Providing a country by country estimate of the number of people living in modern slavery today.
About the Global Slavery Index.
The Global Slavery Index provides a map, country by country, of the estimated prevalence of modern slavery, together with information about the steps each government has taken to respond to this issue. This information allows an objective comparison and assessment of both the problem and adequacy of the response in 167 countries.
Research covering 167 countries
Surveys conducted in 25 countries, covering 44 percent of the global population
Surveys conducted with over 42,000 respondents
A database with over 17,000 datapoints, covering 161 government responses
The Team
Our award winning team of experts have over 50 years experience in the anti-slavery and counter trafficking sector.
Experts Consulted
The Walk Free Foundation holds biannual expert working groups with academics and anti- modern slavery experts from around the world.
Professor Kevin Bales
Kevin Bales is Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation. He was co-founder of Free the Slaves, and recently published Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World.
Samantha Chiu
Samantha is a data analyst in Washington, D.C. specializing in quantitative survey research and data collection in hard-to-reach populations. She designs and manages fieldwork operations in post-conflict, crisis, and war zones around the world. More recently, she has worked in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Haiti, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Her past projects include leading public opinion surveys for D3 System’s Women in Muslim Countries Project and Gender Research Initiative; and, launching coding and statistics programs for women – including, Women Who Code in Accra, Ghana. Samantha’s past clients include Asante Africa Foundation, Counterpart International, Department of Defense ,USAID, World Bank, and U.S. State Department. She is the past-chair of business for Statistics Without Borders and head of research for Witness Change.
Phil Marshall
Phil Marshall has been working on programmes to combat human trafficking and forced labour for the past 18 years. Phil is currently focusing on emerging approaches to trafficking including work to combat exploitative labour practices through targeting supply chains, government procurement practices and proceeds of crime. Phil has a particular interest in 1) ensuring that the design of programmes to respond to trafficking and forced labour are better aligned with accumulated knowledge within and outside of the sector, and 2) the potential to “crowd out” exploitative business practice through initiatives such as the development of cleaner migration pathways and the promotion of ethical buying behaviour.
Dr. Sheldon X. Zhang
Chair and Professor at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Zhang’s research mostly revolves around transnational organised crime, human trafficking, and offender reentry programs in the U.S.
Jan Van Dijk
Jan Van Dijk is emeritus professor of victimology at the International Victimology Institute of the University of Tilburg, The Netherlands and visiting professor of victimology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is Vice President of the Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (GRETA) of the Council of Europe and presides the chamber handling cases of sexual abuse in youth institutions of the Dutch State Compensation Fund. He is a former director of the Research Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and worked as director for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna between 1999 and 2006. In 2012 he received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.
Claire Healy
Research Officer at ICMPD’s Anti-Trafficking Programme. Claire is the author of Targeting Vulnerabilities: The Impact of the Syrian War and Refugee Situation on Trafficking in persons – A Study of Syria, Turkey Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq (December 2015). Claire has also been working with the ECOWAS Commission on combating trafficking in West Africa since 2013, and has composed the ECOWAS Annual Synthesis Reports on Trafficking in Persons, 2014, 2015 and 2016. Working at ICMPD since 2011, Claire has coordinated research projects on trafficking and migration at the Brazilian land borders for the Brazilian government, and on child begging in Europe, co-authoring a study on child begging for the European Commission. Her study on citizenship acquisition was published by the Portuguese Migration Observatory, and she co-authored a study and manual on combating trafficking for exploitation through begging, as well as authoring publications and academic articles on various migration and trafficking issues. She has a particular focus on trafficking research methodology and the intersection of research and policy.
Pablo Diego-Rosell
Senior Researcher at Gallup currently collaborating with Walk Free on the development and implementation of the survey program underpinning the Global Slavery Index. Pablo Diego- Rosell serves as an external technical advisor to Walk Free and has been actively involved in the development of forced labour estimation methodologies with the ILO. Over the past 10 years, Pablo has led quantitative and qualitative research studies on child labor, forced labour and human trafficking in five continents and 35 countries.
Jacob de Hoop
Jacob works for UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti as a social policy specialist. His research examines how social protection programs implemented in developing countries and humanitarian contexts affect children and adolescents. Before joining UNICEF, Jacob worked as a research economist at the International Labour Organization (ILO), was affiliated with the Paris School of Economics as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow, and worked for the World Bank on the evaluation of a cash transfer program in Malawi. Jacob holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Tinbergen Institute in Amsterdam.
