UN Development System and Modern Slavery – Asia-Pacific

We reviewed two decades’ worth of country-level development strategies that the various UN Development System entities collectively agree with host governments – previously known as UN Development Assistance Frameworks (UNDAFs), now known as UN Sustainable Development Partnerships (UNSDPs). These covered 147 countries and regions, between 2000 and 2020 – in all almost 400 country strategy documents. Because these are multi-year plans, commencing in different years and of different durations, we broke them into four cohorts, each covering five years, assigning the plans to cohorts based on the year of their commencement (2000-2004, 2005-2009, 2010-2014, 2015-present).

We examined whether and how these documents mentioned modern slavery, forced labour, child labour, and human trafficking. Our aim here was to identify where references were merely contextual (‘Contextual’); where they went beyond that to identify specific programming or indicators associated with tackling these problems, usually undertaken by one agency or as part of a larger or different overall objective (‘Programming’); and where they went even further, identifying one or more of these problems as a strategic focus, either representing a stand-alone outcome of the strategic plan or requiring programming by more than one UN system entity (‘Strategic’). We treated these three categorizations as lying on a spectrum of strength: thus, if a document included both a contextual and a programming reference to child labour, it was coded as ‘Programming’ (and not as a contextual mention). If it included human trafficking as a ‘Strategic’ target, then we did not record programming or contextual references to human trafficking in that document (though both were there).  We coded each document’s references to modern slavery (including forced and child marriage), forced labour, child labour and human trafficking separately.

The following figures reflect UN country-level development framework mentions of modern slavery and related phenomena, 2000-2020.

Asia Pacific – Modern Slavery (including forced labour and child marriage)

Data source: UN Sustainable Development Partnerships

Asia Pacific – Forced Labour

Data source: UN Sustainable Development Partnerships

Asia-Pacific – Child Labour

Data source: UN Sustainable Development Partnerships

Asia-Pacific – Human Trafficking

Data source: UN Sustainable Development Partnerships

See Data Tables