In collaboration with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), GFEMS has partnered with Justice and Care to address commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) of Bangladeshi women trafficked into India. 

The project operates in the Khulna and Dhaka Divisions of Bangladesh, where women and families are extremely vulnerable to trafficking. Many are trafficked across the border into India, but receive intermittent or disjointed access to services while going through the repatriation process due to their foreign nationality. Justice and Care, which was established to focus on CSE and has worked extensively in India and Bangladesh, will provide expertise on navigating the Indian migration and justice systems in repatriating Bangladeshi victims.

Working collaboratively, the GFEMS-Justice and Care project is addressing these issues through four primary activities: 

• Mapping the bureaucratic process of repatriation of victims from India to Bangladesh, working to improve efficiencies in the process and reduce overall time to bring survivors home. 
• Working with NGO providers in India to ensure coordinated trauma-informed services for survivors, minimizing disruptions to the care plan and providing support throughout the repatriation process. Upon return to Bangladesh, Justice and Care will continue providing wraparound rehabilitation and reintegration services, supporting survivors on their path to self-sufficiency. 
• Training service providers in the local Bangladesh community to support survivors after repatriation using trauma-informed systems and care. 
• Working with extremely vulnerable families in the Khulna and Dhaka Divisions to prevent re-trafficking and provide alternatives for women considering risky migration. 

The activities within this project align closely with the Fund’s approach to ending modern slavery. On the supply side, the project works with vulnerable families to reduce risk of trafficking due to financial shocks and provide adequate rehabilitation so that victims are not re-trafficked. To address the enabling environment, GFEMS is working with communities to accept survivors of trafficking and to combat the social stigma that can lead to victims being cast out of their communities, forcing a return to CSE due to lack of other options and support. 

Along with other projects under the Norad partnership, GFEMS aims to gain significant learnings from this project, including the effectiveness of various rehabilitation techniques and services, an understanding of repatriation from India to Bangladesh, effectiveness of reintegration services, and more details on CSE rehabilitation in the Bangladeshi context. 

GFEMS looks forward to sharing the successes and lessons learned from our work with Justice and Care. Learn more about the Norad partnership and the GFEMS portfolio.

Subscribe to the Fund’s newsletter for updates on the latest developments, news, and opportunities with GFEMS.

In collaboration with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), GFEMS is working with Seefar to expand LIFT: Transformational Livelihoods for Survivors in India. LIFT, which uses a trauma-informed livelihoods model, will provide support to survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) in both Kolkata, one of the largest source areas for CSE victims. and Mumbai, one of the largest destination areas for sex trafficking.

Seefar, a social enterprise with a vision for a world where vulnerable people have more opportunities to advance themselves, will contribute its valuable experience as implementer with comprehensive contextual knowledge of forced labor, modern slavery, and sex trafficking to the delivery of this project.

To date, many livelihood opportunities for CSE or trafficking survivors have failed to meet a market need and therefore lacked sustainability. To address this gap, Seefar leverages the global freelance economy to provide opportunities to create sustainable income. The model aims to create sustainable income options for survivors and prevent further exploitation. 

LIFT uses adaptive counseling to provide a foundation for stabilizing CSE survivors before embarking on employment opportunities. LIFT supports CSE survivors through adaptive counseling and employment language training, and skills training tailored to market demands. By fostering long term career preparation and growth opportunities for survivors, this project decreases risk of re-trafficking and sustainably reduces the long-term prevalence of CSE survivors. Finally, Seefar builds intervention sustainability by training other anti-trafficking organizations in the LIFT approach. 

In addition, the LIFT project includes a rigorous learning phase in which GFEMS and Seefar will gather data to better understand key factors on which training environments and resources are most effective to support these populations. 

With this project, GFEMS and Seefar aim to reduce the risk of re-trafficking, breaking the cycle of exploitation to reduce the prevalence of CSE among survivors. LIFT’s holistic trauma-informed approach supports employment opportunities with sustainable incomes for CSE survivors.

GFEMS looks forward to sharing the successes and lessons learned from the LIFT project and working successfully with our partners at Seefar towards our mission of ending modern slavery by making it economically unprofitable. Learn more about the Norad partnership and the GFEMS portfolio.

Follow along with us on Twitter and subscribe to the Fund’s newsletter for updates on the latest developments, news, and opportunities with GFEMS. 

