THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
A SOUND OF HOPE FOR SOUTH AFRICA IN THE FIGHT AGAINST TRAFFICKING
/ By Gregg Barrett /
The release of the movie, the Sound of Freedom, while not representative of all the facets of current day human trafficking, has helped initiate broader conversations about modern exploitation. For many who watch the movie the feeling will be that doing something is better than doing nothing. But what can be done that will actually help? I was presented with this question in 2021 by an antihuman trafficking (AHT) NGO operating in South Africa and internationally. Prior, the organisation had been operating at one of South Africa’s busiest airports, and in the course of their work had uncovered systemic corruption and organised crime involved in trafficking at the airport. As a result, their security clearance had been revoked preventing them from operating in the airport. Their cost per intercept was around 300 USD which needed to be reduced to around 50 USD to align with funding. Astutely they believed that turning to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) methods would allow them to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their work, and that this could be scaled without a resulting scaling in cost and headcount. Could there be a greater application of AI than that which results in the saving of lives? i From an institutional governance standpoint, South Africa’s law enforcement institutions are not resourced to the same extent as many of those in the developed western world. Under such conditions trafficking thrives, elevating the role of civil society organisations. However, as with law enforcement, these civil society organisations are not equipped with the optimal tools to enable the application of AI in the fight against trafficking. In understanding the scope and nature of human trafficking in South Africa, the United States Agency for International Development released a first report from a larger authoritative study. Five key points from the report are instructive: Human trafficking is indeed a serious, pervasive, and systemic problem in South Africa, that seamlessly intersperses with other crimes and social phenomena — including gender-based violence,
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prostitution, organised crime, missing persons, irregular migration, child abuse and labour disputes, to name a few. South Africa is not nearly equipped or co-ordinated enough to deal with this crime as effectively as it should or could, and enabling factors such as corruption, complicity, and compromise of officials and other AHT role players is a constant stark background to AHT efforts. There is poor record keeping, inaccessibility of official trafficking data, and the absence of an integrated information system required to collate and analyse specific information. A lack of proactive investigations and intelligence sharing, and a largely inactive national AHT task team, means that evidence of South Africa as a transit country is not proactively pursued with international counterparts. Citing a 2019 multi-country report by the UN, the report says South Africa is a “main destination” for smuggled and trafficked persons on the African continent. According to that 2019 report: “Most Africans see South Africa as the easiest country of transit to reach Europe or the Americas”, and it is “an origin and transit country for trafficking towards Europe and North America, and for trafficking and smuggling to and from Latin America and Asia”. Returning to 2021 in my engagements with the NGO, the first step became obvious. We needed to focus on the data. Data is the necessary input for the training of AI models and their deployment (inference). In North America for example, Polaris operates the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline. Through that work, they have built the largest known dataset on human trafficking in North America, with the data informing real time strategies. Underpinning Polaris is what is known as a data management platform. It is this nontrivial piece of technology that effectively enables the application of AI to AHT. At a high level a data management platform provides the capability needed to store, manage, share, find and use data for AI. A database is not a data management platform. Rather a data management platform is required for a single point of
data ingestion. As the name implies this is to ingest data in all its forms (structured, unstructured, and semi-structured), and with all key data transfer approaches (batch, micro-batch, and streaming). To do this the data management platform provides a highly configurable set of data integration tools that extend far beyond typical extracttransform-load (ETL) or extract-loadtransform (ELT) solutions. In the context of AHT the data management platform provides the operational fabric that enables the access control framework to restrict access to sensitive information at a granular level, ensuring that analysts see only the specific data points that are necessary to complete their work. This ensures that data is being used effectively to have a positive impact, while protecting the privacy of individuals. The platform also enables detailed privacy impact assessments to codify the risks of the data used and the development of mitigation plans. Beyond this the existence of a data management platform more fully enables the utilisation of mobility data, a financial intelligence unit, a research hub, and philanthropic engineering support. Mobility data is needed to generate heatmaps to identify choke points for placing new stations with human monitors to intercept trafficked persons. The financial intelligence units’ purpose is to train financial services and anti-money laundering staff on the data management platform itself, and allows these professionals to share knowledge, information, and best practices in real-time. In addition, this unit is intended to help survivors of human trafficking get access to banking services that they would not otherwise qualify for because of poor credit and other issues related to their trafficking experience. The research hub is there to bolster the data science / AI capabilities of the AHT organisations by establishing collaborations with academia and industry. This includes a data facility to provide key data to researchers, academics, law enforcement officers and others seeking to deepen knowledge and understanding in the fight against trafficking. Lastly, philanthropic engineering support is ...continues on page 34
