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How US funding built a brittle economy in anti-trafficking [1]
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Date: 2025-06
To mark our tenth anniversary, we are releasing a new feature which reflects on how the anti-trafficking field has evolved, and where it might be – or should be – going in the future. As part of this project, we sat down with Sophie Otiende, Chris Ash and Dr Allen Kiconco.
Sophie defines herself an African feminist, educator, and care practitioner. She is the founder of Azadi Community, co-founder of Collective Threads, and former CEO of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery. Chris is co-founder of Collective Threads, former manager of the National Survivor Network USA, and a Biden appointee to the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking. Allen is an academic and consultant with expertise around violence against women and girls in conflict and post-conflict settings in Africa. She has co-led projects on survivor leadership in anti-trafficking for the Modern Slavery Policy & Evidence Centre.
Our conversation focused on troubling power dynamics, funding structures, and the politics of lived experience in the anti-trafficking space. We also considered the transformative potential of alternative approaches to tackle violence and exploitation across the world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ella Cockbain (BTS): Anti-trafficking is taking a lot of hits these days. Trump has announced funding cuts of over $500m for international programmes on child labour, forced labour and human trafficking. Trans people's rights are being attacked; diversity, equity and inclusion is under fire; research is being defunded. How does all this affect responses to trafficking and exploitation internationally?
Sophie Otiende: Most of the work in our sector is not community-led or movement-led. It is driven by funders, so the impact is significant.
The US government is one of the biggest funders of anti-trafficking projects globally. For the longest time, the sector has occupied an apolitical space because of this. Many believed the money would stop flowing if we stopped saying that human trafficking is a bipartisan issue.
Now organisations have lost major funding, and people are afraid to speak openly about how this is affecting them. Everyone is waiting, hoping the government will be nice to us at some point and send the funding back. As an activist, this is a frustrating place to be in. Funding for essential work should never be treated as a favour. It is just the right thing to do.
The cuts have hugely impacted survivors and communities. There’s been no imagination whatsoever about how to support these communities without this funding. If we were a movement, we could form a collective response. But that's not what I'm seeing.
Survivors are getting hurt the most by this fragmentation. It doesn't matter how qualified you are in this space, most survivors aren't hired as employees. They’re hired as consultants, so most of them have now lost their jobs. They’ve been affected just as much as survivors receiving direct services.
And there won’t be any consequences. We’re not a movement, so people will just stay in this vegetative state until the US government responds. We could come up with other solutions if we bothered to try. But I am not optimistic that will happen.
Ella: Do you think this situation might force people to question the myth that trafficking is apolitical?
Sophie: People know trafficking is not apolitical. Organisations just make it seem apolitical so they can get more funding. They don't speak up because they’re trying to protect their projects. We're also not honest about how this affects people's livelihoods. I'm not talking about survivors here, but about all the other people paid by these funds. It’s not just about doing good work. Many people could end up losing their jobs. All of this is at stake.
Chris Ash: I mentor people with lived experience and support them to work within the movement. Many of them have now been laid off and lost livelihoods as well. Some had worked for years to gain the same respect in the same positions as people without lived experience.
I grieve for everyone who has lost their livelihood. But I especially grieve for mentees, friends and colleagues who lost their first professional job after working towards that for years. None of this is helping us invest in survivors' long-term stability. It’s been devastating for the wellbeing of survivors working in the movement.
Ella: Did this happen overnight, or were people warned about their contracts?
Sophie: It was sudden. People were told, “today you have funding, tomorrow you don’t.” There wasn't even a transition period.
This also raises major questions about transparency from funders. In some cases, it wasn’t clear to employees, contractors, or even entire organisations that they were actually on a US government grant, because there was a donor in the middle channelling the funds. Some survivor-led organisations discovered overnight that they'd lost the majority of their funding this way.
Funders have so much power to shift. We’re already talking a lot about this, but we’re not talking about how it shows up in places like our funding contracts. If contracts allowed for transition periods and showed clearly where the money is being distributed from, then some of these things wouldn’t happen.
Ella: What does the devastation these cuts have wrought say about the lessons learnt – or not learnt – by anti-trafficking over the last decade?
Allen Kiconco: Researchers, practitioners and academics have been talking about these eventualities for years. Now we’re seeing them manifested.
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/how-us-funding-built-a-brittle-economy-in-anti-trafficking/
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