Eradicating and preventing slavery and trafficking

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Photo credits: Miranda Penn Turin

You can make the difference between slavery and freedom.

There are an estimated 49.6 million people in slavery today—more than any other time in history. But we are the first generation with the power to eradicate it. To get ahead of the problem, we need to address what makes people most vulnerable to slavery: lack of a fair-wage job.

That’s where your donations will:

  • help families coming out of slavery to reach sustainable freedom

  • prevent people from falling into a lifetime of slavery, and

  • transform slavery-ridden regions into hubs where women lead businesses and children are safe from traffickers.

A fair-wage job is a shield between a trafficker and their next victim.

The Incubator for Survivor-Led Businesses

When a survivor becomes an employer, the math of an entire community changes.

Survivor entrepreneurs know exactly where the most vulnerable people live, who has just escaped, who is at risk of being trafficked next, and which jobs will actually reach them. That ground-level knowledge makes survivor-led businesses the surest way to ensure that every new job created lands in the hands of someone who needs it most.

We are proud to have launched the world’s first incubator for survivor-led businesses, together with Voices4Freedom. Participating survivors already have profitable businesses, but want to expand and create jobs for more survivors and other vulnerable people, to prevent slavery from happening.

The ESA Incubator backs these entrepreneurs as they grow — with working-capital grants, trauma-informed leadership development, business skills training, peer support, mentorship, and market access. As their businesses expand, they hire their neighbors out of vulnerability, recognize trafficking patterns earliest, and turn whole villages from extraction zones into economies where slavery cannot take root.

Catalyzing Working Capital That Creates Jobs

Already-profitable businesses are ready to expand and hire, but lack the working capital to do so. Meanwhile, traffickers fill the vacuum left by the absent jobs.

ESA partners with best-in-class investors to channel market-rate capital into these businesses — surgically, in the geographies where each new job has the highest preventive impact. The result is dignified employment in industries like sustainable agriculture, ethical manufacturing, and construction: jobs that are accessible to people who have never had the chance to go to school, and that turn high-vulnerability regions into economies where slavery becomes unprofitable.

Our Strategy:

Job creation and strategic investment in the places where slavery is most concentrated.

Philanthropy alone cannot scale fast enough to meet the size of the problem. We need the global financial system on the side of freedom.

Nearly a trillion dollars in foreign direct investment flows into emerging markets every year. What if a portion of that investment were redirected toward profitable businesses that already exist in hotspot regions so they can expand, create more fair-wage jobs, and give survivors and other vulnerable people an alternative to being tricked by a trafficker?

Eradicate Slavery Alliance initiatives are:

  • Surgical

    This is the first impact investment fund targeting in-region job creation to prevent and eradicate slavery. While there is some slavery in every country in the world, the majority of people enslaved are highly geographically concentrated.

    By targeting our investment and job creation in these very specific regions (think counties, not states), we reach the areas of highest need with the highest potential for maximum impact.

  • Scalable

    When investors make a financial return on their investment, they will want to invest additional funds. More investors will want to invest as well. The more investment money we bring in, the more micro-regions we can reach and the more jobs we can create.

    Our goal: leverage $1 billion in for-profit investment to prevent and eradicate slavery in the next 10 years.

  • Catalytic

    Nearly all national leaders welcome foreign direct investment. Creating jobs is something that every country wants.

    Philanthropic donations are critical, and at the same time, unless we find a way to also use for-profit investment as part of the solution, we won’t be able to scale anti-slavery work fast enough to stem the tide.

  • Rooted

    Survivors, local communities and anti-slavery NGOs participate in every phase, maximizing impact while reducing risk for investors and donors.

    Integrating these efforts within existing networks of trust builds ecosystems where slavery becomes unprofitable—and ending it becomes profitable.

About Us

The Eradicate Slavery Alliance was founded by Jolene Smith, a 25-year veteran of the anti-slavery movement, helping children, women and men out of slavery in agriculture, mining, forced prostitution, brick kilns, factories, and more. Her current mission is to leverage $1 billion in for-profit investment in the next 10 years to bring jobs instead of slavery to the 49.6 million people still enslaved today.

Jolene was Co-Founder and CEO of the first organization in the U.S. focused on eradicating slavery globally, Free the Slaves, which pioneered the models upon which many other programs and policies around the world are based. She created and co-founded the first nonpartisan coalition in the U.S. focused on eradicating all forms of slavery, the Alliance to End Slavery andTrafficking (ATEST), which has spearheaded and passed groundbreaking legislation since 2007. She is also Founding Board member and now Senior Advisor to Voices4Freedom, which helps entire villages free themselves from slavery.

Jolene was Impact Producer for a film with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mission: Joy - Finding Happiness in Troubled Times, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and has been featured in 71 other film festivals. To help people incorporate the lessons of the film into their daily lives, Jolene was Co-Creator of The BIG JOY Project with UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and Harvard, which has participants from 217 countries and territories. It is the world’s largest-ever citizen science project on joy.

Jolene is joined in the Eradicate Slavery Alliance by a team whose expertise spans the worlds of investment, systems analysis, economic development, and survivor leadership, bringing innovative financial solutions to the fight against modern slavery.