrimination and forced labour within labour migration and permits workers who are subjected to, or threatened with, maltreatment, sexual harassment or forced labour to unilaterally terminate their employment contracts without financial penalty. Under the new Law, recruitment agencies may have their licence revoked if they use deceitful advertising or other deceptive means to recruit workers for the purpose of forced labour/ trafficking in persons or other forms of exploitation.
Additionally, as part of pre-departure orientation training, recruitment agencies are required to provide knowledge and skills in the prevention of forced labour/trafficking in persons, and gender-based violence
“The Vietnamese Government’s commitment to prevention of forced labour in labour migration is evident in the passing of this revised Law,” said Baruah. “The Law takes the critical first step towards reducing recruitment fees and related costs charged to migrant workers.”
The ILO’s Private Employment Agencies Convention, 1997 (No. 181) and ILO’s General principles and operational guidelines for fair recruitment state that “workers shall not be charged directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, any fees or related costs for their recruitment” and that “prospective employers, public or private, or their intermediaries, and not the workers, should bear the cost of recruitment.”
“The ILO is committed to supporting the process of development of subordinate legislation through social dialogue, and implementation of the Law throughout 2021 and into the future,” said ILO Viet Nam Director, Chang-Hee Lee.
This year’s International Migrants Day celebrates the 30th anniversary of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. The passage of the Law on Contract-Based Vietnamese Overseas Workers is an important step towards labour migration being an empowering and enriching experience for all Vietnamese migrant workers.
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GFEMS is working with Social Accountability International (SAI), with funding from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) to disrupt the prevalence of modern slavery in the ready-made garment (RMG) sector in India. As part of the Fund’s Apparel and Manufacturing portfolio, SAI will develop a digital platform to incentivize and support improvements in labor compliance by preferentially linking ethical suppliers with buyers. Ultimately, SAI’s platform will reduce unauthorized subcontracting, a key driver of forced labor.
There are an estimated 12 million workers employed in India’s RMG sector, though that number is likely to be higher due to the uncounted home workers and employees of illegal or unauthorized subcontracting facilities. Factories in India’s RMG sector are known to drive multiple indicators of modern slavery, including mandatory overtime work, unsafe working conditions, and unauthorized subcontracting. These conditions are brought on, in part, by poor understanding of the connection between strong labor practices and the opportunity for factories to be reliable and efficient suppliers.
While these problems are well known, there are few opportunities for buyers to gain full transparency into their supply chains and for suppliers to improve their production planning. Both factors would incentivize and enable better social compliance.
SAI’s project will fill these gaps by developing a digital platform to combine suppliers and buyers and a suite of tools to help both parties improve their labor practices. Aligning with the Fund’s intervention framework, this project addresses the demand for cheap goods and services and aims to transform the corporate environmental norms that allow slavery to persist in the sector.
Leveraging SAI’s existing work in Bangladesh, the project will develop tools and training to improve buyers’ purchasing practices and suppliers’ capacity and production planning. Helping buyers manage their purchasing orders and suppliers plan their production schedules will reduce the risk that suppliers will take on the unrealistic targets that result in unauthorized subcontracting. Unauthorized factories sit outside government regulation and most social audits and therefore present a much higher risk for forced labor violations. SAI’s tool will expand on existing data sets by quantifying the effects of purchasing practices on supplier production capacity—e.g. the effects of unpredictable volumes, last-minute order changes, design changes, long payment periods, etc. This will help buyers and suppliers to better predict supplier capacity and reduce the likelihood of subcontracting.
The project also represents a deepening commitment to the Fund’s work on supply chain management and risk mitigation efforts. GFEMS has also created an award winning Automated Forced Labor Risk Detection tool, which helps buyers to detect risk of forced labor in their supply chain with 84% accuracy. Additionally, GFEMS is funding ELEVATE to develop a predictive model to help brands identify risk of unauthorized subcontracting in their supply chains and take remediation steps.
GFEMS looks forward to sharing learnings from SAI’s work with stakeholders in India’s RMG sector. Learn more about the FCDO partnership, the Fund’s portfolio, and scoping research.
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As a part of its work with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), GFEMS is partnering with Seefar and My Choices Foundation (MCF) in India to empower children, families, and communities to end the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC).
