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went to international organisations, primarily United Nations (UN) organisations, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) received more than 25 per cent of all US international funding for 2013. Very little global anti-trafficking funding actually reaches trafficked persons, particularly in terms of assistance payments for re-integration or compensation. Nisha Varia has observed lack of money for compensation through her years of work on this issue with Human Rights Watch (Varia, 2014). Victoria Nwogu’s article notes that during 2013 the Nigerian government dispersed only US$425 each to 47 victims, out of the 777 victims identified for assistance payments (Nwogu, 2014). Moreover, victim services are not allocated adequate, sustainable funding. Only one-fifth of the entire Nigerian anti-trafficking agency budget was allocated for service provision in 2012. The government has not indicated where the other four-fifths were spent, but one-fifth is a small amount to spend on services that trafficked persons need for recovery. Long-term services such as re/integration are also routinely ignored by funders, as can be seen in Rebecca Surtees and Fabrice de Kerchove’s work on donors’ lack of interest in re/integration and some of the risks of failed re/integration for trafficked persons in the Balkans (Surtees and de Kerchove, 2014). Spending by governments varies according to how they view immigration. In a study by Kiril Sharapov, we see that the authorities in Ukraine view the violation of migrants’ human rights as one of the root causes of trafficking. Political crises prevent them from investing funds or political attention on ensuring that systemic changes take place that are needed to protect migrants’ rights, so at the moment money is only spent on raising awareness of what human trafficking is (Sharapov, 2014). This contrasts with the UK, where human trafficking is seen as a threat from international organised crime and irregular migration, and money is spent on crime and immigration control. Sometimes anti-trafficking spending covers up or justifies other aims. This includes stopping migration, particularly women’s migration. In other places, women have been stopped from migrating for work in the name of anti-trafficking. Dispersal and decision-making Our research has shown that there are also serious concerns regarding the way in which such funding is dispersed. Access to funding is particularly hard for the following groups: • Support groups for sex workers, which often do not meet funding criteria or have conflicts of interest with funding bodies • Any organisations that disagree with the US government’s ‘Anti- Prostitution Pledge’ which groups have to sign saying that no activities will encourage or condone prostitution • Organisations that carry out routine but long-term work such as re/integration and service provision • Small- to medium-sized NGOs with limited resources and capital Trafficked persons have no say in determining money flows. We do not know of any donors or anti-trafficking organisations (besides a handful of groups organised and run by survivors) that directly A i d e f f e c t i v e n e s s a n d t r a n s p a r e n c y consult ‘beneficiaries’ on spending, though some evaluations (and publicly available evaluations are rare) ask trafficked persons what was good and bad about programming, purportedly with the results going into redesign of support programmes. There are many ethical considerations in doing this, however, and cautions are necessary to ensure that trafficked persons do not suffer further harm, actually want to participate, are given the chance to do so on more than a tokenistic level and are not overburdened or undercompensated. Sometimes NGOs and other recipients of funds have little say in determining spending priorities. Nwogu and Hoff report on donors setting firm and sometimes misguided agendas in Nigeria and the EU (Nwogu, 2014). NGOs nonetheless often do their best to find small amounts of money from businesses or by setting up social enterprises for what they see as the most urgent and ignored needs, as Surtees and de Kerchove report from a project in the Balkans (Surtees and de Kerchove, 2014). Anti-trafficking funding, like most aid/development funding, has short timescales. Core funding is rare. And in some places, like Russia, most foreign funding to NGOs is not allowed. Regarding short timescales, in a recent letter to billionaire donor Andrew Forrest regarding the new Global Freedom Network, a blogger wrote: ‘Proposing to eradicate slavery in just six years does not allow time to develop and implement a system of training community stakeholders from law enforcement to health care workers to teachers.’ Conclusion What is needed? For a start, donors and anti-trafficking organisations alike must be willing to be more transparent. The call for this is strong when related to public money that should have accountability to tax payers, but transparency is also very much needed with relation to grantees and beneficiaries. Why can’t we trust trafficked persons to have valid opinions about how to stop trafficking and how to respond when it is identified? The next thing needed is for donors to talk to one another. An article by Randy Newcomb, representing Humanity United, notes that ‘public and private donors are seemingly guided more by internal priorities and criteria rather than by how they can collectively strengthen and sustain the most effective solutions’ (Newcomb, 2014). Could it be that aid allocations are guided by foreign policy considerations, which government-based donors do not want to admit to publicly, yet discuss with other donors? Further, it is important to ensure that anti-trafficking money does not contribute to human rights violations, such as preventing women’s migration. Human rights tools to assess the impact of anti-trafficking measures on human rights exist and should be used. Finally, we should keep pushing for donors to provide more long-term funding as well as funding that goes to sustainable, human rights-based work. References Newcomb, R., 2014. ‘Lessons learnt from 10 years and 50 million dollars of grant making to end human trafficking’. Anti-trafficking Review, 3, pp. 152–156. Nwogu, V. I., 2014. ‘Anti-trafficking interventions in Nigeria and the principal-agent aid model’. Anti-trafficking Review, 3, pp. 41–63. Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2014/15 115


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