A fight for freedom

Preventing child trafficking and slavery with UBS Optimus Foundation

Human trafficking is one of the largest and fastest-growing profitable criminal industries on the planet, second only to drug trafficking. And one in four victims is likely to be a child. We work with our clients to support organizations that see prevention as the most impactful place to intervene in child protection, investing across the continuum of public child protection systems, the broad range of community responses, and family support.

Together with you, we can prevent children from being trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor across the world.

The problem you'll help to address 

The buying and selling of people for the purpose of exploitation is, next to arms dealing, among the largest criminal enterprises that exists today, second only to drug trafficking. And it's the fastest-growing, at an estimated USD 150 billion annually. This lucrative trade in human misery operates on the same principles as the rest of the market: supply and demand. And there is currently an incredibly high demand for exploited children.

USD 150 billion each year in global profits for human trafficking

USD 99 billion

of which comes from commercial sexual exploitation

Source: Human Rights First

Slavery happens everywhere

Asia-Pacific - USD 51.8
Developed Economies & EU - USD 46.9
Central & South-Eastern Europe & CIS - USD 18
Africa - 13.1
Latin America & The Caribbean - USD 12
Middle East - USD 8.5

In USD billions
Source: Human Rights First

Challenges across labour, economy and socio-economic conditions are contributing to this growing issues, including:

Weak governance

Many countries and states have considerable gaps in their legislation, enforcement, access to justice or the ability to coordinate holistic approaches between government departments – creating space for complex human rights violations and for actors to operate with impunity.

Socio-economic pressures

Poverty, informality, presence of violence, certain social norms, and gender and other forms of discrimination all operate together to limit options for survival and sustainable livelihoods. The absence of social safety nets, including availability of a social service welfare workforce, affordable health and education services and labour protection, exacerbates these pressures, making it more difficult for people to refuse or leave jobs that are abusive or have degrading conditions.

Migration

Migrant workers are more than three times more likely to be in forced labour than non-migrant adult workers. Migrants are particularly vulnerable to forced labour and trafficking, whether because of irregular or poorly governed migration, or unfair and unethical recruitment practices by ‘middle-agent’ business models.

Global economy

The pressures of the global economy and the demand for cheap products create incentives for businesses to cut costs, often leading to exploitative labour practices in developing countries. This profit-driven exploitation preys on vulnerable populations, perpetuating a cycle of human rights abuses to meet consumer demands for low-cost goods.

How we work

The UBS Optimus Foundation aims to adopt a multi-pronged approach to combat child slavery by focusing on three key strategic focus areas:

Supporting interventions that focus on child-slavery prevention

How?

  • We target high prevalence/high risk communities and work on identifying and remedying the root causes e.g. lack of impunity, demand for slave labour.
  • We support end to end strategies that aim to sustainably reduce prevalence e.g. long term community empowerment and prosecution.

Building the evidence base for what works to prevent child-slavery

How?

  • We fund partners who include research initiatives within their grants to fill data gaps, especially on prevention.
  • We invest in partners internal research capacity and use of data to scale proven interventions.

Filling gaps to analyze investment risks from modern slavery

How?

  • We work to understand UBS core assets and skills and how they can contribute to building investor knowledge regarding modern slavery.
  • We contribute to efforts to define scalable ‘S’ in ESG metrics with a focus on human capital.
  • We demonstrate feasibility of including human capital management as a viable investment consideration.

What are our ultimate goals?

Within five to ten years, we want to see less vulnerability and reduced demand to that children can grow up free from slavery.

  • We want to equip communities with the tools, services and laws they need to ensure they are less vulnerable to slavery.
  • We want to reduce the demand for slaves by changing the behaviour of buyers, ensuring workers rights and representation and see businesses enforcing clean supply chains.
  • We want to reduce the market for slave produced goods through effective regulation in business, by consumers and investors making informed purchases and investments.

Stories from the field

Meet Blue Dragon and Vu in Vietnam

Vietnamese girls and women are commonly trafficked to China and Myanmar where thery are sold into the commercial sex trade or are forced to become brides. Criminal gangs smuggle children and young people to other countries including South East Asia, UK and Europe. We have been working with Blue Dragon in Vietnam to support their work in rescuing children and young people from dangerous crisis situations, including slavery. Watch our reconstruction of Vu’s story and how Blue Dragon are working on supporting communities in preventing the vulnerable from falling into the human trafficking trap.