In partnership with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), GFEMS is working with Association for Stimulating Know-how (ASK) to build a safe labor migration ecosystem in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar, India. The migration ecosystem involves all aspects along a migrant’s journey abroad: from awareness of risks, to support provided by their family, community, and employers, to access to the means and resources to work abroad, to access to systems helping resolve issues. Focusing on major source communities for migrant labor, the project aims to reduce the prevalence of forced labor among migrant workers extremely vulnerable to slavery by creating an ecosystem that addresses specific source-side vulnerabilities. 

ASK has been working for the past 27 years to build knowledge and skills for vulnerable populations and to bring about sustainable and measurable change in the lives of the people they work with. ASK’s core expertise includes planning and management of large-scale projects in the field of safe migration, sustainability, livelihoods, and health and education, with an approach to reducing community vulnerabilities grounded in economic empowerment and support services. Aligned with the Fund’s efforts to reduce the supply of vulnerable workers, ASK works closely with migrant workers to improve their economic well being and ensure stakeholder adherence to labor and human rights.

The Fund’s scoping research showed that UP and Bihar are key migrant sending states for Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Accordingly, the project provides interventions for aspiring overseas migrant workers originating from UP and Bihar. Specific vulnerabilities to be addressed by this project include: reliance on unsafe migration channels, lack of migrant preparedness in the recruitment process, lack of family and community awareness about the recruitment process, lack of support services (or use of them) for migrants and their families, economic vulnerabilities of migrants and their families, and debt bondage. 

To help build a safe migration ecosystem, ASK will establish Migrant Resource Centers (MRCs) within two Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). The MRCs will deliver migrants services that reduce source-side drivers of vulnerability to forced labor. Services include pre-decision and pre-deployment training, basic paralegal and reintegration support (primarily through referrals), and assistance registering for entitlements for aspiring, in-service, and returning migrants and their families.

In parallel, ASK will build the capability and capacity of the CSOs to own and operate the MRCs beyond the project implementation period. These MRCs are a key example of the Fund’s focus on interventions that can be sustained beyond GFEMS funding, ensuring programs have continuing and long-term impact. 

The dual lack of financial knowledge and access to quality financial services is a key problem for migrants and their families. Without financial literacy and access to financial services, migrants are vulnerable to economic shocks. In response, this project, with support from Mitrata Inclusive Financial Services, will test financial health innovations to determine if migrant-focused financial products or services work and if there is a market for them.

In the long term, this project will reduce migrant vulnerability to unsafe practices in the recruitment and labor migration process that often lead to forced labor. Specifically, it will ensure survivor recovery and reintegration and reduce the number of workers who pursue risky migration and who fall into debt bondage, reducing the vulnerabilities that lead to modern slavery by. 

GFEMS looks forward to sharing learnings from this project in reducing source side vulnerability in India. Learn more about the Norad partnership and the GFEMS portfolio.

Subscribe to the Fund’s newsletter and follow us on Twitter to stay updated with the latest GFEMS activity. 

With support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), GFEMS is partnering with the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) in a new project providing recovery and reintegration services to survivors of forced labor, returned migrants, and additional vulnerable populations in Bangladesh. 

CAFOD is a leading, UK-based agency with over thirty years of experience working collaboratively in Bangladesh with local partners. Together with Caritas Bangladesh (CB) and Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP), CAFOD will provide immediate and long-term support to vulnerable and returned migrants and survivors of abuse and exploitation. The project will focus on reintegration support efforts in some of the highest labor-sending districts of Bangladesh.

GFEMS invests in projects that disrupt the supply of vulnerable populations and works with stakeholders to combat exploitation. To further this objective, the project will:

• Work closely with the Government of Bangladesh to strengthen survivor reintegration services and referral pathways. 
• Address the social and economic challenges that vulnerable migrants and survivors experience. Through community engagement activities, the project will cultivate systemic advancements in reintegration support and survivor services, resulting in improvements to the current reintegration, recovery, and referral system in Bangladesh.
• Provide trauma-informed psychosocial and physical care to returnee migrants immediately upon returning to Bangladesh. CAFOD, Caritas Bangladesh, and OKUP will work together to refer victims and their families to support services and tools for recovery and reintegration. Further supporting returnees and vulnerable migrants in livelihood placement, CB will conduct skills assessments and develop plans for use of these skills to secure employment. With this approach to distributing resources and care, the consortium will provide holistic, needs-based support to survivors and vulnerable migrants. 
• Support and advance the current referral system by improving cross-government coordination, delivery of and access to Government-provided services through engagement activities, such as reintegration, recovery, and restitution services. 

