Put anti-slavery efforts at the heart of development work

It goes without saying that ending modern slavery should be a priority, with no justification needed.

More than 40 million people were enslaved in 2016, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery suggests this number has probably grown due to the coronavirus pandemic. Despite this, the issue is largely ignored by the global development sector and siloed off from key aspects of the UN sustainable development system.

Our study, Developing Freedom, found that anti-slavery efforts directly contribute to over 60 per cent of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet, most development practitioners surveyed in the research said that their organisations see modern slavery, forced labour, and human trafficking as social or criminal justice concerns, not core economic, trade, or industrial policy concerns. Modern slavery is more likely to be seen as a project management risk to be safeguarded against, rather than a target for strategic programming, lending, or policy advice.

As a result, we may be missing significant opportunities for growth and development provided by fighting slavery.

It goes without saying that ending modern slavery should be a priority, with no justification needed. Yet without a strong case for integrating anti-slavery efforts into global development practice, investment and engagement by development actors seem likely to remain limited.

Between 2000 and 2017, just $12 in official development assistance was committed to anti-slavery efforts per victim annually. At the UN, just 1.3 per cent of all country-level development frameworks between 2000 and 2020 involved joint anti-slavery programming by more than one UN agency, often a sign of the system’s commitment to an issue. What programming is rolled out and where has depended on which UN entity is involved. Most anti-slavery programming at the national level is either criminal justice-oriented, led by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, or labour policy-oriented, led by the ILO. Since there is no UN operational entity addressing “modern slavery” or “slavery”, such programming is rare. Integrated programming has in fact become less likely over time.

There is a systemic cause for this. The development sector has a blind spot on slavery because it fails to recognise that slaves are denied their economic agency. Individual agency is a presumption of contemporary economic theory and development economics. Even the human development approach pioneered by Amartya Sen in his seminal book Development as Freedom assumes people have agency, through which they can develop their own capabilities.

Yet enslaved people’s agency is deeply compromised, if not removed entirely. They cannot control to whom they sell their labour, and often have their consumption, savings, and investment choices constrained. This has many spillover effects, from reduced productivity and innovation to weakening governance, fueling corruption and exacerbating environmental harm. We have identified 10 different ways that slavery drags on development.

Since slavery impedes development, it follows that fighting modern slavery will contribute to sustainable development. We suggest that ending slavery can unleash significant economic growth. Researchers at the International Monetary Fund recently found that eliminating child marriage—just one element of modern slavery covered by target 8.7 of the SDGs—would offer growth of 1.05 percent GDP per capita.

Looking at all the SDGS, efforts to fight slavery connect to 113 of 179 of their targets (63 per cent). Fighting slavery connects especially to targets in SDGs 1 (poverty), 4 (education), 8 (decent work), 13 (climate), and 16 (peace, justice, institutions).

There are illustrative examples of how anti-slavery efforts in various global value chains have contributed to development. In Brazil, for example, government efforts have freed over 55,000 people from enslavement since 1995 and have generated innovations tying access to development finance to sustainable supply-chain management. And in countries such as Qatar, Thailand, and Uzbekistan, engagement by the ILO, development partners, and private sector organizations has helped foster labor market reforms offering greater protection and support for worker agency.

What can be done to scale up the lessons from these countries? Based on an analysis of development practice, there are five key areas.