Harnessing Data and Intelligence for Collective Advantage: Ending Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains

Jan 20, 2026 Harnessing Data and Intelligence for Collective Advantage: Ending Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains
undefined

Forced labour remains one of the world’s most entrenched and systemic challenges in global supply chains, with nearly 28 million people still trapped in coercive work. Despite decades of effort in addressing this, progress has stalled, in large part because the ecosystem responding to forced labour is fragmented: data is siloed, incentives misaligned and trust limited, as data held by governments, businesses and civil society rarely connect, weakening visibility and accountability.

The Global Data Partnership Against Forced Labour is a multistakeholder platform built on a trusted, precompetitive infrastructure for collective action. Using federated data infrastructure and agentic artificial intelligence, it enables privacy preserving collaboration across stakeholders without moving or centralizing data, allowing participants to retain control and sovereignty while transforming fragmented signals into collective intelligence.

Drawing on a Proof of Concept in Thailand, the Partnership demonstrates how linking data across systems can uncover risk patterns no single actor can see alone, and provides a scalable pathway to make forced labour a preventable risk rather than an enduring reality.

License and Republishing
World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.