05/02/2025
We are excited to present our new Participatory Research report titled, “PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH WITH ANIRBAN: Survivor-led Organizing for Empowerment and Changing Systems that Drive Trafficking in Persons” funded by the USAID Asia CTIP, Winrock International.
HRC and the Asia CTIP team collaborated to conduct this research in Bangladesh with the survivor-led group called ANIRBAN. ANIRBAN was established in 2011 with the help of Winrock International and USAID with a group of trafficking survivors from across Bangladesh. In 2023, we worked with mainly two main ANIRBAN branches - Jashore and Cox’s Bazar branches. This research was completely different from traditional research. We spent 6 full weeks in the field with these two branches and worked with more than 20 survivor leaders to understand them and their organisational work and capabilities and how they are doing excellent work in combating human trafficking, promoting safe migration, and preventing child marriage within the country. These survivor groups have existed for more than a decade, but they are still not a self-sustaining organisation. The research was carried out in a fully participatory way. We created space for the participants to direct the project activities toward their own empowerment goals, and we all learnt lessons together.
We learnt from this study that survivor leadership transcends mere inclusion; it involves redistributing power dynamics, enhancing personal agency, and empowering survivors to develop solutions deeply rooted in their unique social and economic contexts. In this project, by taking a highly relational approach and working directly with the ANIRBAN survivor leaders, we were able both to document the value of their organising work and to help strengthen their organising capacities to continue targeting key mechanisms that otherwise would tend to keep recreating and reinforcing harmful system dynamics. In this way, we show that partnering for joint organising has incredible potential to lead to sustainable change.
We would like to thank USAID Asia CTIP Winrock International and all the survivors and stakeholders who participated in this research.
We invite anyone looking to meaningfully engage with survivors in counter-trafficking programs to read the full report here: https://www.humanity-consultancy.com/publications/participatory-research-with-anirban-survivor-led-organizing-for-empowerment-and-changing-systems-that-drive-trafficking-in-persons
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