(Disclaimer the following is my initial impressions based on 2 minutes of Googling, cannot promise accuracy)
Scale – 400k-1million people are in slavery in the DRC. They lead horrendous lives suffer a myriad of terrible health conditions and are not free. The number is huge, more than die of Malaria each year, more than die of AIDs each year. EAs have looked into US criminal justice but there might be nearly as many slaves in the DRC as there are prisoners in the US and ALL of them are being held unjustly and likely suffer in many more ways than US prisoners.
Tractability – the animal welfare movement has over the last decade, developing a host of evidence based tools that have lead to win after win for animal welfare. In particular we have a playbook for targeted corporate campaigns and have been immensely successful at driving corporates to commit to ethical practices. Most of the products of slavery in the Congo are used by Western companies that could be pressured to change. In many ways this should be even easier than the case for animals as people care more about humans than animals.
Neglectedness – No body seems to be doing this (based on my 1min of Googling). The anti-slavery space seems very very focused on a slavery in HICs (like trafficking to the US or the UK) and not on the Congo. It is talked about but I did not find any targeted campaigns.
30 second BOTEC – Number of years a corporate campaign program would need to run that could end 75% of slavery in the Congo x cost per year /​ 75% x number of slaves * a best guess DALY burden of life in slavery = ( 10 x $2,000,000 ) /​ ( 75% x 700,000 x 12.5 ) = $3/​DALY
My entry:
Modern slavery
(Disclaimer the following is my initial impressions based on 2 minutes of Googling, cannot promise accuracy)
Scale – 400k-1million people are in slavery in the DRC. They lead horrendous lives suffer a myriad of terrible health conditions and are not free. The number is huge, more than die of Malaria each year, more than die of AIDs each year. EAs have looked into US criminal justice but there might be nearly as many slaves in the DRC as there are prisoners in the US and ALL of them are being held unjustly and likely suffer in many more ways than US prisoners.
Tractability – the animal welfare movement has over the last decade, developing a host of evidence based tools that have lead to win after win for animal welfare. In particular we have a playbook for targeted corporate campaigns and have been immensely successful at driving corporates to commit to ethical practices. Most of the products of slavery in the Congo are used by Western companies that could be pressured to change. In many ways this should be even easier than the case for animals as people care more about humans than animals.
Neglectedness – No body seems to be doing this (based on my 1min of Googling). The anti-slavery space seems very very focused on a slavery in HICs (like trafficking to the US or the UK) and not on the Congo. It is talked about but I did not find any targeted campaigns.
30 second BOTEC – Number of years a corporate campaign program would need to run that could end 75% of slavery in the Congo x cost per year /​ 75% x number of slaves * a best guess DALY burden of life in slavery = ( 10 x $2,000,000 ) /​ ( 75% x 700,000 x 12.5 ) = $3/​DALY
Cheers, Sam!