Fighting Human Trafficking in Nepal
Focus on prevention, safety and digital innovation
Our sisters in Nepal establish and train “Surveillance Groups” community-based protection networks. The group facilitators are trained in evidence-based trafficking identification, survivor referral protocols, and immediate intervention procedures through quarterly two-day intensive training workshops addressing Palermo Protocol requirements and trauma-informed response.
Sisters and lay collaborators conduct monthly supervision visits, providing troubleshooting support, mentoring emerging volunteer leaders, documenting trafficking alerts, and ensuring quality adherence to safeguarding standards. We also facilitate mass awareness campaigns, public forums and community meetings addressing unsafe migration patterns, trafficker recruitment tactics, safe relocation strategies, and economic alternatives.
A key focus is on managing innovative digital outreach, coordinating online awareness campaigns, sharing trafficking-warning content, survivor testimonies, safety resources, and economic opportunity information accessible to digitally connected youth. Sisters operate referral pathways, personally accompanying identified trafficking survivors to government child-protection services and Plan International’s ProTEcT programme (Prevention, Tracking, Education, Transformation initiative operating across Sunsari, Makwanpur, and Banke districts).
Sisters provide culturally informed advocacy with the Sukumbasi community (landless, traditionally discriminated population), leveraging their institutional presence since 1926 to address systemic trafficking causes including caste-based discrimination, economic marginalisation, and unsafe migration facilitation. Sisters coordinate participatory data collection, personally documenting trafficking indicators, survivor outcomes, and community protective-factor changes to inform district-level policy advocacy and ProTEcT programme evaluation.
We recognise trafficking as interconnected with systemic poverty, gender inequality, inadequate education access, and discriminatory migration policies.
As Mary Ward women, we aim to further Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC) in a specific Mary Ward way – that is, in accordance with the charism of the Just Soul and its defining virtues of freedom, justice, sincerity and felicity which speak so powerfully to issues of JPIC and their integral nature in all aspects of mission and ministry.
We are working in different areas and projects – not out of ourselves, but because we allow ourselves to be sent by God. We form our sisters to be mobile and available, willing to go wherever they are sent. We expect them to strive, like Mary Ward, to have that inner freedom to respond to the call to leave all and follow Christ with passion and compassion.
