The Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP Office) is excited to announce our new 2020 Program to End Modern Slavery (PEMS) awardees. The TIP Office has awarded the Warnath Group $15 million and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) $5.61 million. Both awardees will strengthen global anti-trafficking efforts to measure and reduce the prevalence of modern slavery and assess the effectiveness of interventions.
The Warnath Group will carry out a variety of activities over the next five years to combat child sex trafficking in two hotspot provinces of Costa Rica—Puntarenas and Guanacaste. Warnath’s breadth of activities will span the 3Ps of prosecution, protection, and prevention, with an emphasis on intensive training and technical assistance for Costa Rican criminal justice actors, government, and social service providers. Warnath’s provincial level approach will allow for a focused prevalence measurement and enhance the ability of the TIP Office to measure intervention impact and the effectiveness of our methodological approach. Warnath’s targeted interventions will lay the groundwork for systemic, sustainable, and scalable impact within Costa Rica.
The $5.61 million award to IPA will support rigorous research and expand the limited evidence base on what programs work to prevent and prosecute human trafficking and to protect victims around the world. While there have been numerous high-quality studies to understand the complex dynamics of trafficking in persons there have been few, if any, projects assessed through randomized evaluations. IPA will bring its unique depth of experience in standing up randomized control trials across social science interventions globally to test strategies for addressing trafficking. This initiative will be ambitious in scope and strive to generate actionable findings and produce some of the highest quality studies to date by working with a multidisciplinary network of leading researchers from public health, law, psychology, political science, and economics.
The TIP Office has made an additional $4 million investment to the Africa Programming and Research Initiative to End Slavery (APRIES) at the University of Georgia (UGA) to expand programming and research efforts in West Africa, as well as support research efforts under the Prevalence Reduction Innovation Forum.