Fighting Human Trafficking (#1) – Summary of Report

In India, the rate of convictions for human trafficking is low and the scale of the problem is increasing. There is a breakdown in relationships between police and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in many areas, and trust between the two parties is suffering. The proportion of incidents being reported to police is small. The morale of police in the Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTUs) is declining, and retention and recruitment are suffering as a result, further constraining the resources available.

The problem of human trafficking is not specific to India; the scale of the problem is enormous, and spans both regional and international borders. A significant root cause of the problem is generally agreed to be related to the large and ready supply of potential victims, which is caused by poverty, illiteracy and a lack of educational awareness. This is especially true in India.

The Government of India is taking bold and decisive steps on many fronts, but the business cases and evidence to support decision making, legislation and policy are inadequate, leading to misalignment at the strategic level, which cascades down to misalignment at the local, tactical levels. The tools and evidence needed to formulate, and align on, a cohesive strategy to tackle the problem in a top-down approach are lacking.

I travelled to India as part of the Kalinga Fellowship and worked with a wide range of stakeholders including survivors, government representatives (India, UK and the US), law enforcement agencies, front-line NGOs, and several technology providers working in the domain. As part of my report, I recommended a clear set of steps to be taken in using technology to help combat human trafficking. The underlying principle of the subsequent recommendations is that the problem of human trafficking must be tackled ‘top-down’ rather than ‘bottom-up’.

This blog post provides a very high-level summary of my report, published on behalf of the Kalinga Fellowship. Other blog posts in this series provide some of the related material and findings. The full report is available from Jambuzi on request.

Artificial Intelligence

With the recent advances in cloud-based technology and AI, we are now at a time in history where it’s possible for all stakeholders to work together collaboratively and effectively on a global scale with unstructured data. The analytics, which are possible through such collaboration with a cloud-based AI platform, are more powerful today than ever before. Many of the insights and challenges (detailed separately in the full published report) can now be addressed through the adoption of appropriate technology.

Since more and more industries are rapidly adopting AI and cloud-based technology to address commercial and operational areas, the advance of cloud-based platforms and AI will continue to accelerate. An anti-human trafficking platform can and must benefit from the same emerging technology.

Traffik Analysis Hub (TA Hub)

One of the primary technological tools I recommended for tackling this in a top-down approach is Traffik Analysis Hub (TA Hub), which has been reviewed by a diverse cross section of the Kalinga Fellowship. It is a cloud based artificial intelligence platform, focussed purely on the domain of fighting human trafficking. It provides empirical information to all stakeholders involved, from the Government to NGOs. Instead of relying on estimates, those stakeholders can then use data-driven intelligence to perform their respective functions more effectively, and to collaborate with each other more openly.

The Kalinga Fellowship’s review of the platform was extremely positive, and it shows a strong correlation with addressing the findings in the published report. No other solution has been identified which compares to the strengths of the TA Hub in this respect.

The existing TA Hub community is already growing throughout Africa, North America and South America. At the time of the Kalinga Fellowship’s workshop in Delhi in December 2019, the number of incidents in the TA Hub system was at about 110,000 incidents. They would like as many people as possible to join their growing community and are specifically hoping to engage with the anti-human trafficking community in India. The fight against human trafficking in India would benefit immensely from the evolving global picture. Scaling the data in India will allow the community to get a better picture of what’s happening on the ground and, ultimately, to implement more effective policies and initiatives to combat trafficking.

Three technological phases are outlined.

• Phase 1 implements a shared, cloud-based artificial intelligence platform, providing the visibility needed by all stakeholders to:

  • Drive strategic decision making and improvements in anti-human trafficking initiatives.

  • Remove the supply of money from the trafficking criminal networks.

  • Foster greater collaboration between parties.

• Phase 2 implements a private version of the platform for each relevant organisation, hosted within their own IT environments, and augmented with their own data from their own existing systems. This will provide more powerful investigative analysis of individual cases, as well as identifying the relationships between those cases.

• Phase 3 increases the power of all versions of the platform implemented in phases 1 and 2 with more advanced predictive analytics.

The steps outlined within phase 1 can begin immediately, and many of the individuals who would be assigned the actions described, have already expressed enthusiasm for getting started as soon as possible.

Costs / funding

In the longer-term, subscription to the platform will be free for NGOs. In fact, the vision is that NGOs will receive financial rewards from the TA Hub for submitting data to the platform and the community. The development of the platform and the NGO rewards scheme will be funded, instead, by subscription fees, paid by financial institutions and commercial industry organisations in return for empirical data, which they use to achieve their goals for ethical standards, corporate social responsibility (CSR) targets, and legal compliance. This is already a proven model in other countries and will continue with roll out in India.

This model of funding is not yet viable though. In the meantime, certain ‘broker’ NGOs will be required to pay a very small annual fee of £100 GBP (or ₹9,234 INR at the time of writing). This subscription fee is in place to help qualify the early partners; it helps to verify them as genuine NGOs operating in the human trafficking domain.

Over the last 3 years since its inception, IBM have supported the development of the TA Hub both financially and technologically. They have already invested over $500,000, but the TA Hub must become a financially self-sustaining entity. The TA Hub team aims to be financially self-sustaining by the middle of 2020.

The TA Hub is now established as an independent NGO. With IBM’s initial investment, the TA Hub team has built the platform and released it to production. Now, with a live system delivering real value in many countries, they are beginning to fund the ongoing work through subscriptions. The first subscriptions have already begun.

A challenge for the TA Hub team is now securing the financial resources needed to drive this system to achieving its full potential. The technical team is small and comprises John McGrath and 3 other developers. There are many clear steps for the ongoing development of the platform, but development capacity is at its limit. The small development team are now prioritising from a large backlog. With more resources, they could go faster.

So far, the TA Hub have been approached by about 15 financial services institutions who would like to sign up to the service. As financial services institutions they will pay up to £20k GBP per annum each for their membership. For the non-financial institutions, progress is being made with several large corporations. These too will pay up to £20k GBP per annum for their membership subscription.

About the Kalinga Fellowship

The Kalinga Fellowship is a global programme that brings together the most progressive leaders from business, government and civil society to facilitate a breakthrough in thinking and strategy on Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG5), “Gender Equality”, impacting millions of lives.

It was formed through a partnership between FXB Suraksha, the Kalinga Institute, the Bridge Institute, Sewa International, Prajwala, Bridge and UN Women.

The Fellowship is a ten-year commitment, which started in 2017. It began in the State of Orissa and then spread to the State of Telangana and, more recently, across all of India. The 2017 and 2018 Fellowships were focussed on combatting gender-based violence. The focus of the third Fellowship, which launched in Delhi in December 2019, is in combatting the trafficking of women and children.