Building Local Resilience to Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking after COVID-19: Action-Research in Senegal and Kenya

COVID-19 threatens progress across all the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including target 8.7 to eradicate modern slavery and forced labour. In Africa, where the proportion of workers in informal employment is already the highest in the world, millions have faced a loss of income, or found themselves in situations of increasing precarity (1). Migration and supply chains have been disrupted, creating risk factors for trafficking and labour abuse. Victim identification has become more challenging, as states shift protection resources towards combatting the pandemic. Critical support services from the public, private and voluntary sectors have been placed under significant pressure, and lockdown restrictions have severely compromised everyday service delivery.

Although some states have so far shown resilience to the illness associated with COVID-19, the political, social and economic impacts of lockdown, followed by a likely world-wide economic recession, may be equally damaging to anti-slavery efforts. Our research will therefore undertake a multi-layered qualitative analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 for community-based anti-slavery initiatives in key urban centres within Senegal and Kenya, examining four key questions:

- What factors underpin community resilience against exploitation in each setting?
- How were antislavery projects contributing to building resilience before COVID-19? Which other stakeholders played critical roles?
- How is COVID-19 impacting on the structural issues, legislation, institutions, systems and practices that underpin resilience to exploitation?
- What issues, partnerships and processes need to be prioritised to ensure resilience is developed and protected?

The project will use a peer-reviewed slavery-free communities resilience framework (Gardner, Northall and Brewster, 2020) to explore the multi-layered 'social determinants' and dynamic processes underpinning exploitation and resilience in each setting. Documentary analysis drawing on international development data will inform an overview of the economic, social, legal and political baseline prior to the pandemic. Working alongside our project partner, Free the Slaves- an international civil society organisation dedicated to changing the conditions that allow modern slavery to exist - we will mobilise rapid research access to multiple front-line organisations working in communities in Dakar and Nairobi. We will map local actors to create an overview of the local antislavery governance framework, and undertake interviews with key informants to understand which social factors, government interventions, institutions and initiatives have been most critical to combatting exploitation in each setting. We will use the resulting data co-create pre- and post-pandemic 'theories of change' that will illustrate how an international crisis is impacting anti-slavery efforts at a local level. Our work will build knowledge on the wider systemic impacts of COVID-19, and provide a useful template for researchers seeking to understand and address the effects of the pandemic on anti-slavery resilience in other countries. We will also make recommendations for policy-makers, NGOs and funders on how they can best use their resources to prevent and mitigate the social and economic challenges of COVID-19 to strengthen community resilience against modern slavery and human traffficking. The results of this research will be made freely available through online reports and research briefings hosted by the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab web site (2).

(1) https://www.ids.ac.uk/opinions/precarious-and-informal-work-exacerbates-spread-of-coronavirus/
(2) https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/beacons-of-excellence/rights-lab/resources/reports-and-briefings/index.aspx