Generating Evidence to Support
the Elimination of Child Labour,
Forced Labour and Human Trafficking
An RTA HTRI Conference
27 – 29 June 2022

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The conference

The 3-day conference organized by ILO, IOM, and IPA will share and promote new research awarded through the Research to Action (RTA) project and the Human Trafficking Research Initiative (HTRI) Competitive Research Fund.

The goal

The goal of the event is to advance discussions among researchers, policy actors, social partners, and practitioners around the world – to strengthen partnerships and explore the logistics of refining evidence on effective solutions.

The topics

The research topics encompass risk factors for vulnerability, assessment of the effectiveness of counter-trafficking, child labor, and forced labor policies and interventions, the socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19, and more.

Programme

All times are expressed in CEST (UTC + 2). Click here for timezone conversion.
Day 1
27 Jun 2022
Day 2
28 Jun 2022
Day 3
29 Jun 2022

Welcome from organizers

Introducing the Research to Action (RTA) Global Research Agenda and Policy Intervention Guidance (PIG) tool

Human rights and legal commitments

This session presents three studies on human rights and legal frameworks.

Advancing a Child Rights Informed Approach to Antislavery Policy and Practice

This systematic evidence review will examine the intersections between two distinct, and traditionally separate, fields of academic research - children’s rights and modern slavery - to take understandings of both fields in new directions and deliver new theoretical insights that will help reshape practice.

Unravelling the Normative Underpinnings of Child Labor in Ghana: A Bottom-Up Study Among Hotspot Communities

Increasingly, research points toward the need to identify the socio-cultural norms of child labor as a primary measure to understand the localized risk factors underpinning child labor and better inform interventions.

Child marriage as a form of human trafficking in Tanzania: A human rights perspective

This research aims to study child marriage as a form of human trafficking in Tanzania from a human rights perspective.

Social event

Keynote 1 – From Research to Action: Improving the Policy Impact of Academic Research

Most academic research around issues such as child labour, forced labour, and human trafficking aims to have an impact on the design or implementation of public policy.

Break

Welcome from organizers

Recent initiatives supported by the US Department of State

Schooling and skills development

This session includes four studies on schooling and skills development in India and Colombia.

Globalization and Child Labour

Expanded access to foreign capital could be a tool to unlock economic growth in low-income countries and consequently many low and middle-income countries have sought to increase foreign capital flows.

School, Work or Marriage? Gender Gaps in Child Development

Using detailed child-level panel data and geo-coded data on agricultural shocks from India I examine how decisions regarding girls’ and boys’ schooling, employment and marriage respond to changes in household income and labor opportunities.

The effect of longer school days on crime: Are kids the victims or the perpetrators?

In this research project, I study the effect of longer school days on juvenile crime and child work in illegal organizations by exploiting a policy setup in Colombia that aims to increase the length of school hours dedicated to academic activities by 7 hours per day.

Breaking the cycle of intergenerational practices of grooming young women and girls into the sex industry in India: Promising interventions in skills building, education, and livelihoods options for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi Nomadic Tribes

Almost 20 percent of victims of human trafficking globally are sexually exploited (ILO and Walk Free Foundation 2017). In India’s sex industry, many young women and girls come from impoverished, low-caste communities, including Nomadic, Semi-Nomadic, and Denotified tribes.

Social event

Welcome from organizers

A Demo of the Research to Action (RTA) Bibliography and Evidence Gap Maps

Migration and exploitation

This session focuses on three papers from Asia.

Modern Forms of Debt-Bondage in Indian Agriculture

This paper re-interrogates the nature of unfreedom in Indian agriculture. Debt-bondage in agriculture has prevailed in India since ancient times. However, the nature of bondage has significantly changed over the years.

Opening the ‘black box’ of protection and reintegration interventions for trafficking survivors in Myanmar: A realist evaluation of World Vision’s Anti-Trafficking in Persons (A/TIP) program

This study evaluates how World Vision’s (WV) Anti-Trafficking in Persons (A/TIP) programming, aimed to strengthen protection and reintegration services for survivors of trafficking in Myanmar.

Understanding Migrant Vulernability to Trafficking and COVID-19 in Northern Thailand

The Freedom Story has been working to prevent child trafficking in Northern Thailand for 13 years, with projects in Chiang Rai and Nan provinces in Thailand, both rural trafficking hotspots with high rates of poverty, low levels of education, and social isolation.

