Ali is a Human Rights Activist and the President of the National Foundation for Combating Human Trafficking and Child Trafficking (NOFCHT). He is also a member of the National Committee for Combating Human Trafficking in Yemen.

Awah Francisca Mbuli is a survivor of sex and labor trafficking. She is the founder of Survivors’ Network (SN), a Cameroonian-based, female survivors-led NGO that fights against all forms of human trafficking. SN rescues and provides temporary housing, psychosocial services, vocational training, and economic empowerment programs to victims of human trafficking and internally displaced women. She advocates both with governments and the general population.

For her efforts, Awah has been awarded numerous distinctions, including, but not limited to being one of the 50 Most Influential Cameroonians and an Obama Africa Leader and having received the African Dream Achievers Award, the US Trafficking in Persons Hero award, and the World of Difference Award 2022 for Economic Empowerment of Women.

Furthermore, Awah is one of the Freedom From Slavery Forum Ambassadors.

Dennis is responsible for designing, implementing and supervising research projects in East and the Horn of Africa and labour migration corridors to the Gulf countries. His experience includes data mining on engendering inclusivity for UNWOMEN and conducting violent extremism research for USAID. He has also been involved in a range of projects for clients including Core Group Polio Project, Kenya’s Ministry of Education, Save The Children and CARE International.

Ekaterina Porras Sivolobova is the founder and director of Do Bold. She has been working on the ground supporting migrant workers affected by modern slavery in the GCC countries while harnessing data to advise and campaign for better policies and practices. Her work has been shortlisted for the World Justice Challenge and the Nelson Mandela Prize Walk for Courage. And her efforts have been highlighted in the BBC, The Guardian, and the Washington Post.

Dr. Katarina Schwarz is an Associate Professor in Antislavery Law and Policy at the School of Law and Associate Director of the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham. Her research explores the intersections between slavery and the law, from the historical to the contemporary.

In her role leading the Rights Lab’s Law and Policy Programme, Schwarz works at the interface of research and policy to deliver evidence-based guidance for contemporary antislavery action. Her Rights Lab research interrogates the law and policy frameworks operating at the global, regional, and domestic levels to determine the elements of effective antislavery governance and map trends, successes, and failures.

Schwarz is the lead author of the Antislavery in Domestic Legislation Database, the world’s first comprehensive database of international obligations and domestic legislation on slavery and related practices. This project, initiated in 2015, maps the current state of domestic legislation prohibiting slavery, servitude, forced labor, institutions and practices similar to slavery, and human trafficking in all 193 UN Member States, providing new insights for the global antislavery movement.

Linda is the Founder and the Executive Director of Tamkeen for Legal Aid and Human Rights. Tamkeen’s mandate focuses on topics related to labor rights, migration, and combating the crime of human trafficking. she leads a team that consists of lawyers, researchers, and field officers and represented Tamkeen in a number of national, regional, and international conferences and events that focus on Labour issues, Migrant Workers and Migration, Legal Aid and Human Trafficking. In 2013, Linda formed the Arab Network for Migrant’s Rights (ANMR) established in five Arab countries.

Namrata, a labour expert, leads Equidem’s India work and collaborates closely with Equidem’s initiatives across South Asia, South East Asia, East Africa and the GCC. With close to 15 years of research experience, Namrata has worked on a range of labour and migration issues, including but not limited to, recruitment; remittances; the linkages between trafficking and migration; the future of work; informality and informal migration; post-conflict livelihoods; financial inclusion; and modern slavery in South Asia’s garment sector. Namrata set up the first in-house consumer research unit in banking at Bank Dhofar in the Gulf state of Oman, where she lived for close to 2 decades. She has also worked with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), helping with the establishment of an internal Labour Migration Unit with the ILO-Country Office, Sri Lanka and the Maldives when she was a fellow at Harvard University’s Women and Public Policy Programme (WAPP) in 2017.

Namrata has been a research advisor across an array of sectors in the MENA region, including with various government departments in the GCC, banking and financial institutions, and an array of private sector entities. Namrata has a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University (2018), Masters of Economics from the University of Warwick, UK (2008), and a Bachelor of Economics from Madras University, India (2006).

Pamela Vargas Gorena works as part of the Rights Lab’s Law and Policy Programme, conducting contextual research and engagement focused on antislavery law and policy frameworks to deliver bespoke legislative toolkits. She contributes to the expansion of a database of domestic legislation and international obligations of all UN Member States, maps global legislation to understand trends, successes, and failures, and identifies factors contributing to positive legislative change. Her research background includes comparative law and jurisprudence as well as the assessment of government law, policies and capacities. As a qualified Bolivian lawyer, she previously held management positions in government contributing to the development of law and public policy at central and local levels. She also has been part of UN-Habitat, working on the Urban National Policy, and has frontline experience working with vulnerable youth in the non-profit sector.

Rima Kalush is the Deputy Director of Majal.org, and editor of Migrant-Rights.org. She joined Migrant-Rights.org in its infancy and has overseen its financial and programmatic growth. Her work has been published and referenced by institutions including Al Jazeera, the International Labor Organization, Jadaliyya, Gender Across Borders, and the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. She holds a Master of Philosophy in Middle Eastern Area Studies from the University of Oxford.

Vani Saraswathi is the Editor-at-Large and Director of Projects at Migrant-Rights.org and the author of Stories of Origin: The Invisible Lives of Migrants in the Gulf. The book is an anthology of reporting from seven origin countries over a period of three years.

Since 2014, in her role with Migrant-Rights.org she reports from the Gulf states and countries of origin. She also organizes advocacy projects and human rights training targeting individual employers, embassies, recruitment agents, and businesses in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and UAE, working with nationals and long-term residents in these countries. A special emphasis is on female migrants, including domestic workers. Much of her advocacy effort is geared towards mainstreaming issues facing female migrant workers.

She is also a member of the Migration Advisory Group (previous Policy Advisory Committee) of ILO ROAS, the Policy Advisory Group of Freedom Fund’s Ethiopia hotspot, Humanity United’s Advisory Group on Forced Labour and Human Trafficking, and Steering Committee member for GAATW’s cross-regional (Asia-GCC)work.