Capturing Shifting Vulnerabilities in Modern Slavery Sectors

A team at UoP has been contracted since 2019 to support the evaluation and learning from The Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS). UoP is part of a consortium making up the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Unit’s (GFEMS MELU). The Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS) is a public-private partnership funded by DFID (now the FCDO) and the US Department of State which aims to fill a major international gap in financing efforts to tackle slavery, particularly in developing countries. The FCDO’s investment with GFEMS aims to develop new and innovative approaches to tackling slavery in targeted populations; and is focussed on increasing the global evidence and resource base and working with new partners in the private sector to improve effective practice in tackling slavery. The programme has four outcomes under three areas of work:

i. Improving the Evidence Base
▪ Outcome 1: Key Actors have an improved understanding of the scale and prevalence of modern slavery and global knowledge gaps are reduced;
▪ Outcome 2: Increased evidence and learning on drivers of modern slavery and learning from the pilots is available and used by key actors to design modern slavery interventions;

ii. Testing and scaling impactful interventions
▪ Outcome 3: Key beneficiary vulnerabilities that enable modern slavery are reduced in targeted communities and sectors

iii. Harnessing innovation
Outcome 4: GFEMS harnesses and captures innovative ways of working to reduce modern slavery and shares with key actors; innovation shapes future investment strategies

UoP provides academic input into the research being carried out by the Monitoring, evaluation and learning unit focused on delivering on outcome 1 above. This has so far consisted of the following outputs:
· a political economy analysis of modern slavery in Bangladesh and India
· a global and national literature review
· a rapid 2 months review of the impact if C-19 on different categories of modern slavery.

The three categories of modern slavery the programme focused on are:
· The sexual exploitation of children
· Readymade garment sector
· Overseas labour recruitment