The project is a new investment in the Fund’s sex trafficking portfolio, focusing on addressing the supply side of slavery and reducing risks for most vulnerable individuals, a key pillar in the Fund’s intervention framework. After an extensive period of scoping research and program design, GFEMS identified targeted prevention interventions among children, their families, and local communities at risk of trafficking and CSEC as an opportunity with high potential for impact and replication.
Coupled with other investments within the FCDO partnership, the Fund’s objective in this project is to understand which targeted prevention intervention is the most effective when working with vulnerable communities in West Bengal. The project is centered around implementing a messaging campaign to inform children of the risk of becoming victims of CSEC and reach potential enablers of CSEC in West Bengal.
The project strategically matches Seefar’s proven anti-trafficking expertise in complex environments with MCF’s broad grassroots network and pre-existing trafficking prevention model, the Safe Village Program (SVP). The intervention is a behavior-change campaign with community strengthening activities in West Bengal. The campaign tests the comparative impact of different combinations of activities in empowering vulnerable individuals and communities to recognize, prevent, and respond to trafficking and CSEC. These activities will include: word of mouth/ remote counselling, service mapping and referral pathways, digital media outreach and media engagement, school and community-based outreach, parent outreach, and community outreach to deliver the behavior-change messaging. Messaging provided will focus on the warning signs of CSEC and the realities children may face when moving away from home at an early age for employment or marriage.
Seefar will test the effectiveness of the prevention strategies to understand which method – or combination of methods – is most effective in changing the knowledge, attitudes, and practices among youth, their families, and their communities with regard to risks to CSEC.
GFEMS looks forward to sharing learnings from the behavior change campaign and insights from Seefar’s research. Learn more about the FCDO partnership, the Fund’s portfolio, and scoping research.
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As a part of its partnership with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), GFEMS is partnering with ELEVATE to develop and pilot SafeStep, a mobile application to provide workers with tools to make informed decisions about migration. The first iteration of the application, which is now live on the Google Play App Store, is designed for Bangladeshi workers considering migrating to work in Gulf Cooperation Council countries. ELEVATE is developing SafeStep in consortium with Diginex Solutions and Winrock International.
The project represents another investment in the Fund’s ethical recruitment portfolio and will focus on increasing the supply of ethically recruited migrants and migrant labor. After an extensive research and scoping period to understand the key drivers of exploitation among Bangladeshi migrant workers, GFEMS identified several opportunities with high potential for impact and replication. The development of SafeStep meets one of those key needs for migrant workers: high-quality support throughout the migration process. By coupling informational and educational content with actionable tools, SafeStep will empower workers to successfully and safely navigate their migration journey, with an emphasis on minimizing worker-paid fees and other avenues for exploitation.
SafeStep’s end-to-end support begins before a worker decides to migrate, with a budget calculator and educational content. These tools help migrants understand the potential cost of relocating for a job and provide accessible information on what to expect during the recruitment process. Support continues after a worker decides to travel, with a blockchain-enabled tool for migrants to upload and store documents like contracts, visas, and receipts for any fees paid. Finally, the app includes a help center where workers can report and receive support on issues or concerns in their migration process.
ELEVATE and its consortium partners centered design of the application on input from stakeholders, including migrants, sub-agents, and employers. Several cycles of user feedback will inform subsequent iterations of the app. Ultimately, SafeStep is designed to serve as a digital backbone for safe migration solutions, with potential to accommodate new features and functionality. SafeStep is initially focused on the migration corridor between Bangladesh and the Gulf, with built-in flexibility to adapt to other key migration corridors.
GFEMS looks forward to the ongoing partnership with ELEVATE, Diginex, and Winrock and to sharing learnings from early usage of this first-of-its-kind platform in Bangladesh. Learn more about the FCDO partnership, the Fund’s portfolio, and scoping research.
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GFEMS is proud to share the launch of a new portfolio of interventions and innovations with our partner, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO). The portfolio is expected to total approximately 9M USD.
The FCDO portfolio represents deepening investments in India and Bangladesh, following the inaugural GFEMS portfolio launch in late 2018, and two additional launches with Norad and the US State Dept. Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons earlier this year.
Originally scheduled to launch in spring 2020, all of the projects in this portfolio have been adapted to reflect and respond to new needs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with our partners on the ground, these projects are now better designed to mitigate exacerbated vulnerability, adjust to remote environments, and contribute to responsible recovery.
