The challenge

Right now, an estimated 40 million people are trapped in modern slavery. However, given the hidden nature of human trafficking, it is almost impossible to understand the full scope and scale of the issue, and those at risk remain hard to identify and difficult to reach. Stop The Traffik (STT) seek to put an end to this through raising awareness and gathering data-led insights to create personalised prevention campaigns.

The approach

By combining data collected from global human traffic stories with advanced analytics techniques, an innovative tool was created, harnessing the power of data to support STT’s prevention campaigns.  

This tool uses the data on historical human trafficking incidents to identify hidden patterns and give insights about likely victims, so that STT can act fast with social media campaigns, targeting more accurately to help prevent potential new incidents from occurring.

The data-driven human trafficking incident tool was created within a PowerBI dashboard, which includes visualisations of the data but is also powered by bespoke machine learning techniques to create a picture of the most likely trafficking scenarios. 

The outcome

This tool is game-changing for STT, as through machine learning algorithms, members of STT’s team are now able to identify patterns and trends for incidents with characteristics which may not be clearly represented in the collected data. This increases the effectiveness of the social media prevention campaigns, by improving messaging targeting and increasing the impact and reach of STT’s work.