STOP Human Trafficking

Ioana Bauer is the director of eLiberare, an NGO working on preventing and combating human trafficking and sexual exploitation in and from Romania. She has been active in the area of protecting human rights and human dignity since 2005. Besides leading and shaping prevention activities, developing materials on the issue and conducting capacity building activities, Ioana has also worked directly with survivors of human trafficking advocating for better assistance and identification of victims.

Ioana is passionate about fighting injustice in all its forms and is a firm believer in the power of community and collective action. Through her experience fighting human trafficking in Romania and supporting victims, her efforts aim at bringing the issue on the public agenda and finding multisector approaches to counteracting human trafficking and related disappearances.

Among European countries, Romania has the highest number of people who are trafficked either for sexual exploitation or in work conditions that compromise their safety, health and dignity. Not only poverty but, above all, dreams of a better life make people vulnerable to deception and exploitation. Our project aims to identify, mobilize and enable the unobvious social actors to weave a resilient social network of empowered citizens to stop modern slavery.

The project identifies new roles that social actors can play in stopping the human trafficking business and aims to lead a multi stakeholder process of designing creative, cutting-edge tools that empower them to increase safety. Once armed with knowledge and skills the key social actors can benefit from system solutions that the organizations create which give them more formal authority to act. Every person can act once they have the tools, resulting in people caring more about each other.

According to the Global Slavery Index, there are approximately 45.8 million people currently living in various forms of slavery, but potential victims are not prepared to protect themselves and are convinced that this cannot happen to them. Communities at large are oblivious to the impact that human trafficking had on their potential and, for hundreds of thousands of people in the world, the dream of a better life has become the bait that made them vulnerable to traffickers’ offer. Together with the low level of education attendance for people from disadvantaged and poor communities and poverty, these factors make them prone to be recruited by people promising “good jobs” in Western Europe, e.g. working in construction, caring for the elderly, working in agriculture, in restaurants, bars, or hotels.

The Government and Romanian state institutions do not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking. Endemic corruption and alleged complicity in trafficking crimes persisted without punishment, particularly in the cases of officials exploiting minors under the care of government-managed placement centers. Moreover, the lack of enough government funding for assistance and protection services remains problematic, leaving victims without services, susceptible to re-traumatization, and vulnerable to re-trafficking.

The approach to prevent human trafficking concentrates strongly on the need for mind-shift and behavioral change for citizens,in order to co-create solutions. The solution to this complex problem needs to be addressed on citizen level and our project proposes 5 steps:

• mapping the ecosystem to identify actors that can act as barriers against human trafficking;

• identifying groups of stakeholders (private and public) who, when empowered, could be the most impactful in driving change;

• engage the most insightful stakeholders in co-creating community responses;

• create tools that respond to the specific need of a given group, which enables people to address the gap identified;

• create incentives tailored for each group dissemination, including digital outreach to achieve significant penetration of the market with a given tool.

Social actors can play new roles in stopping human trafficking. What is needed is a process of designing creative, cutting-edge tools that empower them to increase safety. Once armed with knowledge and skills, stakeholders can benefit from system solutions that we create which give them more formal authority to act. The aim of the project is to create tools that are by design replicable and easy to use, and explore new technologies and apps to do it.

Human trafficking is modern day slavery in which people take advantage of the control and exploitation of others. The most common forms are sexual exploitation, labour trafficking, forced begging, forced crimes (people are forced to commit illegal activities, such as stealing from ATMs or stores, etc.), forced marriages, organ trafficking and child exploitation. Most of the victims of sexual exploitation are women, the majority being minors. Victims of forced labour are men, women and children. Our project serves the underprivileged, the people with less opportunities in their search for a better life. Because of this, lack of opportunities becomes a root cause of trafficking: people end up accepting job offers or educational offers that seem shady from the start, but have no other option. Working for years in the field, we learned that we need to work in the area of prevention to address the root causes of the problem, vulnerabilities, and traumas that can pave the way for a person to be trafficked. Our aim is to involve social actors in local communities to co-create and co-design tools to empower them to stop this phenomena in their own places.

As our overall aim is to create a social movement against human trafficking we believe The Elevate Prize will help us to scale-up our solution and impact more lives.The tools created in our work were piloted and successfully implemented in Romania and are being piloted in several other countries around the globe.We want to share our approach to systemic change with as many stakeholders as possible,to empower them to raise awareness about human trafficking and take action in their local communities.This is an opportunity to educate people about how human trafficking happens and also to change people’s attitude towards victims.

The idea was to create a social movement against human trafficking and it started back in 2013:instead of looking at certain entities and put the burden of addressing the issue on them,we switched the paradigm to making it everybody’s issue.We used the business model of creating a need for the resources we create,through gap analysis,resource creation,lobbying and policy change. 

