Building Communities of Collaboration in Trafficking Corridors
May 2026 GLC Monthly Learning Call Brief
Building corridors of protection and the patient and genuine relational collaboration it requires
Key Learning Points from our May Calls:
Trafficking corridors are not just geographic routes — they are chains of relationships, and it is relationships that can disrupt them.
No single country or organisation can address cross-border trafficking alone. Effective response requires multi-actor, multi-jurisdictional collaboration built over time.
The systems through which people move along trafficking corridors — aviation, immigration, labour recruitment — were not designed to protect people. Reorienting them is a part of our work.
Aspiration is a key vulnerability mechanism. Traffickers exploit the very real and legitimate desires of people for a better life; understanding this is essential to prevention.
Map before you act. Detailed mapping of corridors, stakeholders, and partners is the essential first step
Awareness alone does not protect people. What is needed is equipping, training, and formalised collaborative frameworks.
The work has to be genuinely relational: humble, people-oriented, and patient. Organisational posturing is one of the quiet mechanisms that makes effective collaboration harder.Trafficking thrives where governance is weak, corrupt, or captured.
Introduction
Trafficking corridors by their very nature, straddle different physical locations and jurisdictions, and at each point - origin, transit, destination - there are multiple stakeholders, various positions of power and agency, and a possible multitude of responsible individuals. The question of how to build effective collaboration across these complex, multi-nodal systems was the subject of discussion. However, what seemed quietly but persistently present, as an undercurrent beneath the practical, informative content was a deeper insistent theme: the call to genuinely relational, collective cooperation and the question of what kind of people and organisations we need to be in order to build that collaboration.
The Eastern call presenters, Irwin Jeyasoorya and Emmanuel Wataka from The Salvation Army brought to life a story of building cross-border collaboration, step by patient step, between Uganda and India; and Anita du Plessis from Freedom Ports Alliance took us inside the complexities of the aviation industry as necessary but difficult partner.
On the Western call William Lauderdale from International Justice Mission in Poland and Cintia Meirelles from The Exodus Road in Brazil brought new and revealing information about emerging trafficking phenomena: the rapid increase of Latin Americans being trafficked to Poland, and Brazilian nationals being drawn into scam compounds in Southeast Asia. Anita supported the call with further contributions on the aviation sector that she shared on the Eastern call.
Both calls, in their different registers, one more relational and process-orientated, the other more phenomenon-focused and analytical, pointed toward the same conclusion: these corridors can only be made smaller by cooperation, and cooperation deepens with relationship.
What We Learned and Discussed
The corridor is a chain requiring a chain of response
Emmanuel offered a practically important framework for understanding what a trafficking corridor actually is. A corridor is not a single border crossing but a chain of transit nodes, with survivors often moving through three to five different jurisdictions before reaching their destination. The origin country has information about the survivor's originating context (family, community etc.) but not the conditions at the destination. The destination country may know about the exploitation but has no information about the survivor's background or return options. Transit countries frequently have no legal mandate to intervene at all.
This broken chain is not incidental but structural, and traffickers exploit it deliberately. The implication for practitioners is direct: effective response requires a chain of collaboration that mirrors the chain of exploitation. As Emmanuel put it simply: "No man is an island." Collaboration has to be built with an understanding of each node in the chain, including, critically, the transit countries that are so easily overlooked.
The Uganda–India model: building a corridor of protection
Emmanuel and Irwin presented an instructive and practically replicable account of what it looks like to build a cross-border collaboration from the ground up. Responding to a notable increase in Ugandan survivors returning from India, the Salvation Army began with rigorous internal mapping - of recruiting networks, service providers, survivor profiles, and push factors - before making any external approach. They engaged survivors themselves to identify NGOs working in India, and out of five organisations they contacted, one responded. That single relationship became the foundation.
From there, the process moved through virtual gatherings that built trust, to in-person high-level engagement that built formal commitment, to a currently-in-progress bilateral MOU between the Ugandan and Indian governments. Over 71 survivors have been supported through the resulting collaboration. The key lessons Emmanuel distilled were crisp: map before you act; start with virtual but move to in-person quickly; use survivor data as your leverage with government; document everything, including failures; and do not ignore transit countries. This model is directly applicable to other corridors, and Emmanuel outlined a step-by-step progression, from identifying a first trusted partner, to joint mapping, to staged government engagement, which is worth watching in full in the call recording.
Aspiration as vulnerability
Will brought to the calls a striking and relatively new phenomenon: the rapid and significant increase in Latin Americans, predominantly Colombians, being trafficked to Poland. The scale of the shift is dramatic. In 2022, just under 8,000 work permits were issued to Latin Americans in Poland; by 2024, that number had reached nearly 44,000. Of the trafficking victims identified by the Polish Border Guard in 2025, 98% were Latin American nationals.