“The FCDO portfolio reflects thoughtful, nuanced, and deliberate action to disrupt modern slavery.”
Prior to project launch, GFEMS engaged in extensive scoping and design phases to identify the geographies and sectors with the highest potential for impact. The portfolio, designed based on the findings from that efforts, addresses the following opportunities:
GFEMS is funding a total of seven projects across these opportunities:
Projects within the portfolio address the key pillars of the Fund’s intervention framework– supply, demand, and enabling environment of modern slavery. They address core challenges that prevent sustainable reduction in prevalence.
Sustainability is a key theme across the projects, and across the Fund’s wider investment portfolio. GFEMS designs programs and strategies for future investments with sustainability in mind. Funding focuses on both projects with high potential for replication and scale, and those that leverage both national priorities and market demands. All projects are informed by, and tailored to, the populations GFEMS seeks to serve. Within the FCDO partnership, GFEMS specifically targets sustainable changes in supply chain practices, project sustainability through increased government and private sector engagement, and sustainable livelihoods for survivors.
“The FCDO portfolio reflects thoughtful, nuanced, and deliberate action to disrupt modern slavery. The Fund worked closely with partners to develop holistic programming that is based on the best available evidence, but also flexible enough to respond to evolving needs in the field. We are excited to launch these programs with our incredible partners and grateful for the support of FCDO,” said GFEMS Director of Grant Programs, Helen Taylor.
GFEMS will share more information about the portfolio, projects, and our implementing partners in the following weeks. We look forward to sharing the impact, successes, and lessons learned from this portfolio.
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The Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS) is pleased to share the expansion of our Global Finance portfolio to include an initiative focused on use of new payment technologies and virtual currencies by traffickers.
This initiative will evaluate new payment technologies and virtual currencies tied to online sexual exploitation of children (OSEC), determine how to identify these transactions, and develop forensic techniques for investigating the illicit financial flows to traffickers. Building on the Fund’s recent work with partners in the Philippines and the UK to identify and disrupt financial flows tied to online sexual exploitation of children (OSEC), these initiatives are designed to drive development of solutions with potential to be replicated globally.
Mobilizing the financial sector is a critical component in the Fund’s comprehensive strategy. The financial sector has tremendous potential to drive systemic change and play a key role in making modern slavery economically unprofitable.
Beginning in 2018, when GFEMS CEO Dr. Jean Baderschneider served as a commissioner on the Liechtenstein Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking and building off the efforts of the ensuing FAST Initiative, GFEMS has accelerated its investment in financial sector innovation and partnerships. To-date, GFEMS has committed over 1 million USD in funding to its Global Finance initiatives.
This Global Finance portfolio is strategically designed to leverage and integrate diverse funding streams, driving innovation and more effectively mobilizing the financial sector.
One component of the Fund’s financial sector strategy is leveraging the power of responsible investors to drive meaningful, sustainable actions by companies to address forced labor risks in supply chains. For companies to take meaningful action, they first need actionable insights on forced labor risks in their supply chains. However, existing forced labor risk assessment tools have largely been too qualitative or inexact to inform targeted and effective risk mitigation efforts.
To address this, GFEMS has developed an award winning forced labor screening tool that predicts the risk of forced labor at the firm level using operational features like the number of known trade partners, financial information, and geography. The Fund intends to release the prototype open source for investors, supply chain management platforms, and NGO watchdogs to further develop and integrate into their own platforms, elevating the issue of forced labor in due diligence and procurement. This effort is key to ultimately mobilizing trillions in private sector procurement and ESG investment to sustainably address forced labor.
The Fund also leverages the expertise and analytics capabilities of the financial sector to improve efforts to identify and disrupt illicit financial flows to traffickers. As part of this workstream, GFEMS kicked off the Cross Industry Data Initiative (CIDI) in early 2020. Working with The Knoble and SAS, the Initiative convenes financial crime professionals, financial institutions, law enforcement experts, and NGOs in a series of working groups to address data-sharing challenges and build partnerships necessary to implement solutions.
We look forward to sharing future updates about our growing Global Finance portfolio and partnerships. Together we can create and implement actionable solutions for ending modern slavery.