Meet former child slave James Kofi Annan

When you think of fishing, many of you probably remember the good old times where your parents or family members took you for a weekend trip (in most cases you hopefully went voluntarily). But imagine being separated from your family at age six (sometimes not even knowing how to swim) and forced to wake up at the crack of dawn to support fishermen with various tasks such as jumping into the cold water to untangle huge fishing nets. Every day. For years. This is what happened to James Kofi Annan in Ghana: "I worked as a child fisherman in more than 20 villages between the ages of six and 13, when I finally escaped. I was tortured and abused in various forms. On a daily basis, my working day started at 3am, and ended at 8pm, and was full of physically demanding work. I was usually fed once a day and would regularly contract painful diseases which were never treated. I was first trafficked with five other children out of the six of us; three lived, and three did not. I saw many children die from either abuse or the rigorous work they were forced to do."

Hear from Anita, a former child slave

But there is hope to break the cycle. Hear from Anita, a former child slave who now has the chance to grow up in a safe environment.

Our recommended partners

Here are some of our recommended partners that we are working with. Please contact us for the full list.

Justice and Care

Justice and Care rescues victims of slavery and human trafficking. They rebuild their lives. They help the police to pursue and dismantle criminal networks and bring perpetrators to justice. They secure communities at risk from traffickers and spark systemic change. Internationally, they bring together world-class specialists – including social workers, lawyers, and researchers. Together they work to prevent crime, protect and restore victims, secure justice and bring about changes in practice, laws and systems.

The Freedom Fund

The Freedom Fund works to end modern slavery, working in the countries and sectors where it is most prevalent. They invest in and partner with organizations and communities on the frontlines of ending slavery and exploitation. By partnering with survivors and those at risk of slavery as well as visionary investors, governments and anti-slavery organizations, they bring together the knowledge, capital and will needed to dismantle the systems that allow slavery to exist and thrive. Through their investments and support, they aim to shift power, so that frontline organizations and communities can shape and drive the change required to bring modern slavery to an end.

Jan Sahas

Jan Sahas is a community and survivor centric not-for-profit organization. Jan Sahas works with an aim to eliminate sexual violence and forced labor with a focus on the most excluded social groups through a comprehensive approach of- Prevention, Response, Rehabilitation and Systemic Reform. Keeping this approach at the core of their work, they have developed strategies to address sexual violence and forced labor through- legal and social support, land and property rights, skill development and livelihood promotion, Mental health, and Early Childhood Care and Education. The organization is working in multiple states across India and carries out concentrated capacity building and advocacy efforts with the state and civil society organizations, thus having a national and regional footprint.

Want to speak with our experts?

Contact your client advisor or reach out to our UBS Optimus child protection experts at sh-philanthropy@ubs.com

Sarah Veilex
Program Director,
Child Protection UBS Optimus Foundation

About Sarah

Sarah joined UBS Optimus Foundation in July 2021 as our Child Protection Program Director. She is a 17 year-qualified lawyer, who prior to this role, worked for 13 years in UBS Wealth Management’s UK legal team.

Sarah has many years experience as a volunteer trustee on the Board of a London headquartered charity that operates in Africa and Asia to relieve the burden of malaria and other communicable diseases; as well as an early Sydney based career in HIV/AIDS health education and policy for women.

Wanting to work again in the field of social justice, human rights and health, Sarah completed an MSc in Global Health Law and Governance at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry within Queen Mary University of London, graduating with Distinction. Her major research project focused on the lifelong negative health outcomes relating to violence against children and investigated whether the international children’s rights framework was an effective tool in preventing such violence. She chose Uganda as a case study.

This research consolidated Sarah’s commitment to protecting children, to ensure their immediate safety and wellbeing, and to secure them a healthy adulthood.

Protecting vulnerable children

UBS Optimus Foundation is harnessing the power of collective philanthropy by helping clients combine their expertise and mobilize their capital to fund initiatives that address child protection.

The UBS Transform Collective supports family-based care for vulnerable children as an alternative to institutional care. These philanthropists aim to reform policies and practices to protect vulnerable children, strengthen families, and reduce the number of children living in institutional care facilities (estimated between five to six million children worldwide1).

Want to join the collective?

Learn more