Hundreds of millions of people in India are at risk of falling into various forms of exploitation. The Global Slavery Index considers India to be the most-affected country in the world in terms of exploitation. Young girls are particularly at risk of sex trafficking or forced marriage, and men are regularly exploited in manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Conflict, climate shocks, and economic volatility are all simultaneously driving impoverishment and migration, and thus putting more and more families at risk.

Arise began working in India in 2016, making it our longest-running permanent office. Since 2016, Arise has facilitated 116 projects - reaching over 136,000 vulnerable people - and supported over 24,000 anti-slavery actors with training and network development activities. Joint programmes with groups across the network facilitate remedial education, skills training, access to state services, awareness sessions, community groups, and safe migration pathways for at-risk families. These interventions are tailored to local needs, and decided on after consultation with local communities, who understand the specific local exploitation and trafficking threats.

Arise has also enabled cross-sector collaboration, research and data collection and rehabilitation of survivors through this work with the frontline in India. All of the locally-led supported projects have been delivered in partnership with frontline groups, many of whom are run by Catholic sisters.

In 2018 entered a partnership with the AMRAT (Asian Movement of Women Religious against Trafficking). Today, the network is composed of over 40 frontline groups across 19 regions. Sisters are at the forefront of this vital and necessary work, they have strong relationships with communities and are able to build trust to enable long-term, sustainable change in people’s lives.

We want to increase the impact of frontline work in India through further capacity building and network activities across 5 regions.

We want to support frontline groups from more remote regions of the country working to prevent forced marriage, sex trafficking and forced and child labour through more accompanied projects, training, network conferences, and opening access to funding.

We will oversee the roll out and use of the MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning) App, which will allow anti-slavery programmes to record impact and share intelligence in real time.