We are excited to announce that we started to partner with the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation in Vietnam to prevent human trafficking (by reducing child migration) after the 2020 cyclones and floods. The Thua Thien-Hue province in Vietnam has in the past been a hotspot for child trafficking, specifically for exploitative labour in garment sweatshops in southern Vietnam. After the 2020 floods the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation started to work with communities to restore livelihoods, schools and homes. Collaboratively with our new partner we designed two projects which have commenced last month.
The Countering Child Migration in Vietnam project aims to help children affected by the devastating floods. The restoration of homes, schools and livelihoods reduces the need for children to migrate to other areas for education or work. We support our partner to provide this much needed disaster relief. The aim is to keep the children in the local area, reduce the need for them to migrate, and therefore prevent child trafficking from occurring. We are proud to join forces and actively contribute to this effort. Together we are reducing the risk of children being trafficked into sweetshops.
The second project we fund is the Evaluating Disaster Relief Efforts to Prevent Human Trafficking initiative, which as per the title suggests, centres around the evaluation of disaster relief efforts in the Thua Thien-Hue province. Following the widespread devastation and loss of life that was caused by the 2020 cyclones/floods, the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation commenced a larger programming effort to help those in need. Knowing that child migration is one of the main consequences of such a disaster, the organisation engaged with local communities and provided aid. This relief assistance was targeted to avoid child migration, aiming to reduce school drop-out rates and ensure that homes are restored as soon as possible.
We partnered with the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation to evaluate this relief programming, more specifically explore the intersection of relief provision and counter-human trafficking. From previous research we understand that we have globally a very limited amount of quality relief evaluation when it comes to human trafficking and disasters. Therefore Freedom in Disasters is very proud to sponsor specific research into this topic and share our findings with the world.
We will provide updates about these two initiative with our new partner later in the year – stay tuned!