Partnering with Companies to Counter Human Trafficking in Thailand

Key Results

• Partnership to Support Fair Labor at Sea – Through both the USAID Thailand CTIP project and the USAID Asia CTIP regional project, Resonance helped broker, develop, and implement a partnership with leading global pet care provider, Mars Petcare. The partners seek to reduce labor exploitation in the seafood supply chain in Thailand and beyond. Partnership activities focus on improving worker voice on fishing vessels at sea, building industry capacity for responsible recruitment, and facilitating broader engagement among private sector, government, and civil society stakeholders.
• Sustainable Sugarcane Partnership – Resonance helped broker, develop, and implement a partnership to pilot FairAgora Asia’s Verifik8 technology to improve worker voice and wellbeing, increase labor transparency, and promote fair recruitment practices within Thailand’s sugarcane industry. Through this collaboration, USAID Thailand CTIP is supporting the social enterprise FairAgora Asia as it adds new social metric features to Verifik8, a sustainability analytics platform traditionally used to help farms measure environmental sustainability performance. These additions will allow the tool to measure labor standards and worker wellbeing at the farm level. The partners will pilot the new version of the tool in sugar mills and farms in Thailand that source to large global buyers. Collaborating partners include a range of stakeholders involved in the production and sale of sugarcane in Thailand, from smallholder farms and sugar processing mills to large global food and beverage companies.  
• Rapid Partnership Appraisal (RPA) – Early in the project, Resonance led a robust mapping exercise to identify opportunities for partnerships that leverage private sector influence, skills, and resources to achieve greater impact and sustainability for counter trafficking efforts in Thailand. The team conducted interviews with 26 companies, business associations, NGOs, and government agencies, and identified six partnership opportunities. 
• Developing Capacity and Sharing Learnings around PSE for CTIP – To develop the capacity of local actors and others who work to combat human trafficking in Thailand, Resonance provided technical assistance focused on PSE and partnership development. We also developed and disseminated knowledge and learnings related to PSE for countering trafficking in persons (CTIP). Examples include:
  
  • We led PSE capacity development sessions for local NGOs who help combat human trafficking across Thailand;
  • We shared key learnings on PSE for countering human trafficking through a webinar hosted by Freedom Collaborative, an online community platform that unites stakeholders engaged in CTIP efforts worldwide. Titled “Engaging the Private Sector for CTIP (Lessons Learned, Considerations and Partnerships),” the webinar encouraged discourse on meaningful PSE and partnerships to combat labor trafficking;
  • We developed PSE-related resources, guidance documents, and tools designed to increase the knowledge and capacity of NGOs, government, and other critical stakeholders in Thailand to collaborate effectively with the private sector on counter-trafficking issues.