The Evaluating Disaster Relief Efforts to Prevent Human Trafficking is designed to better understand how disaster relief efforts can contribute to preventing human trafficking.
The Thua Thien-Hue province, an impoverished province in central coastal Vietnam, has in the past been a hotspot for child trafficking, with children being trafficked into exploitative labour in garment sweatshops. Late 2020, this province was hit by a series of devastating typhoons causing record breaking flooding. Widespread devastation was caused and 230 people lost their lives.
Child migration is known to be one of the main consequences of such a disaster in this region. In the past, this has been exploited by crime syndicates for human trafficking.
The Blue Dragon Children’s foundation commenced relief assistance programs to avoid child migration, aiming at a reduction of school drop-out rates and the restoration of homes and livelihoods.
In August 2021, Freedom in Disasters partnered with the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation to examine in how far the assistance programs contributed to avoid child migration.
We know that research and evaluation of programs that aim to prevent human trafficking in disaster situations are very rare. We are proud to co-fund this amazing initiative which aims to contribute to the international body of knowledge to better understand how to approach disaster relief and counter human trafficking programming.
To have a look at the Human Trafficking & Traffickers in Vietnam Report (Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, 2021) please click here. This report provides some context about the specific local complexities encountered when working in the part of the world, fighting modern day slavery.
This initiative was completed in February 2022. By working closely with our partners, we collaboratively contributed to the international body of knowledge regarding disaster relief programming in a human trafficking prone environment. We gathered data, obtained video footage from relief recipients and shared the evaluation report with colleagues and audiences across the globe.
To access the evaluation report that was prepared for Freedom in Disasters, please click here.
What we have achieved:
In August 2021, Freedom in Disasters and the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation formalised their partnership and commenced collaborationg on this initiative to better understand programming efforts in relation to disaster relief and human trafficking.
After Freedom in Disasters provided funds for this initiative, the Blue Dragon Childrens Foundation started to recruit local personnel to support the evaluation and information gathering efforts.
In November 2021, the Blue Dragon Foundation utilised our funds to recruit local resources to commence the data gathering process. Locals from the Thua Thien-Hue province were recruited with the help of the local women circle (a grass-roots community network). Over the following weeks interviews with five local families were conducted to explore the effectiveness of relief efforts.
In February 2022, the evaluation report of this project was published, contributing to the international body of knowledge in regards to disaster relief and human trafficking programming. It concluded that the targeted counter human trafficking effort resulted in supporting the wellbeing and education of children, which kept them in school and in their local area, preventing them from migrating which reduced the overall child trafficking and exploitation risk. This report was uploaded to the Resource Hub and shared on various social media channels to create awareness of this successful disaster relief/counter trafficking programming effort.
We measured our impact by:
Freedom in Disasters is accountable to its partners, sponsors, the broader public, and most importantly those trapped in modern slavery. We ensure that our initiatives make an impact in the real world, and therefore design quantifiable solutions to combat human trafficking in disasters.
The Evaluating Disaster Relief Efforts to Prevent Human Trafficking impact measurements are occurring in the categories of:
- Providing financial support to analyse the disaster relief assistance in relation to human trafficking and commission a report which details the findings.In February 2022, the Blue Dragon Report to Freedom in Disasters (Feb 2022): Key Findings related to the Prevention of Human Trafficking through Disaster Relief was published and shared with the international colleagues via various channels.
- Financial assistance was provided to interview disaster relief assistance recipients and obtain video footage detailing their experience.In November 2021, multiple stakeholder interviews were conducted and captured for future analytics. Freedom in Disasters published one of these interviews and added it to the Resource Hub to facilitate international knowledge exchange.