Feeling the urgency
Fuzz Kitto
Fuzz Kitto is co-Director of Be Slavery Free, a coalition of organisations seeking to end modern slavery through engagement with business, government and consumers. He believes we can only end slavery when we work together.
As Matt Friedman said in a recent blog – “We must all feel a sense of urgency”
Modern slavery is often complex with few simple solutions because it is a wicked problem - treating strands is not helpful when there are no strands but rather a continual tangled strand. This is how the traffickers want it to be!
Getting clear, clean data is so difficult. We can get our campaign analytics reasonably easily. For instance, our 2022 Chocolate Scorecard - had 920,000 tweets, 1.7 million views on our/partners websites and a print reach of over 22 million at least - but we have no way of knowing how many children in West Africa were saved from child labour and slavery. We continually try and inform businesses, governments and consumers about the extent of the problem but few move the cogs, systems, resources and people to intervene to help vulnerable individuals and peoples. Modern slavery is a systemic problem.
Systemic problems need systemic solutions. It is estimated 80% of the effectiveness in "saving" individuals is in small NGOs and organisations. But small NGOs only get resourced enough (or have the capacity) to solve micro systemic or the local slavery situation - often called contextual anti-slavery work. But most of the causes are meso systemic (schools systems, family systems, community dysfunctionality, localised corruption, crime and inability to service debts or poverty cycles). The macro causes are rarely solved apart from large NGOs who tread carefully around governments and large donors because they need the funding that generally come from these sources.
We were asked last year by a sizeable funding body regarding - why weren’t the small NGOs more effective?
The answer was obvious.
Grants were short term and effective strategies are long term. Resources given were only enough to work on the contextual/local situations and not enough to work on systemic/meso issues and rarely enough to tackle the macro causes such as cultural changes, government policies/strategies/evidence based evaluation, corruption, poverty - all of which cause the vulnerability in local communities.
EVERY TIME WE PUT OFF TACKLING THESE AREAS MORE AND MORE PEOPLE FALL THROUGH THE CRACKS IN OUR STRATEGIES AND THE TRAFFICKERS GET MORE AND MORE EFFECTIVE! Although it is better to build a fence at the top of the cliff - rather than run an ambulance service at the bottom of the cliff - as Carolyn Kitto says "we need to make sure the road (culture) goes nowhere near the cliff. THERE IS INDEED AN URGENCY! Thanks Matt Friedman.