In the area of hard-to-reach populations and people in vulnerable situations, there is a need for more high-quality rigorous research on prevalence estimation, victim identification, the effectiveness of anti-trafficking interventions, and strategies to prevent trafficking and other forms of exploitation. Building a solid evidence base on these topics is key to improving programs and investment decisions.

NORC draws on a cadre of in-house international experts and statisticians working on trafficking and exploitation to address the most important issues impacting at-risk populations. NORC is a member of the U.S. Department of State Prevalence Reduction Innovation Forum, where we test emerging best practices and use innovative sampling techniques, such as social-network-based sampling, to measure trafficking and hard-to-reach populations. For the U.S. Department of State, USAID, and the U.S. Department of Labor, as well as private foundations such as Freedom Fund and the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, NORC conducts innovative Intervention Design Research (IDR) to identify key factors that make interventions successful within a specific geographic and sectoral context. In Nigeria and Liberia, we are conducting IDR research on effective programming related to child domestic workers. In Brazil, our IDR research focuses on forced labor conditions in the mining and ranching sectors. NORC’s rapid ad-hoc studies on people in vulnerable situations—such as USAID-funded landscape analyses of trafficking patterns in DRC, Mali, and Timor Leste—provide real-time data on the types and locations of trafficking survivors that enable policy makers to make informed decisions in challenging environments.