Photo by fanjianhua on iStock
December 19, 2024
Authors
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Global Lead, Human Trafficking and Forced Labor, BSR
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Associate Director, Technology Sectors, BSR
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Manager, Technology and Human Rights, BSR
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Manager, Human Rights, BSR
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Associate, Equity, Inclusion and Justice, BSR
The third Tech Against Trafficking Summit, hosted by Amazon in London, convened over 160 anti-trafficking and tech leaders to identify priority action for leveraging technology to combat modern slavery and addressing its misuse.
Over the three-day program of policy roundtables, plenary sessions, workshops, and a dedicated tech day for NGOs, the discussions focused on three top-of-mind tracks for the anti-trafficking field.
With insights gathered from human rights leads at global companies, suppliers, anti-trafficking NGOs, and experts with lived experience, here's what we learned about the key individual and collective priorities for business in 2025.
Key Priorities for 2025
Supply chain data sharing on forced labor
1) Streamlining forced labor data points collected by business: TAT consultations over the past year have highlighted that there is a lack of clarity about precise actual or proxy data points collected by business on forced labor. The ILO indicators offer a useful blueprint for business, but they remain imperfect with differences in how these are interpreted and integrated into businesses’ human rights due diligence tools. Too many data points by business are collected with limited understanding about their effectiveness and in a way that is extractive for information holders.
Through a multi-stakeholder convening in 2025, Tech Against Trafficking will look to streamline and consolidate list of forced labor data points in alignment with ILO indicators. A more focused set of data points aims to help business reduce the volume of information collected and requested from suppliers and enable a better tracking and measurement of improvement over time.
2) Bringing corporate suppliers into the conversation on the forced labor data ecosystem: Corporate suppliers are required by clients to provide data on forced labor via self-assessment questionnaires (SAQs), surveys and audits (desktop and on-site). Yet they are not always kept informed about how their data is used.
In 2025, businesses with global supply chains have the opportunity to engage with selected corporate suppliers, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to understand the challenges they face in collecting and sharing data points on forced labor and find opportunities to make the current system less extractive.
Addressing trafficking on digital platforms
3) Building effective information sharing platforms for identifying and disrupting trafficking networks. Secure platforms, forums, or mechanisms for sharing information, such as trends, data, patterns, and indicators, are needed to enhance business awareness of online harms and investigative capabilities. Collaborating with peer companies, law enforcement agencies, and financial institutions can facilitate the exchange of critical information and lead to more effective investigations. Further information gathered from individuals with lived experience and experts can bring additional perspectives.
Through its dedicated workstream on online trafficking, Tech Against Trafficking will bring together leading tech companies to share practices and challenges, as well as information about emerging threats to address the misuse of technology platforms in a collaborative manner.
4) Leverage technology to maximize impact, including via collaboration: While there are limited resources for companies and organizations to address online trafficking issues on their own, scaling up the use of advanced technologies, like machine learning, can enhance detection capabilities and streamline investigative efforts. Tech solutions deployed should account for and be calibrated to the rapidly evolving tactics employed by traffickers. Tech companies can also look to collaborate across sectors, such as financial services and child safety, to share insights, tools, and technologies.
Tech innovations, AI, and human trafficking
5) Engaging end users and lived experience experts in the design of anti-trafficking technology solutions: This includes lived experienced experts who can inform the design and deployment of tech tools. This is particularly critical to scale the potential of technology, prevent harms for those in situations of human trafficking (in terms of accuracy and bias of data), and ensure trauma-informed or victim-centered approaches.
This effort can take a variety of forms, including the involvement of end-users in the design of technology solutions to ensure they are contextually relevant, as well as collaboration with survivor organizations.
6) Building a culture of trust with end-users: Developers of anti-trafficking technologies should ensure transparent communication with stakeholders (especially end users) about technologies being used, including what they are, why and how they are being used, and how information processed through them will be managed. This will likely build trust in utilizing tech solutions and make such technology innovation effective.
2025 will likely bring new opportunities in how tech is deployed to address human trafficking and forced labor globally, including how to inform corporate forced labor data collecting and sharing efforts. On the flipside, tech will also continue to present challenges in how online platforms are leveraged by traffickers. Addressing these six priorities is a good start for the broader anti-trafficking community to co-design context-specific anti-trafficking solutions and respond to changing tactics in a collaborative and effective manner.
“Technology is not the destination, but a powerful tool. It should always be designed and deployed with the needs, values, trust, and lived experiences of people at its core.”
— 2024 TAT Summit panelist
BSR is the secretariat of Tech Against Trafficking, a coalition of leading technology companies collaborating with global experts to help eradicate human trafficking and modern slavery using technology. Explore the TAT Summit's outcomes and for more details about how to join Tech Against Trafficking, contact the Tech Against Trafficking team.
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