Social event

Keynote 2 – Intervention Development Science: Do we need it? What would it do?

Scholars, NGOs and funding agencies often struggle to determine ‘what works’ to address complex social problems, especially in resource-poor settings.

Break

Welcome from organizers

Incidences and determinants of child and forced labor and impact of alleviation policies: recent evidence from Côte d’Ivoire, Brazil, and France

This session will share empirical evidence on child and forced labor from three countries: Côte d’Ivoire, Brazil and France.

Child labor and learning outcomes in agricultural households in Côte d’Ivoire

Our paper documents risk factors for schooling and child labor in Côte d'Ivoire.

Women and Forced Labour: Evidence from the Southern French Agriculture Sector

This study aims to examine and document the context and parameters that altogether render women migrant workers vulnerable to various degrees of exploitation in domestic supply chains of the agricultural industry in southern France from a Political Economy perspective.

Preventing forced labor: causal evidence from both government and non-governmental interventions in Brazil

This proposal lays the grounds for an impact evaluation aimed at assessing the potential of two types of interventions in curbing the use of forced labor in Brazil.

Social event

Welcome from organizers

Introducing the Human Trafficking Research Initiative (HTRI) and the Research and Learning Agenda

Identifying risk factors and vulnerabilities

This session explores the risk factors for child labour, forced labour, human trafficking, and modern slavery in three distinct contexts with the goal of identifying evidence-based solutions.

Points of inflection: Analysis of the impact of Covid-19 on the vulnerabilities Eritrean refugees face to human trafficking in Sudan

Evidence is emerging that the recent in coup in Sudan, the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, and the COVID-19 pandemic are driving a human trafficking crisis for Eritrean forced migrants.

An experimental intervention using social media to provide access to information and support on illegal recruitment fees and practices

Migration intermediaries play a legitimate role in the efficient matching of labor supply and demand across borders.

Social event

Keynote 3: Evidence will not be enough: How politics bends practice and what to do about it.

We are now in the third year of the global Covid-19 pandemic. During the early stages of the pandemic everything was murky. Reliable evidence was in short supply. Researchers sprang into action, producing a tremendous amount of new information.

Break

Welcome from organizers

Recent initiatives supported by the US Department of Labor

Culture / Behaviour change campaigns

This session will discuss cultural and behavioral causes and drivers of, and agents of change to reduce, various forms of child labour and forced labour.

Social Relationships and Child Labor Migration from Karamoja, Uganda: An Exploratory Study

This is an exploratory, qualitative study of the role of social relationships in Karamojong child labor migration.

Using the Past to Inform the Future: Archival Data Analysis to Improve Evidence for Policy and Practice for Child Labor Trafficking Survivors in Sierra Leone

Child labor trafficking affects a significant amount of children in Sierra Leone; however, evidence of how identified victims are served and their outcomes after social service intervention are scarce.

The risk of forced labour and exploitation that migrants and migrant workers face whilst on their undocumented journeys to Europe

This research aims to assess the risk of forced labour and exploitation that migrants and migrant workers face whilst on their undocumented journeys to Europe.

Providing conceptually grounded insights on modifiable determinants of trafficking-related outcomes to inform a counter-trafficking Behaviour Change Campaign in Haiti

Internal and cross-border trafficking of people in Haiti remains an important challenge, with an estimated 59,000 Haitians living in situations of modern slavery.

Social event

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ABOUT

The latest ILO global child labour estimates indicate that, despite important progress, there were still 160 million children in labour worldwide in 2020. The ILO global estimates of forced labour for the same year show a total of 25 million persons in situations of forced labour. Given the hidden nature of human trafficking, there are no prevalence estimates to capture the full scope and scale of the issue.
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Join us

Generating Evidence to Support the Elimination of Child Labour, Forced Labour and Human Trafficking.

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Speakers

RTA Research Fellows

Natalie Bau

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
RTA Seed Grants

Charline Sempéré

PhD Student, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield
RTA Seed Grants

Naomi Lott

Visiting Fellow in Law and Children’s Rights, Rights Lab, University of Nottingham
RTA Seed Grants

Yuri Barreto

PhD Student, Department of Economics, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

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