GFEMS is excited to support the development of an improved system of survivor care for returned migrants in Bangladesh. By taking a needs-based approach to service delivery of healthcare, counseling, shelter, and legal support, this project ensures that survivors receive services that directly meet their needs.

GFEMS looks forward to sharing learnings from the progress of this project, and from working with CAFOD and its consortia partners, in enhancing reintegration support in Bangladesh. Learn more about the Norad partnership and the GFEMS portfolio.

Subscribe to the Fund’s newsletter and follow us on Twitter to stay updated with the latest GFEMS activity. 

GFEMS is proud to launch a new portfolio of interventions and innovations with funding from the Norwegian Agency for Development Corporation (Norad). The portfolio represents a 5.7M USD investment in programming, with additional programming to be added later this year, and will support recovery, reintegration, and rehabilitation of survivors, as well as build safer migration systems for migrants seeking work abroad, their families, and their communities in India and Bangladesh. GFEMS is funding six projects across these focus areas, in partnership with five local, regional, and international organizations. Projects in the Norad portfolio represent an investment in evidence-based, inclusive, and sustainable interventions.

This portfolio marks a new round of in-region projects for GFEMS, following the inaugural portfolio launch in late 2018. The portfolio projects have high potential to reduce vulnerability to trafficking and re-trafficking, informed by an extensive scoping and design phase that included research into structural drivers of modern slavery, vulnerability analyses of target populations, and industry analysis in priority sectors and geographies.

GFEMS and its partners designed the portfolio to address the Fund’s strategic priorities in Commercial Sexual Exploitation (CSE) and Ethical Recruitment. Specifically, the projects test new models of ethical recruitment and support growth of existing promising models for survivor care.

GFEMS views modern slavery through an economic lens as a systemic problem driven by traffickers’ exploitation of people for profit: a consistent supply of vulnerable individuals and demand for cheap goods and services. For example, within ethical recruitment, the Fund is lowering the supply of vulnerable workers by providing support to aspiring migrant laborers and making tools for the recruitment journey more accessible, and decreasing the demand for slavery by creating incentives for ethical labor over exploitive recruitment practices. Similarly, within CSE, the Fund is working to reduce the supply of vulnerable individuals through provision of trauma informed care, economic empowerment, and reintegration services. h The Fund ensures that all stakeholders, including the private sector, work together to address modern slavery and the systems on which it relies.

Sustainability is a key priority across the projects and across the Fund’s wider portfolio. GFEMS identifies projects that leverage national priorities and meet market demands, both indicators of high potential for replication and scale. Projects provide vulnerable populations and survivors with the skills and resources they need to live safe and full lives. Within the Norad partnership, GFEMS specifically seeks to support sustainable change in the recruitment industry and provide sustainable livelihoods for survivors of modern slavery. 

In the coming weeks, GFEMS is excited to share more information about the projects and partners in this portfolio. The Fund looks forward to sharing the successes and lessons learned as the projects move forward.

Subscribe to the Fund’s newsletter and Medium page and follow us on Twitter to stay updated with the latest GFEMS activity. 

In collaboration with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), GFEMS is working with Seefar to launch and pilot The Ethical Recruitment Agency (TERA) India. From its headquarters in Lucknow, TERA India will provide safe work opportunities abroad to vulnerable communities in Uttar Pradesh (UP). 

Seefar, a social enterprise with a vision for a world where vulnerable people have more opportunities to advance themselves, will contribute its valuable experience as implementer with comprehensive contextual knowledge of forced labor, modern slavery, and ethical recruitment to the delivery of this project. Seefar launched TERA in 2018 with the mission of helping workers benefit from migration while staying safe from exploitation. 

The Fund’s scoping research indicated that UP and Bihar are two of India’s top migrant sending states to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Community vulnerabilities and an unregulated recruitment system permits exploitation throughout the recruitment process. Vulnerable migrants are charged prohibitively high fees by recruitment agents, leading them to take out loans which may be nearly impossible to pay back and sinking them into a cycle of debt bondage. Beyond financial exploitation, recruiters and their sub-agents often provide false or insufficient information to migrants regarding working and living conditions, salary, and the nature of work to be carried out. 

