Trafficking in Persons: How Standardized and Participatory Country Capacity Assessments Drive Action

Supporting States to address Trafficking in Persons (TIP) in an effective and meaningful way requires a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of their existing counter-trafficking interventions and capacities. Research efforts and external assessments can contribute to this understanding, often providing unique qualitative insights and perspectives.

Yet these exercises can take time to deliver, are often costly to undertake, and rarely – if ever – employ standardized methodologies that can be replicated over time, or across countries, to enable valid comparison. As outlined in the IOM Counter-Trafficking Theory of Change, while pre-intervention planning “requires strong local engagement and systematic assessments of needs, context, resources [and] capacity”, pre-intervention assessments are typically “limited and non-systematic".

For these reasons, under two projects aiming to support Pacific Island Countries to address the issue of labour rights violations and human trafficking on fishing vessels (funded by New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) and the IOM Development Fund), IOM, in coordination with UNODC, developed a standardized assessment tool to review, in a holistic and data-driven way, the capacity of States to prevent and respond to instances of TIP.

LEARN MORE ON THE TOPIC

The assessment tool considers five thematic areas related to TIP (legislation and policy; coordination and partnership; prevention; protection; and prosecution) and is structured as a Key Informant Survey Form comprised of questions that are predominantly close-ended.

The survey is designed to be administered – individually, and in person – with a diversity of key informants, including law enforcement, justice, social protection, labour and counter-trafficking actors. Following this, inputs from key informants are compiled for review and confirmation during national validation workshops, which invite broad stakeholder participation. The workshops serve to confirm country responses to information collected through the key informant interviews, and to clarify minor inconsistencies.  

Infographic outlining the workflow process for the Country Capacity Assessments on TIP

Across the seven Pacific Island Countries in which this exercise was undertaken, validation workshops also helped to promote a consistent understanding among all relevant stakeholders of the countries’ national counter-trafficking capacities. As such, they were integral to shaping the real sense of ownership that counterparts had over the assessments and their recommendations. Findings were directly, collectively and transparently identified by national stakeholders – not by external actors. Consequently, buy-in for the assessments has been high, and this has informed how counterparts have engaged with findings. In Tuvalu, for example, within weeks of the presentation of findings, stakeholders had revived  a national coordination mechanism on transnational organized crime. A few months later, they had developed a draft version of their first ever National Action Plan on Trafficking in Persons.

Similar momentum has been observed across other Pacific Island Countries, giving meaning to the phrase “evidence to action”.

Country Capacity Assessment on Trafficking in Persons reports have been published for Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, the Federated States of Micronesia, Samoa and the Republic of the Marshall Islands and will be forthcoming shortly for Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea.

For more information, please contact Nathalie Hanley, Programme Manager, IOM Solomon Islands, at nhanley@iom.int.