First of all we started to empower educators with educational resources for schools:creating a resource that fits the format of a school lesson,getting it approved by the Ministry of Education,including the need for it in the compulsory curriculum through advocacy and then offering the resource for free through the school system.  

Then we approach first responders (police officers,labour inspectors,social workers,priests,etc.)with identification of human trafficking sessions and we create training materials on trauma and the effect it has on both victims and caregivers for both state and NGO professionals. 

The way that this applies in capacity building is by understanding the gaps existent in the system and coming with resources that address those.Simply put,identifying the gaps in the system,creating resources to address them and creating the need for them through either legislative change,or a reward system that motivates the entity targeted.

Human trafficking is one of the worse forms of violence and it mostly affects women and girls across the world. Romania is one of the main source countries for victims of trafficking in the European Union, and these numbers translate in people sold for profit, a lot of times by their own nationals. 

When I was 15, I lost my dad to cancer, my mom got remarried and moved away by the time I was 16. I remember clearly waking up the day after my dad passed thinking that I have all the reasons to fail in life and no one would blame me for it: a teenager left without the support of her family almost overnight. However, I decided that this would actually motivate me to fight harder for my dreams, that included leaving the country as soon as I turned 18.

I did that and ended up finishing my Masters with a full ride from a US university, but just as easily I could have fallen prey to traffickers. I owe a big debt of gratitude and action and I choose to use my accomplishments to help others who were not as fortunate as I was succeed.

Since 2013 when I started this work, I have been a part of all the operations this activity entails: reaching out to victims still in exploitation, working alongside law enforcement for extractions, delivering aftercare services shelters for survivors, developing prevention resources, engaging different stakeholders in co-creating systemic approaches to the issue and delivering mass-scale programs that resulted in more identified victims and better policy programs to protect victims.

Before that, what prepared me best, was my life experience: living in a poor neighborhood in Romania, with limited resources and having to pretend I was older in order to secure odd jobs to be able to cover my expenses and stay in highschool was the best preparation for working in programs aimed at empowering vulnerable individuals.

The time I spent in corporate America, and studying political communication before that, gave me the edge to approach this issue, not only with a heartfelt perspective, but also very strategically and results-driven. Being able to foresee challenges, prepare for resistance in the field and working with a variety of stakeholders is something that I have done already and that I thrive in.  

Making much of little has been a theme in my life: having scarce resources is not scary to me, but a reality both personally and professionally at times. I believe this is one of the reasons why I am able to replicate and scale simple and accessible solutions for large impact. I am teachable and not afraid to admit I don’t know.

I grew up in a typical Romanian family: my parents strived to offer me opportunities for education, cover my basic needs, and encouraged me to follow my dreams, despite the challenges. My dad was my pillar and I remember specifically coming back from school my freshman year of highschool and finding out that he had been admitted in the hospital for pneumonia. After other tests, it turned out his health problem was way more complex: he had stage 4 lung cancer. I was in a doctor’s office, 14 years of age, when the medical professional said: ‘Three months’. In my innocence, I asked if that’s how long before he gets better. The answer was: ‘That’s how long he has left to live’. That specific moment made me so angry, but it was also a stepping stone to the kind of world I wanted to leave behind: one in which empathy is the word of the day, and people cared about all their peers. I didn’t want to have another person go through their world falling from under them just because humanity is so disengaged with itself that as long as it didn’t affect one directly, it no longer mattered.

When I joined eLiberare, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: start an educational program, create training resources for frontline workers and exert some policy changes to improve services for victims and survivors of trafficking. In 2016, our organization suffered a huge mission drift: what was supposed to be an adjacent activity to bring funds towards our main goal became an all-consuming business focus to the founder. During a season of tension, we negotiated how to transition to two separate entities, with a 5 year succession plan and a team working full time on the issue. One Monday, I came in and was told that I have my salary for 6 months and a legal entity, but my team was offered jobs and the plans would no longer unfold as settled. I remember going into the team meeting and saying: I have no idea how this will work, I understand if you leave and choose security, but one thing that I can promise is impact and purpose to last you for the rest of your life. All but one if the team members came on board and we have since then grown exponentially in both size and impact.

Not the case

The idea of focusing on prevention and awareness is something that has been thrown out for a while. However, involving the general public, as well as every sector of professionals is the focus that gives the idea the novelty and the edge: it’s the citizens who have to take action. With three layers of social networks that should constitute a barrier between a potential victim and the traffickers: families, communities, and state institutions, it is vital to strengthen and establish each of them to act.

Our approach identifies new roles that social actors can play in stopping the human trafficking business. We then lead a multi stakeholder process of designing creative, cutting-edge tools that empower them to increase safety. Once armed with knowledge and skills the key social actors can benefit from this systemic approach and have more formal authority to act.