In this project, TERA India will operationalize systems for monitoring worker welfare, test the viability of an ethical recruitment agency in UP, and provide targeted support to low-skilled workers across multiple industries, including domestic workers, cleaners, and construction workers. In addition, TERA India will engage with the broader community of people vulnerable to modern slavery, including aspiring migrants who are unskilled, poor, and new to the migration process, to enhance understanding of and access to ethical recruitment opportunities. 

This project will provide ethical recruitment service to vulnerable people by supporting debt-free recruitment and adherence to best-practice worker welfare standards. To achieve these goals, Seefar will help migrant workers secure safe employment and work abroad with no recruitment debt, fees, deception, or abusive living and working conditions. Testing TERA’s success will generate learnings on the viability and sustainability of an ethical recruitment agency, with the ultimate goal of shifting the market toward ethical recruitment. A key component of Seefar’s work will be filling the evidence gap to support TERA’s scalability and replication. The project will generate key research products establishing the business case for ethical recruitment, document beneficiary case studies and collect welfare data, and share lessons learned on establishing an ethical recruitment agency. 

GFEMS aims to cultivate increased demand for ethical recruitment services among key stakeholders, including workers. In the longer-term, this demand will reduce prevalence of forced labor among vulnerable communities in UP. GFEMS will share learnings on the demand for ethical recruitment and its impact on the recruitment industry. 

GFEMS looks forward to sharing the successes and lessons learned from the TERA India project and working successfully with Seefar towards our mission of ending modern slavery by making it economically unprofitable. Learn more about the Norad partnership and the GFEMS portfolio.

Follow along with us on Twitter and subscribe to the Fund’s newsletter for updates on the latest developments, news, and opportunities with GFEMS. 

Through tireless efforts, the Blas F. Ople Policy Center and the Philippines Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT) Task Force on Trafficking of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), under a partnership with GFEMS, and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) of the Philippines, have achieved a landmark prosecution of eight traffickers. A conviction of the traffickers, who were responsible for the forced prostitution of two Filipina women, was handed down in Bahrain in April 2020. 

The victims, two women who had been working in Dubai in 2018, were trafficked when they responded to the perpetrators’ fraudulent offer of better jobs in Bahrain. Upon their arrival in Bahrain, they were confined in a building and forced into commercial sex for several months before escaping.

On April 28, a Bahrain court sentenced each of the convicted trafficking offenders to seven years imprisonment and a fine of 5,000 dinars each, equivalent to USD $5,300.  The convicted include five Filipina women and two Filipino men who recruited the women through fraudulent offers of legitimate work and oversaw their enslavement in an illegal brothel in Bahrain, as well as a Bahraini police officer who was complicit in the trafficking scheme. 

The new IACAT Task Force, of which the DFA is an active member, established in early 2019 as part of the Blas F. Ople Center’s partnership with GFEMS, under a grant from the U.S. government, was instrumental in achieving the successful justice outcome through the use of a case conference approach. The IACAT Task Force secured strong evidence from the two victims which it shared with Bahrain, leading to the successful prosecution in the Gulf State.  The two managed to escape the syndicate to return to the Philippines where they approached the Ople Center for legal assistance. 

Key leaders in the response included the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Under Secretary for Overseas Workers, Ms. Sarah Arriola, who effectively used diplomatic channels in the absence of a formal Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with Bahrain and Ausamah AlAbsi, Chairman of Bahrain’s National Committee to Combat Trafficking in Persons, and a 2018 TIP Report Hero, who led Bahrain’s cooperation. 

GFEMS is proud to be a partner of the Blas F. Ople Center, led by OFW protection champion Susan Ople, and the member agencies of the IACAT Task Force on Trafficking of OFWs.

This article was funded in part 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.

This month the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS) is co-hosting a Cross-Industry Data View webinar in partnership with The Knoble and SAS Institute. The webinar will cover the work to-date of the Liechtenstein Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAST) Initiative and explore specific opportunities to accelerate progress. This will be followed by an in-person workshop later this year where participants will build a roadmap for creating a cross-industry data view of financial transactions.

