Consortium Contre L’Esclavage Moderne (CCEM)

CCEM is an innovative project that takes place in the DRC, a country attracting investment but also prone to modern slavery. This project strengthens a multi-stakeholder partnership to combat modern slavery by reinforcing corporate social norms against the practice. This will be achieved through three key elements: training, leveraging data science to generate actionable insights, and developing a Partnership Initiative.   

We work with the DRC’s largest business associations, DRC businesses, government, and UK businesses and investors to demonstrate that there is a strong business case for operating without forced labour. These corporate social norms will provide a vital counter to the endemic drivers of forced labour in the DRC. 

• Strengthened social norms around the rejection of modern slavery in supply chains 
• Use of data science capabilities to derive actionable insights 
• Increase exchange of information on eradicating modern slavery, between businesses, government authorities, investors 

The innovative component of the project involves the building and deployment of data science tools to generate currently unobtained insights on modern slavery risks in the DRC using a variety of qualitative sources (e.g., interviews with local businesses and survivors) and quantitative sources.   

These insights will be presented to stakeholders (businesses/investors) in a manner that enables them to understand the on-the- ground modern slavery context – an understanding which remains a significant capability gap for the private sector.   

These insights will deliver greater transparency and help identify blind spots, which will enable businesses to conduct more rigorous due diligence and therefore – most importantly – to make better informed decisions around whom to partner with and where/how to invest.  

This outcome will, in turn, support the impact of influencing social and behavioural norms around the non-use of modern slavery in the DRC. To achieve this outcome, Trilateral will deploy its AI platform, STRIAD®, to ingest, process data, operationalise data science models, and generate insights with data visualisations. 

If you’d like to find out more about this project, or our work in this critical area, please contact Dr Julia Muraszkiewicz