Will presented structural conditions that created this corridor - Poland's post-EU-accession labour gaps, the withdrawal of Ukrainian male workers after the 2022 invasion, and Poland's own rapid economic development making it a genuinely attractive destination. Into that attraction, traffickers inserted themselves. A quote from a survivor in Poland captures the mechanism precisely: "’My cousin is making 6,000 złoty a month and is traveling and has a blonde girlfriend’. It's a dream that they sell online."
Cintia Meirelles brought a parallel dynamic from Brazil, where nationals are being targeted for scam compounds in Southeast Asia through promises of high salaries and luxury living conditions, with emotional manipulation including 'love scams', used alongside economic aspiration as recruitment tools. The targeting is sophisticated: criminal organisations have access to extensive demographic data and tailor their approach to specific vulnerabilities.
What connects both accounts is the role of aspiration as the primary vulnerability-activating mechanism. The dream being sold is not entirely fabricated as Poland and South East Asia are genuinely places where prosperity is possible and so the aspiration is legitimate. This is what traffickers then manipulate and weaponise. Understanding this is essential to prevention, because it means we are not only dealing with simple deception but with something that activates the very real and understandable desires of vulnerable people. Prevention has to work with aspiration, not simply against it.
The aviation sector: a system not designed for protection
Anita presented on the work of Freedom Ports Alliance (FPA) on both calls, highlighting factors around airports and the air transportation of people in trafficking corridors. Airports are convergence points for airlines, immigration, law enforcement, ground handling, and government departments, but they function in operational silos, each with different mandates and limited history of genuine collaboration. Governments are mandated to eradicate trafficking; airports are mandated to ensure safe air travel. Between those two mandates, victims fall through.
Awareness alone does not equip airport and government officials to make the decisions needed to stop trafficking. What is needed is a genuine mindset shift which requires recognising that all are there to do their very specific jobs as they understand it. It also requires sustained physical presence, training that speaks the language and systems of the aviation sector, and agreements that are formalised and signed rather than verbally promised. It took FPA four years to secure a government-approved national policy framework for airports in South Africa, and six years before collaboration began to bear operational fruit. The work is slow and it is costly, but it is the work.
An emerging and serious concern Anita raised is the aviation industry's push toward contactless travel. The reduction of human interaction at airports directly reduces the opportunities for human detection of trafficking. Machines cannot screen for trafficking. This trend is moving in precisely the wrong direction, and addressing it requires advocacy at the industry level, not just at individual airports.
The deeper question: systems built for protection require people oriented toward people
One of the things that came through most clearly - in the practical detail of Emmanuel's account, in Anita's hard-won experience of aviation engagement, and in the reflections shared across both calls - is the connection between the kind of collaborative systems we are trying to build and the kind of orientation we bring to building them.
The systems through which people move along trafficking corridors are not, in the main, oriented toward the protection of human beings. They protect state interests, institutional interests, border security, corporate liability. This is structural. But there is a quieter version of the same problem within the anti-trafficking sector itself: the tendency toward organisational posturing, reputational competition, and institutional self-protection that makes genuine relational collaboration harder than it needs to be.When we engage as organisations protecting our patch rather than as people trying to understand another's perspective and work, we replicate, in miniature, the very dynamic that makes the systems we are trying to change so resistant.
The antidote the calls pointed toward is not naïve. It requires strategy, evidence, and formal agreements. But it begins as always with relationship - with going to partners, government officials, and airport stakeholders with humility and genuine curiosity, and staying long enough to be trusted. Emmanuel described it as starting with the facts and letting them do the work. Anita described it as being present, consistently, over time. As a sector, we come to this work because we care about people. The challenge, and the invitation, is to let that care shape not only what we do, but how we do it.
Implications for the GLC
The May calls were rich in new information - new phenomena, new corridors, new data points about the evolving shape of trafficking globally. But the insight that lingered was the quiet persistence of the relational thread running beneath all of it. Building communities of collaboration in trafficking corridors is not only a technical or strategic challenge. It is a deeply human one.
This connects directly to previous community learning - on advocacy in constrained contexts, on sustainable capacity and care for self, on the long view that this work requires. The GLC exists precisely to be a space where this kind of genuinely collaborative, people-oriented approach to the work can be modelled and practised. We encourage community members to reflect on the trafficking corridors most relevant to their own contexts, and to consider what a first step toward deeper cross-border collaboration might look like - a mapping exercise, a first conversation with a partner on the other side, a meeting with a government contact armed with evidence. Is there a trafficking corridor that needs mapping that our members could start working on together? What can we do with this learning and this important call to creative and relational action?
Sign in to the Members Area to watch the May call recordings. If you are not yet a member of the GLC and are interested in the calls or joining, email the Secretariat Team at team@globallearning.community, or read more about membership at globallearningcommunity.org/joinus.