Year in review

• We launched the Corporate Accountability Seed Fund in July, an initiative which aims to mobilise increased investment in corporate accountability actions led by frontline civil society organisations in Southeast Asia to hold multinational companies accountable for forced labour in their supply chains. The Fund is the first of its kind dedicated to ensuring that worker-led organisations and other civil society organisations in the Global South can take direct action against companies that are failing to meet their responsibilities.

• We produced research, alongside the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR), uncovering the links between lacking official documentation and vulnerability to extreme exploitation.
  The Guardian followed with the story of Esther*, a young woman who received support from partners in Kenya, whose lack of documentation contributed to her having to drop out of school, entering exploitative child domestic work, exposing her to sexual violence and making it very difficult to find a job or start a business. The Kenyan government has since promised to rectify Esther’s situation.

• Four participants in our leadership program, Freedom Rising, shared their journeys of personal transformation, growth and skills development with us in this powerful new film:

  After supporting 240 individuals across India, Nepal and Brazil to participate in Freedom Rising we are now taking the opportunity to reflect and take stock of learnings from the program, with plans to refresh the Freedom Fund’s approach to leadership development in 2025.

• Throughout 2024, we have made grants to 41 organisations in five countries through our Survivor Leadership Fund. These grants provide survivor leaders with the unrestricted, flexible funding they need to best support their organisations’ delivery, growth or sustainability, strengthening the global survivor-led modern slavery movement.

• We launched Freedom of Expression, an exhibition featuring artwork from children and young people who participated in programs to address the commercial sexual exploitation of children in Brazil and Bangladesh. We were honoured to display the exhibition at London Bridge rail station earlier this year, and re-installed it at the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for Human Rights Day in December.

• We convened the first in-person meeting of the Coalition Against Forced Labour in Trade in Mexico in November. The Coalition, led by the Freedom Fund and our partner The Human Trafficking Legal Center is an international network of civil society and research organisations working to advocate for the introduction and effective enforcement of forced labour import bans around the world.

• We commissioned and published an evaluation to understand the impact of our work with bonded labour communities in Nepal. The evaluation found that the program has been successful in achieving each of its intended outcomes: building an active, united bonded labourer movement, contributing to significant government policy changes to address bonded labour, and supporting bonded labourers to increase their resilience through access to government and NGO support services.
  

• In partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago, we undertook extensive studies into the prevalence and nature of exploitative child domestic work in Nigeria and Liberia, and generated recommendations for reducing harm to children working in private homes.

• We launched an inception program in Karamoja, Uganda, focussed on ending child exploitation, including child marriage. Six initial partners are working with the Freedom Fund’s team in East Africa to establish the objectives and activities for the program, guided by findings from participatory research undertaken by The AfriChild Centre.

These highlights are just a small selection from a busy and successful year. To learn more about other programs and research globally, head to the Freedom Fund newsroom.