According to Walk Free Foundation’s 2016 Global Slavery Index, an estimated 45.8 million people in 167 countries across the globe find themselves bound by some form of modern slavery. And from that number, about 9,200 are in Singapore.
We come in at 45th place (tied with Mauritius) out of a total of 52 rankings measuring modern slavery by the proportion of the country’s population. Two years ago, Singapore’s number of ‘modern-day slaves’ was about 5,400.
The higher a country’s ranking, the more widespread its modern slavery is — this is defined as the presence of slave-like conditions such as human trafficking, sex trafficking, forced labour and debt bondage.
At the top of the list is North Korea with 1.1 million slaves — that’s about four percent of its population — followed by Uzbekistan, Cambodia, India and Qatar. And all the way on the bottom are countries like the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden.
As for countries with the highest absolute numbers of ‘modern-day slaves’, the top five are India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.
These results were based on over 42,000 interviews from 25 countries, taking into account about 44 percent of the global population.