These expert convenings are part of the Fund’s ongoing commitment to mobilizing the financial sector against trafficking and slavery, following the launch of the Liechtenstein Initiative’s Blueprint for Mobilizing Finance Against Trafficking and Slavery at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019. In alignment with the Fund’s approach, the workshop will foster collaboration across sectors by bringing together representatives from financial institutions, government, anti-trafficking organizations, and the FAST Initiative.

Financial institutions have different views of transactional and account activity, resulting in only partial or fragmented understandings of potentially illicit financial flows. There is an opportunity to create a more holistic picture of account activity through improved collaboration and communication between financial institutions. It may be possible to develop a cross-industry data view by utilizing pre-existing infrastructures and capabilities within the financial sector. Ultimately, this could accelerate efforts to identify and disrupt illicit financial flows to traffickers.

In the upcoming workshop, GFEMS and its partners will work side by side to identify actionable steps for creating this data view to enable institutions to proactively share relevant information. Participants will focus on identifying opportunities to improve information sharing across institutions, clarify what information needs to be shared, and pinpoint outstanding challenges to be addressed. Following the workshop, participants will develop a project roadmap that includes clear steps and milestones to creating a cross-industry data view.

GFEMS thanks The Knoble and SAS Institute for their partnership and looks forward to continued collaboration with the financial sector as part of its overarching strategy to end modern slavery by making it economically unprofitable.

Read more from GFEMS on mobilizing the financial sector to end modern slavery and human trafficking.

Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter for the latest information on our activity.

==

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 assessing impact to better equip our partners to scale and replicate solutions in new geographies.

A major theme in the recommendations from the 2019 U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking’s Report is the need for additional resources dedicated to assistance in gaining and maintaining employment for underserved populations like survivors of human trafficking. While lack of specialized employment support is not a new problem and similar recommendations have been made in the past, few resources exist for survivors to gain the necessary skills or training to succeed in obtaining meaningful and decent work.

This International Women’s Day, GFEMS is pleased to announce the pilot launch of the “Future in Training (FIT) Hospitality” Survivor Employability Curriculum, in partnership with Marriott International.

Developed by GFEMS and Marriott over the past two years, the first-ever FIT curriculum focuses on hospitality. It is the Fund’s first program in the United States and is aimed specifically at providing training and resources for survivors seeking careers in the hospitality sector. Marriott’s partnership with GFEMS is part of the company’s human rights goals, which include training 100% of on-property hotel workers in human trafficking awareness. To date, the company has trained over 700,000 hotel workers,

The FIT Hospitality pilot will be implemented with the support of the University of Maryland Safe Center (UMD Safe Center) in the Washington, DC metro area. Through this program, GFEMS will provide survivors with an introduction to hospitality and tools for employability in the sector using a multi-disciplinary curriculum encouraging dynamic engagement. The first-phase of the pilot will test implementation and knowledge gained to inform further enhancements and the need for post-curriculum follow-up services, such as application assistance or career mentoring. Pilot participants will also benefit from transportation and child care support that mitigate known barriers to survivor career training.

GFEMS anticipates several learning outcomes following the FIT Hospitality pilot. GFEMS will support identification and monitoring of the barriers survivors face in trying to gain training and aim to understand the adequate level of support survivors need while participating. Ultimately, GFEMS seeks to gain a better understanding of the type of assistance survivors need to gain meaningful employment and implement that knowledge into the FIT curriculum and other programming; the Fund aims to create customized assistance that meets the needs of survivors.

The pilot will provide valuable insights for GFEMS as it continues to build its portfolio within one of its key pillars, Sustaining Freedom for survivors. As GFEMS continues to grow and build new programs globally, livelihood training programs in various industries and sectors that both equip survivors with necessary skills and prevent at-risk populations from entering risky situations remain a priority. Insights from the FIT Hospitality pilot, along with other planned research, will inform new FIT programming in additional sectors for sustained freedom in the US and abroad.

Following the pilot’s implementation, GFEMS looks forward to sharing the insights gained and plans for future implementation. The Fund is grateful for the partnership and support of Marriott and UMD Safe Center, and is excited to continue our commitment to empowering survivors.

Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter for the latest information on our activity.

==

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 assessing impact to better equip our partners to scale and replicate solutions in new geographies.