Lack of government investment in modern slavery prevention results in major gap in progress on the G20’s comprehensive national action plans and leaves billions of people exposed to exploitation
Key highlights:
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Plans without funding are political theater, not strategy — Across the G20 and beyond, governments spend about $1 per vulnerable person per year, making the most comprehensive national action plans functionally undeliverable.
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Corporate forced labor is a crime with no perpetrators — Despite an estimated tens of millions of victims in global supply chains, there has been only one forced labor investigation ever brought against a Fortune 500 company, exposing a near-total absence of criminal accountability in non-financial industries.
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Real-time data accountability can work on a shoestring budgets — Uganda’s TipMap platform, built on a budget of just hundreds of thousands of dollars with NGO and US government support, demonstrates that transparent, publicly accessible prosecution tracking is achievable even for low-income countries — yet most wealthy nations have yet to replicate this model.
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Every year, governments around the world publish sweeping national action plans to combat modern slavery, covering everything from vulnerable children, forced labor, and gender-based violence to prosecution targets and victim support. These action plans are, in many cases, genuinely comprehensive documents, and also in many cases, they are almost entirely unfunded.
That is the central finding of the Modern Slavery Prevention Index (MSPI), a new tool developed by Duncan Jepson, Director of Strategy and Operations at Praeveni Global. After decades working across supply chains, corporate law, and financial crime compliance in Asia, Jepson grew frustrated with a sector that was generating more conferences and consultants than criminal prosecutions. The MSPI takes a step back from that ground-level work and asks how governments are investing in this problem at a scale that matches their stated ambitions.
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that there is a big gap between plans and funding the execution of those plans. Across the G20 plus additional countries, total government spending on modern slavery prevention amounts to roughly $1.6 billion annually, Jepson notes. When measured against the estimated population of up to 2 billion people living in conditions of poverty and precarity that make them vulnerable to exploitation, the “investment” by governments works out to approximately $1 per person per year.
Grand plans & empty coffers
The MSPI evaluates governments across four dimensions, which include the context of exploitation within their borders, the comprehensiveness of their national action plan, the funding allocated to that plan, and the measurable outcomes produced. The gap between the second and third dimensions is the point at which the analysis reveals the most confounding gap.
Most national action plans, Jepson notes, look remarkably similar regardless of whether they come from wealthy nations or some of the poorest countries in the world. They include all the right elements; however, the problem is that the ambition of the plan rarely maps onto available resources. “If you see a similar kind of plan in a country which is not providing anywhere near the same investment, maybe only providing $10 million to $20 million,” then they’re clearly not going to be able to build the kind of institutional mechanisms and have them operational to achieve their stated ends, Jepson explains.
When measured against the estimated population of up to 2 billion people living in conditions of poverty, the “investment” by governments works out to approximately $1 per person per year.
This gap is partly a result of how these plans get written. Policy teams include every desirable outcome, every population group, and every intervention type because comprehensiveness signals seriousness. The result is what Jepson describes as a political product rather than a strategic one because it is detached from realities of resource constraints.
The three Ps framework — set out in the Palermo Protocol (2000), which organizes anti-trafficking efforts around prevention, protection, and prosecution — has drifted from being a planning tool into being a target in itself. Governments check the boxes, publish the plan, and treat that as a win. The actual investment required to deliver outcomes becomes secondary.
Many perpetrators face no accountability
Perhaps the most sobering element of Jepson’s analysis concerns corporate accountability which, outside of healthcare and financial services, is extremely limited for criminal matters such as forced labor. Modern slavery in global supply chains, particularly forced labor in agriculture, manufacturing, fishing, and extractive industries, generates enormous profits. Prosecutions against the corporations involved are nearly nonexistent.
The Goodyear case, which Jepson brought to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s investigations unit a few years ago, remains a rare landmark. When he received a World Customs Organization award for the work, the citation described it as recognition for “the first investigation into a Fortune 500 company.” Indeed, the fact that there is only one successful investigation in the entire history of Fortune 500 enforcement on forced labor is stunning in itself.
The structural reason for this, Jepson argues, is that non-financial industries operate without a criminal legal framework wrapped around their regulatory obligations. Banks are required to identify suspicious transactions, file reports, and de-risk clients connected to illicit activity, all under threat of serious legal regulatory consequence.
Modern slavery in global supply chains, particularly forced labor in agriculture, manufacturing, fishing, and extractive industries, generates enormous profits, while prosecutions against the corporations involved are nearly nonexistent.
Manufacturers, food producers, and commodity traders face no equivalent pressure. Their obligations tend to be framed in the language of sustainability and ethical sourcing, which are voluntary, subjective, and entirely company controlled.
When violations are discovered, the response is typically managed internally through grievance mechanisms, remediation programs, and consultant-led audits. Workers rarely have access to independent legal recourse and access to justice.
What good funding and enforcement should look like
Jepson is careful to point out that meaningful progress exists, even on limited budgets. Uganda’s TipMap platform, developed with support from the Human Trafficking Institute and US funding, provides a real-time, publicly accessible database of trafficking prosecutions and arrests. For a country investing only hundreds of thousands of dollars in this space, the platform demonstrates how transparency and institutional accountability can be achieved without enormous resources.
Italy and Germany both earn recognition for aligning their plans with their investment levels and for building on contextual knowledge. Yet neither country has solved corporate supply chain accountability, even though both demonstrate that coherent strategy tied to realistic resourcing produces better outcomes than aspirational planning without funding.
The US import ban mechanism, developed through U.S. Customs and Border Protection, remains the most significant enforcement tool in the world, although it’s still largely unique to one country.
The case for realistic investment
What Jepson would like to see instead is relatively straightforward. Governments need to develop a deeper, intentional recognition that their current spending levels are insufficient, he says, adding that investment in prevention also makes economic sense.
Every dollar not spent stopping exploitation upstream generates far greater costs in law enforcement response, victim and social services, and lost economic productivity downstream. Clearly, $1 per vulnerable person per year will not build the necessary infrastructure to protect anyone.
You can find out more about the challenges in combatting force labor in supply chains here
