IPA's Human Trafficking Research Initiative (HTRI), funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Program to End Modern Slavery (PEMS), was launched in 2020 to address a critical gap in global anti-trafficking efforts: the lack of rigorous evidence on which programmatic approaches drive meaningful change. Over the past five years, HTRI has funded and supported researchers and implementing partners to build a robust evidence base by designing and testing interventions that are effective, ethical, and policy-relevant.

Our "Evidence for Impact: Insights from the Human Trafficking Research Initiative" brief looks back on learnings from 25 projects that HTRI has funded to date—10 exploratory seed studies, 7 pilot evaluations, and 8 full-scale randomized evaluations across 17 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East—to examine which types of interventions proved to be most successful, and under what conditions. For policymakers, practitioners, donors, and researchers, these findings can help guide efforts toward designing and implementing interventions with the strongest potential for effectiveness, and avoiding those that fail to deliver.