Relationship Between Development Interventions and Outcomes

This page draws on research undertaken for the project by researchers at the University of Nottingham Rights Lab – Dr Katarina Schwarz, Dr Bethany Jackson, Dr Deanna Davy, Dr Daniel Ogunniyi and Dr Hannah Jeffery.

We chose to map the sampled academic literature to understand in broad terms what the relevant relationships might be between different types of development interventions and outcomes, and different anti-slavery interventions and outcomes.  Figures 5 below shows how the identified studies connect anti-slavery interventions to development outcomes (Figure 5A); development interventions to anti-slavery outcomes (Figure 5B); and development interventions (with a stated anti-slavery component) to development outcomes (Figure 5C). In each case, the thickness of the line connecting the interventions (on the left) to the outcomes (on the right) represents the number of times these variables are connected in the identified records. Analysis of these diagrams reveals several things.

What evaluations tell us about the relationship between anti-slavery interventions and development outcomes (Figure 5A)

Data source: Developing Freedom, UNU/RightsLab

In Figure 5A, it is noticeable that evaluated studies deal most often with awareness campaigns, rather than other types of anti-slavery interventions. Very few deal with information and communications technology-based interventions, and private sector-oriented interventions were also relatively infrequent. Even more notably, improved economic conditions were the least frequently cited development outcomes, reinforcing the sense from our survey of practitioners that relatively little attention is paid to the economic impacts of modern slavery. However, against that trend, it does seem notable that where the intervention focused on survivor rehabilitation, economic outcomes were the most mentioned, suggesting there is a greater focus on economic justifications for and impacts of survivor rehabilitation than in other programming areas.

What evaluations tell us about the relationship between development interventions and anti-slavery outcomes (Figure 5B)

Data source: Developing Freedom, UNU/RightsLab

In Figure 5B, we see that the type of development intervention most frequently linked to anti-slavery outcomes in the identified literature relates to education and skills. By contrast, economic programming is the least mentioned. Also notable is that the outcomes most often cited – Increased Awareness and Improved Institutional Frameworks – are both preventive.

What evaluations tell us about the relationship between development interventions and development outcomes (Figure 5C)

Data source: Developing Freedom, UNU/RightsLab

Figure 5C deals with development interventions (with a stated anti-slavery objective) and looks at how they are linked to development outcomes. Here, interventions are seen as being connected fairly evenly to a broad range of outcomes, with no obvious clustering. Again, however, the focus is on education and social protection outcomes – with less focus on economic benefits.

This mapping gives us a sense of the broad contours of how connections between anti-slavery efforts and development efforts are understood in the analytic literature. They suggest that programmers and developers see ties between anti-slavery efforts and development efforts focused on education and social protection. However, whereas the SDGs frame efforts to address modern slavery squarely in terms of promoting decent work (SDG 8), there has been comparatively little focus in the research literature on the connections between anti-slavery efforts and the economic aspects of development interventions. And almost no focus – at least in the ‘development’ literature – on the relationship between anti-slavery efforts and environmental outcomes.