Private donors: the pied pipers of ‘modern slavery’?

As the director of an anti-slavery charity in London at the turn of the century, I would have welcomed a substantial injection of cash to supplement the income we received from our members, from a few private foundations and from several European governments. However, in the year that the UN Trafficking Protocol was adopted (2000), I felt we did not have enough technical expertise (despite being 160 years old) on how to tackle all the patterns of extreme exploitation that we knew to be occurring around the world. Nor did anyone else.

During the first decade of the 21st century, I saw the international community groping along a learning curve. Governments allocated more substantial amounts of money than before to their police in order to enable them to catch traffickers and bring them to trial. Industrialised countries, notably the USA and the European Union bloc, provided substantial amounts to international organisations for what were nominally anti-trafficking activities. They and smaller donors, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, also started funding anti-trafficking efforts in specific regions, such as southeast Asia.

However, not enough lessons were digested about what worked and what did not. Between 2001 and 2007 the US government reportedly allocated some $447 million to efforts to combat global human trafficking outside the USA and allocated more each year. For example, in 2011 the US State Department awarded $22.5 million to fund anti-trafficking work around the world, partly to international organisations (e.g. more than $4 million went to projects run by the International Organization for Migration) but mainly to US-based non-governmental organisations (e.g. more than $1 million went to the International Justice Mission for its operations in India and the Philippines).