The tools created by eLiberare are by design replicable, which enabled the school curriculum to be tested with partners in 18 countries already. Also, digitalizing resources to where they can be easily ordered and received online solves mobility issues, staffing issues and potential lack of material resources. Thus far, we were able to reach almost 750.000 young people with our educational kit. All this, without leaving the office. This way, even schools that don’t have indoor plumbing, but have an active internet connection can benefit from it.  

Also, we go towards the need, rather than expecting the needy to come to us.

People often think human trafficking is a matter of organized crime and it should be addresed only by specific institutions. And as this is a fact, human trafficking is indeed a form of organized crime. What we are trying to do at eLiberare is to change the paradigm by having the solution to this complex problem at the citizen level. After all, human trafficking doesn’t just affect the victims, but also their families, communities and it can end up stealing the potential of entire countries. 

We believe that every citizen, organization, institution, stakeholder should have the information and the know-how to act when there is a potential case of human trafficking.

In our work we identify, mobilize and enable the unobvious social actors to weave a resilient social network of empowered citizens to stop modern slavery. We defined three layers of social networks that should constitute a barrier between a potential victim and the traffickers: families, communities, and state institutions. That’s why we decided to invent new ways for prevention and early identification of human trafficking victims by reaching in a creative way both the typical actors (i.e. teachers and students) and the not so obvious ones (i.e. beauticians or priests) to strengthen and establish barriers between potential victims and traffickers.

We want to make fighting human trafficking everyone’s issue, by educating children and young people, by building capacity towards teachers, social workers, police officers, prosecutors, judges, beauticians, medical nurses and doctors and other key stakeholders in communities in order to be able to identify and notify the potential cases of human trafficking. 

We do that by creating offline and online resources we offer for free, offering training sessions and presentations and advocating. We create the demand for our resources by offering incentives for each group (recommendations for teachers, trauma-informed care training sessions for social workers, etc.) and this way we create local networks of people actively working to stop this form of exploitation in their local communities.

Our methods bring us closer to our mission of creating a social movement against human trafficking.

We currently serve 700.000 students in schools and highschools in Romania and more than 6500 stakeholders including teachers, police officers, social workers, priests, prosecutors and judges.

For next year, our aim is to build capacity towards more 1.000.000 students and more than 3000 stakeholders.

For the next five years, we hope to educate more than 5.000.000 students across the world and build capacity towards 10.000 local stakeholders who will become ambassadors of the cause.

Our goal is to increase our impact and scale up our systemic approach to fight human trafficking worldwide. 

The plan is to pilot and implement our program in other countries, and in five years we want to pilot our program on 5 different continents, one country/year on a different continent.

We want not only to educate children and young people, but also to build capacity at a community level to identify and notify cases of human trafficking in local communities, no matter where they are on the globe. In order to do that, we will need to partner with local organizations from other countries and understand their legal systems, train them, create new tools and resources tailored to the local contexts.
We want to equip people and cultivate a collaborative leadership space, where we can share resources among the network, share good practices and have a peer-to-peer accountability system.

One of the most important barriers that currently exists is caused by the CoVid-19 pandemic, which changed very much all systems, including the educational and social sectors. With schools being closed, and face-to-face events being forbidden, our work was bound to suffer some changes. We also looked at this moment as an opportunity and started to share our online resources with other countries, which opened up the discussion for piloting our model in other countries, during the pandemic.

Another barrier would be the different national contexts we will encounter, because our plan is to scale up our solutions in more countries. Our systemic approach was tailored to a Romanian / European context and it was successfully implemented because we could adapt very easily to all requirements.

A barrier that often is encountered in non-profit work, is fundraising and how to support financially such an ambitious plan.

As far as the Covid-19 pandemic is concerned, we will work on several scenarios, which will involve the situation where we could go back to the work we are doing, or we can continue working online and use this period of time to empower other partners and organizations to use our model.

This takes me to the next barrier we need to overcome, the different national contexts, and our plan here is to identify as many local partners as we can, build capacity towards them, train them on our methods and offer support and assistance in implementation.

As for the financial support, apart from planning, which we always do, grants and fundraising, we also want to bring in knowledge and empower local organizations to find resources within the community. 

We need to take into account that most educational resources are already created, they just need to be adapted. However, a business plan will be observed in order to make sure we have the support we need.

At international level: Rescue Freedom International, Ashoka, Resilience Fund, European Freedom Network, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

With our international partners we work on several levels: sharing expertise and knowledge, partnering in specific situations that involve victims, partnerships with local organizations and scale-up our tools and solutions.

At national level : National Agency Against Human Trafficking, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Interior, The Office for Organized Crime, Foreign Embassies

With national organizations we especially work on projects, programs and national campaigns coordination, advocacy and legislative work and coordination on specific cases to offer external assistance.

