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40.3 million slaves? Four reasons to question the new Global Estimates of Modern Slavery

The new slavery estimates will guide international policy for years to come, which is why we need to start taking their data limitations seriously.

By Daniel Mügge
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Owen Lin/Flickr. CC (by-nc-nd)

Four years ago the Walk Free Foundation (Walk Free) published the first ever Global Slavery Index (GSI), with the goal of spurring the international community to action by quantifying human exploitation. For an issue to exist, Bill Gates apparently advised Walk Free’s founder Andrew Forrest, it must be measurable. And if something can be measured, so can the world’s progress be towards eliminating it.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0