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Ethical recruitment channels remain out of reach for most Overseas Filipinx Workers (OFWs), despite sincere efforts by the Philippine Government to protect them. This puts them at risk of trafficking and if exploitation does occur, unethical channels do not provide any access to grievance mechanisms for remedy.
While the Philippines is in many ways a leader among labor-sending countries with regards to ethical recruitment practices, traffickers exploit remaining gaps. For example, while OFWs migrating for domestic work cannot legally be charged fees (a key source of debt bondage among migrant workers), vulnerable workers in other low-skill sectors, can be charged. Furthermore, enforcement of regulations is not fully effective. A recently released study by Seefar found that on average, Filipina domestic workers paid $700 in recruitment fees despite it being illegal for agencies to charge such fees.
The recruitment industry also has much room for improvement in implementing practices that can reduce the risk of trafficking. There are 1,300 licensed recruitment agencies in the Philippines and countless more informal operators. Almost none of these agencies are in line with international ethical recruitment standards.
With funding from the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, GFEMS is addressing these challenges by assembling a consortium of partners led by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), that also includes the Blas F. Ople Policy Center, Diginex, and the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance (the “Alliance”). The consortium will improve recruitment industry practices by supporting and incentivizing the effective, sustainable adoption of ethical recruitment in the Philippines, with particular emphasis on domestic workers and hospitality workers.
Multiple complementary workstreams will bring together the Government of the Philippines, Philippine recruitment agencies (PRAs), the hospitality industry, and civil society organizations (CSOs) dedicated to migrant worker protection. Together, the consortium will provide these stakeholders with:
Ultimately, the project aims to sustainably reduce the prevalence of TIP among OFWs by empowering the Government of the Philippines and civil society to create an environment for more employers and PRAs to practice ethical recruitment and provide safer employment alternatives overseas. The planned tools are intended to help the recruitment industry reduce demand for exploitative labor by providing data-driven approaches to drive behavior change and creating greater access to ethical recruitment capacity building programs.
Finally, as part of the Fund’s commitment to expanding the field’s evidence base, we will be researching learning questions related to effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, and sustainability, including:
GFEMS looks forward to sharing more information about this project as it is implemented, and is grateful for the support of the U.S. Department of State and the partnership of the consortium.
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This article and the IOM project were funded by a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.
GFEMS is excited to share that we have won in the “Prosperity” category at the 2020 Society for International Development- Washington Chapter Innovation Competition. Our entry, “Automated Decision Support Tool for Forced Labor Risk Detection” was judged by two separate panels of career nonprofit and international development professionals.
In developing the tool, GFEMS set out to solve the challenge companies, investors, authorities, or other stakeholders face in identifying the location(s) of forced labor in large, complex supply chains. With no existing viable tools developed that are both sustainable and effective, identifying forced labor in global supply chains has been nearly impossible. While numerous supply-chain risk assessment tools exist, the Fund undertook this project because existing tools suffer from one or more of the following shortcomings:
The GFEMS team, led by Senior Data Scientists Shannon Stewart, developed a novel decision support tool that predicts the risk of forced labor at the company level with about 84% accuracy. It uses data that is collected passively by governments and operates without participation of any of the firms on whom data is collected.
The tool is intended as a first-pass screening tool for use by corporate social responsibility and procurement professionals, investors, regulatory enforcers, and other stakeholders like NGO watchdog groups. It is not intended to replace these functions, rather it prioritizes due diligence efforts and stretches the impact of every dollar invested in cleaning up supply chains. It can elevate responsible manufacturing businesses in both access to markets and capital, and, in turn, support sustainable livelihoods for their workforces. Ultimately, the goal is to benefit the estimated 16 million people who are victims of forced labor within private-sector supply chains and to prevent more vulnerable people from becoming victims.
The Fund is currently gathering feedback on the tool from industry experts, and intends to release a refined version as an open source project. GFEMS has successfully demonstrated that there is reliable, detectable signal of forced labor risk in operational data. This proof of concept has encouraged at least one supply chain risk platform to begin development on a tool that operates on public data, combined with data that may be available only to them.
Moving forward, the Fund will work directly with companies who wish to implement a similar process. By opening our thinking to the public, GFEMS aims to inspire companies to take a new look at their data and how it fits with the broader context of industrial operations and to develop analogous tools that work for them.
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