Modern Slavery PEC partner workstrand: Liverpool University
The project explores what can be learned at the intersection of modern slavery and international development programming to inform policymaking on prevention of exploitation. This intersection has historically been somewhat overlooked by policymakers and the UK’s strategy towards sustainable development. At a moment of restructuring within these two sectors, this project recognises the need for robust reflection on what recent investment in modern slavery and human trafficking prevention programming has delivered, particularly for grassroots partners and affected communities.
It builds on the methods and findings of previous FCDO-commissioned research. Including collaborative work that gathered evidence on existing promising practice of involving people with lived experience in international policy and programming to address modern slavery and human trafficking and generated context-specific principles to support improved practice in this area. The project is led by Modern Slavery PEC Co-leads and an Modern Slavery PEC Research Fellow based at the University of Liverpool.
It will produce academic and non-academic outputs that analyse the variety of frameworks for articulating preventative approaches to exploitation within the international development space that have developed over the last two decades.
To do this, the project will comprise a desk-based scoping study of relevant published academic and grey literature, work with strategic partners to identify and examine selected Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) portfolios and an expert stakeholder consultation that will generate new insights about what effective, context-specific programming for prevention of exploitation looks like.
We will explore the wealth of existing datasets and evaluation portfolios which can be analysed to inform anti-trafficking stakeholders’ increased strategic focus on preventative approaches and dialogue with intersecting policy areas. The project team is keen to hear from anyone with examples of relevant datasets or evaluations of modern slavery and human trafficking programmes with preventative aims.
Please get in touch with Tesfalem Yemane at T.Yemane@liverpool.ac.uk in the first instance if you would like to discuss sharing any datasets or unpublished evaluations to support building of the evidence base for this research. This would allow us to discuss how any submissions would be used, what can and cannot be submitted. Links to any relevant published material in the public domain can also be sent to this address.
Project team: Dr Wendy Asquith, Dr Tesfalem Yemane and Professor Alex Balch (University of Liverpool)