At local level: schools, social assistance offices, the police, churches, hospitals, other NGOs etc.

Local organization and institutions and key to our work, because usually our intervention has a timeline, but the people working at local level stay and deal with all these issues, they are the one identifying and referring cases of human trafficking, they are the one that keep educated the young generation and they have the responsibility to maintain a strong community. Through local partnerships we implement our programs at grassroots level.

Our value proposition is to create a movement against human trafficking and help communities eradicate this phenomena internally, to bring the topic on the mainstream agenda, so people understand the impact that human trafficking has.

Human trafficking is not only one big problem, but rather a sum of multiple small problems that communities deal with. We want to help local stakeholders to fight human trafficking, by offering resourcers and digital tools (online curricula for schools,support for presentations, trainings, an online resource platform) and by creating incentives.

In other words, we create the resources (the product) and also the demand for it, because people want to fight human trafficking, but usually have no idea where to start.

A successful example we had in Romania, was targeting a group of stakeholders that has huge impact in communities, but is rather skeptical about involving in activities such as fighting human trafficking and talking about sexual exploitation - the Orthodox Church and the priests. We managed to train more than 700 priests in our activity so far and we changed mentalities and certain myths created around human trafficking. As a result we had many refferals of cases done by priests and we were able to prevent certain cases of human trafficking because these priests were instructed on how to act. And we have similar stories with teachers, social workers, police officers, etc.

Human trafficking steals the community’s potential, by stealing its people. It’s our job to provide the tools for people to fight it.

Our financial strategy involves a combinations of revenue sources: 

• donations, 

• grants,

• EU project funding,

• offering consultancy to foreign governments,

• providing our expertise on ethical business practices,

• research in the field of human trafficking. 

At this moment, all income is used to enhance and expand the mission of the organization. We usually have a 2-year financial projection, that helps us know our target and keeps our fundraising and income generation on track.

The financial strategy is done in collaboration with the advisory board and engages our president and head of development to identify and pursue relevant income streams.

Our funding strategy includes private donors and project based grants from embassies, national and international organizations.

Rescue Freedom International - $35.000 - grant / donation - monthly giving

Individual donors - $100.500 - donations - monthly giving 

US & Uk Embassy in Bucharest - $20.000 - project grants - September 2019, Jan - March 2020

EU Commision - $9.500 - project funding - July 2019

In order to scale-up our program in 5 more countries, in 5 different continents, in the next 5 years, we are estimating a budget of 500.000 dollars in total. We are already gathering funds for this, and we hope to keep raising money on a continuous basis. Of course, we also expect local partners to reach out to their communities in order to implement parts of the program.

Our estimated expenses for 2020 are around $100.000, this covering all our 4 pillars of engagement: educational programs reaching approximately 1 million students by the end of 2020, 1000 stakeholders trained on human trafficking, identification or trauma informed care and investigations, awareness campaigns with a reach of over 1million + unique individuals online, and external assistance benefitting our partner shelters from across the country.

The main reason we are applying to the Elevate Prize competition is because we want to scale-up our solution, worldwide and for that we need as many partners and as many people become ambassadors of the cause.

As mentioned in the barriers section, we want to find local partners, that we can train and empower to become ambassadors in their communities in fighting human trafficking and we believe through this network and other networks we are working with, we can achieve that.

Another reason why we are applying for this is the exposure to knowledge, expertise and potential investors or donors that could embrace our mission and help us grow and expand our impact.

The innovative environment, as well as the collaborative approach to designing solutions is something that we believe could benefit our project greatly and help us identify new scalability and partnership opportunities that we did not initially think about.

The network that we would have access to would enable us to develop a strategy for market entry, as well as navigate the legal aspects of running operations in other countries. The base for partnerships would be set up by default through the actors already vetted by the community we would be entering in.

Also, the seeding funding from the Elevate prize would help us cover the launching costs for several initiatives across 5 continents outside of Europe. Our model is cost effective, but it still needs a starting fund to secure a point person, as well as basic operating costs.

The partnership with Ashoka would be ongoing and it would help secure scalability and access to local implementation across the 5 geographical regions targeted.

Alliance 8.7 would be another desired partner, as they have piloted flagship programs in several countries in which human trafficking is an issue, and this could be a connect project to be included in their approach.

UNICEF - as we target children and adolescents, as well as dealing with education and empowering actors to act as barriers against traffickers - their reach and influence would help with both visibility and access to communities.

Universities and schools across the world, specifically universities that have programs abroad and that could include human trafficking prevention as part of their service projects.

We would also continue our approach of engaging nontraditional actors, whether private entities or faith based actors with big reach and nonobvious links to the human trafficking sector. We would actually tap into the collective knowledge of the platform in order to establish those.