At the beginning of 2020, GAATW adopted a new Strategic Plan to guide our work in the next ten years. It was the result of a two-year process that involved an external assessment of the Alliance, four regional consultations with GAATW Members in South and Southeast Asia, Europe, and South America, and a Theory of Change exercise guided by an external facilitator.

The Strategic Plan responds to the following socioeconomic and political context that impacts the lives of migrant and trafficked women, as well as the specific challenges of anti-trafficking work:

• The neoliberal economic model prioritizes profits over people, advocates for a reduced government role, minimizes business regulations, and promotes the privatization of social protections and public services. This approach has led to increasing inequality between the rich and poor in both developed and developing countries.

• The weakening of labour rights, trade unions and collective bargaining, and a rise in zero-hour, piece-rate contracts and the gig economy, all of which have led to erosion of the hard-won victories of the labour movement and increased precarity of work.

• The climate crisis is destroying people’s homes and livelihoods, especially subsistence farming. This is pushing people into distress migration to cities or other countries in search of salaried work.

• Patriarchal social attitudes are the cause of violations of women’s rights. One of the underlying reasons for women’s exploitation is the undervaluation of women’s work, which includes not only the gender wage gap but also the significant amount of unpaid domestic, care, and household work that women perform, often 1.5 to 4 times more than men globally.

• Governments are cracking down on civil society and human rights work, criminalising solidarity, and forcing NGOs to register as foreign agents.

• Anti-trafficking efforts often rely on simplistic narratives that ignore larger socioeconomic and political factors. This approach results in misguided solutions, such as criminalising clients of sex workers and enforcing migration restrictions, which fail to improve job conditions and instead lead to negative consequences for migrants and sex workers..

• Donors contribute to the marginalisation of civil society, as their funding is increasingly short-term and project-based, forcing NGOs to spend a huge amount of time fundraising and reporting, and to become mere service providers while abandoning their role of watchdogs. Consequently, there is little time for reflection and analysis, leading to a growing disconnect from communities and social movements.

The Need for Focused Thematic Programmes

GAATW has played a significant role in shaping global anti-trafficking discourse and developing international human rights laws regarding human trafficking and migration. GAATW’s action-oriented research, often conducted with members and allies, contributed to the establishment of an internationally recognised definition of human trafficking in the 1990s. GAATW highlights the connection between trafficking, migration, and labour, advocating for rights-affirming migration policies and stronger labour protections to reduce trafficking risks. Our commitment to the rights of trafficked persons, migrant workers, and low-wage women workers is central to our work.

Since 2025, the GAATW-IS has formalised this focus into three thematic programmes, carrying out research, communications and advocacy under each theme:

1. Human Trafficking and Forced Labour Programme
2. Women on the Move Programme
3. Women Workers for Change Programme

This approach enables us to see interconnections more clearly and develop cross-cutting projects that work towards the four long-term goals set out in our Strategic Plan 2020-2030:

• To contribute to a change in the discourse on trafficking from an issue of law enforcement and crime to one at the intersections of gender, migration, labour, and development.
• To contribute to a change in the policies and responses to trafficking so that they are respectful of women’s agency and based on a labour rights approach rather than protectionist and criminalisation approaches.
• To create spaces for intersectional, inter-movement dialogues built upon a shared feminist, rights-based analysis of labour migration.
• To challenge the social and economic invisibility of women’s work, promote policy recognition of women workers, and support their mobilisation, collective voice, and bargaining power.

Core Functions

Advocacy

Over the decades, GAATW has played a key role in the development of international human rights laws and policies related to human trafficking and migration. In the 1990s, GAATW was instrumental in the campaign for an internationally recognised definition of human trafficking, now enshrined in the United Nations Trafficking Protocol.

Currently, GAATW International Secretariat (GAATW-IS) advocates for the rights of migrant women and trafficked persons, maintaining consultative status with the UN's Economic and Social Council since 2006, as well as with the ASEAN Inter-Governmental Commission on Human Rights since 2018 and the Regional Monitoring Network of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights since 2023. GAATW supports its diverse global network of members in developing advocacy tools and promoting evidence-based policies and feminist approaches to trafficking at the national and local levels.

Alliance Strengthening

As an Alliance Secretariat, this is one of the ongoing core areas of our work. Liaising with members and broadening our membership and partnerships with a view toward collaborative advocacy are priorities for this area of work. Our members include organisations from all across Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

In 2023, our Secretariat was actively engaged in various initiatives aimed at supporting and enriching our community. One of the key efforts was conducting personalised interviews, allowing us to have meaningful dialogues with our members to better understand their work contexts and objectives. Our commitment to transparency and engagement was evident through regular communications, where we consistently updated our membership. We also took pride in recognising and showcasing the incredible contributions made by our members through our Meet our Members, highlighting their achievements across our communication channels. Additionally, we organised online consultations with RED-LAC to foster collaborative decision-making and advocacy work. To broaden our scope, we established external partnerships with other organisations that share our goals and values, further enhancing our collaborative research and advocacy work.

Knowledge Building and Research

The GAATW International Secretariat (GAATW-IS) will continue to use research, participatory learning, advocacy and communication tools to realise the vision and mission of the Alliance. GAATW’s participatory research plays a substantial role in shaping and shifting global anti-trafficking discourses. Much of GAATW’s research has been action-oriented, feeding local or international change processes and has been done in collaboration with Members and allies.

Members’ involvement in research projects will maximise the knowledge and experience within the Alliance and ensure that research activities are relevant. In general, our research prioritises documenting women’s experiences and agency in order to advance global anti-trafficking discourses, strengthen our advocacy messages, create a sound evidence base with the objective of promoting and protecting the human rights of trafficked persons and migrants, and expand knowledge in under-researched areas.

Overall, we seek to destabilise the dominant perception of women as victims in isolated, crime-centred responses to trafficking. Instead, we strive to present a complex picture of empowerment through migration, work, and human rights-based approaches.

Strategic Communications

GAATW’s communications work aims to enhance global representation and access to vital information, strengthening the Alliance's network of diverse member organisations. It challenges the prevailing narrative of women as victims in trafficking by highlighting empowerment through migration and labour, utilising feminist participatory action research (FPAR) to document women's experiences and resilience. GAATW's efforts incorporate the perspectives of various partners and affected communities, particularly from the Global South, enriching the anti-trafficking discourse. The organization is committed to providing effective communication services through publications and multimedia projects that amplify the voices and knowledge of its members and partners at all levels.