Years ago, when I was a data scientist at the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, my keystone project was a piece of original software that estimates the likelihood of forced labor at the supplier level. It was intended as a proof of concept to show that by observing only passively-collected operations data, I could, with reasonable accuracy, prioritize due diligence efforts across a corporate supply chain, no matter how large. This formed the basis of discussions with both large corporations and governments, where we demonstrated the feasibility of using new technology tools to enable the smooth enforcement of and compliance with stronger laws against the use of forced labor in globalized corporate supply chains. The time was right, but regulators needed to create the business case to invest.
The tool was recognized in 2020 by the Society for International Development, Washington, winning their annual Innovation award. It was a finalist from the Thompson Reuters Foundation Stop Slavery Awards in the Innovation category in the same year.
The Fund has since ceased operations, and most of the work I contributed is no longer hosted in a discoverable place online, so I am bringing together the key elements in their original form here.
The code repository is here, and I would draw your attention to the ReadMe, which explains some of the rationale behind choices that I made about things like “What is a company?” https://github.com/shannonrstewart/FLARE
A short intro video that describes the project:
A tutorial series that takes a tour through the codebase:
Part 2
Part 3
After I left GFEMS, I joined a tech startup working on this exact issue and worked with dozens of talented software engineers. There, I learned a great deal about data pipelines, scalability, and parallelization that is not reflected in this proof of concept. While I believe it demonstrates an important point about the presence of reliable mathematical signal, almost none of this code can be directly ported into a real B2B SaaS platform for runtime reasons. Nevertheless, the FLARE tool remains available for commercial use under an MIT license, and I am happy to answer questions about it.