by Tasneem Nahar
Brief overview of Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS)
In 2015-2016 Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS) was formed by a coalition of activists and advocates who envision a multilateral fund to coordinate global action against modern slavery. In response, the US Congress established the Program to End Modern Slavery through the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, which allocates funds to the United States Department of State to support anti-trafficking work.
After a decade, the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS) has sunsetted its operations. Throughout the Fund’s lifecycle, the Fund launched major programs in 9 countries, worked with and directed resources to over 60 partners, directly reaching 115,000 people and countless more through cutting edge research and new tech tools.
The numbers, however, are not the whole story. More than anything, the Fund was a bold cross-sector initiative. The Fund was launched as the world sought to address labor exploitation in global supply chains, refugee and migration crises, increased international sex trafficking and sex tourism, and online-enabled trafficking. In 2000, the UN established its Palermo Protocols and the USA passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), creating international measures of trafficking and bodies to respond to it. Other countries followed suit.
Supply Chain
The integrity and security of supply chains is of paramount importance to the global economy. Deep and opaque global supply chains are exposed to forced labor risks. With 25 million people in involuntary, coerced servitude, forced labor permeates global supply chains of commodities, goods, and services affecting over $350 billion of goods in the technology, apparel, seafood, medical supplies, cocoa, cotton, palm oil, coffee, and sugar industries annually.
Targeting solutions to address forced labor risks in supply chains, the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery launched cohesive projects targeting high risk countries and sectors, delivering a comprehensive set of tools and interventions that helped workers report abuse, companies to assess their risk and improve their practices, and law enforcement to act on credible reports.
Supply Chain | Coffee
Brazil is one of the world’s largest coffee producers, supplying over a third of the US’ total imports, and, in recent years, a world leader in the fight for meaningful labor rights with such regulations and tools as its Dirty List of companies violating laws, the National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labor which engages companies in enforcing laws, and a network of federal and sub-federal bodies tasked with assisting survivors and prosecuting violators. As Brazil emerged from the COVID 19 pandemic, these mechanisms revealed that Brazil’s bustling Coffee sector was also one of its biggest challenges. Figures available from Brazil’s Forced Labor Observatory demonstrate that the coffee sector was responsible for more forced labor than any other in the country.
With funding from the United States Department of State, GFEMS launched a multi-faceted initiative to build on Brazil’s efforts and eliminate slave labor in the coffee supply chain. Targeting the state of Minas Gerais, which produces the bulk of Brazil's coffee, our partners Instituto Trabalho Decente, the Stanford University Human Trafficking Data Lab, LRQA, Reporter Brasil, and the Federal University of Minas Gerais provided the government tools to better prosecute companies utilizing forced labor, launched reporting mechanisms on farms in major corporations’ supply chains, and empowered survivors.
Enabling Labor Prosecution with an Innovative Decision Support Tool
One of Brazil’s innovative labor-rights tools is its Federal Labor Prosecutor’s Office (FLPO), a government entity charged with investigating labor abuses and sanctioning the companies in whose supply chains abuses occur. But as with any enforcement agency, resources are limited and the FLPO cannot act on every report it receives. Working hand-in-hand with Minas Girais’ FLPO and with GFEMS support, Stanford University’s Human Trafficking Data Lab developed an innovative solution to the FLPO’s resource issue: a machine learning tool, Bússola IA, that would help authorities more efficiently target investigations. Drawing from a host of real-time public and administrative data, including outcomes from 5,500 trafficking investigations involving over 400,000 survivors and thousands of firms, the tool would use AI to produce rapid, evidence-based analytics for the hundreds of human trafficking tips, helping identify suspicious activity and trafficking risk factors. Ultimately, the tool allows the FLPO to make evidence-based determinations on how to best use its limited resources, moving them to act on the best information to catch the worst labor violations.
While the Fund’s support ended with its closure, our early efforts allowed for the full development of the tool and its rollout in twelve jurisdictions. These twelve jurisdictions comprise the treatment group for a randomized control trial the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab will use to evaluate Brassia IA’s effectiveness.
Equipping Workers with Strong Grievance Mechanisms
The Fund and its partners sought to set up a best-in-class grievance mechanism for workers in Minas Gerais’ coffee fields, allowing them to report labor abuses and trigger remedy in accordance with principles and frameworks established by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. We started a deep consultation process with more than 50 institutions and stakeholders including survivors, the private sector, government, public institutions, academia, civil society, and trade unions. We created and hosted an expert advisory council named Alliance for Fair CAFE to further the design, which included survivors from an organization our partners supported. One critical finding from this process was that grievance mechanisms fail due to low trust from users, so we formed a partnership to house the mechanism within a national workers’ union, CONTAR. The tool’s backend protocols were designed to align with government protocols defining the roles and responsibilities of helpline operators, issue categorization, escalation pathways, confidentiality policies, and response timelines.
The resultant grievance mechanism, Nossa Voz (“Our Voice”), was a stunning success. In the single year of GFEMS support following the tool’s development and rollout, it received over 130 interactions and was involved in the removal of eleven workers from modern slavery conditions. Eleven of the biggest firms in Brazil’s coffee industry have agreed to run the tool on its coffee farms with more in the pipeline, and major networks such as the Rainforest Alliance and Sustainable Coffee Challenge provide institutional support. The ILO has agreed to continue operations of Nossa Voz, ensuring the tool will continue to make an impact for years to come.
Empowering Survivors and the Systems that Support Them
Alongside the major tools it developed in the Brazilian coffee sector, the Fund supported partners who strengthened the support survivors receive.
- Instituto Trabalho Decente trained workers and civil servants on labor rights and regulations, especially those that define slave labor and conditions analogous to slavery, as well as redress mechanisms including Nossa Voz in order to strengthen community response to trafficking. These interventions were targeted at municipalities within the state of Bahia, which is a major source of seasonal migrant laborers who power the coffee-harvesting season in Minas Gerais and who suffer much of the exploitation. ITD trained 350 people and reached many more (100,000/day) with multimedia materials, increasing awareness and introducing Nossa Voz at scale.
- Reporter Brasil, the influential journalism group that spearheaded the development of the Dirty List, worked with the Minas Gerais State Secretariat for Social Development to improve the delivery of social assistance to survivors of forced labor. Reporter Brasil trained hundreds of professionals in slave labor, child labor and related issues, and helped these professionals bring learnings back to their home offices.
- The Federal University of Minas Gerais had operated the Slave Labor and Human Trafficking Clinic, a free legal clinic for survivors, out of its law school for years prior to GFEMS support. With our funding, they recreated the model at nine other universities throughout Brazil, including key sites in Bahia.