From Data to Action: Understanding Forced Labour Drivers

This Capstone report examined the determinants of adult forced labour in Nigeria using microdata from the 2022 Nigeria National Child Labour and Forced Labour Survey. It was the first nationally representative survey specifically designed to measure forced labour in the country, covering 69,217 individuals across 16,418 households and providing an unprecedented empirical basis for analysing a phenomenon that remains both rare and underexplored in the quantitative literature. Grounded in the International Labour Organization’s conceptual framework for forced labour vulnerability, the analysis combined survey-weighted logistic regression, propensity score matching, and spatial regression methods to examine how individual characteristics, household vulnerability, and area-level conditions are associated with the probability of being in forced labour in one’s current job.

Household indebtedness emerged as the strongest correlate of forced labour risk, with indebted households facing more than double the prevalence of non-indebted households. Lower educational attainment, exposure to negative shocks, gender, and age were also significant determinants, with the shock effect driven primarily by environmental shocks, pointing to agricultural vulnerability as a key structural pathway. Work migrants face disproportionately elevated risk, and deceptive recruitment emerges as an important pathway into coercive work among adults in vulnerable situations. Spatial analysis further revealed that forced labour is geographically clustered rather than randomly distributed, with localized hot spots overlapping with areas of lower infrastructural access and weaker state presence. These findings provided important insight into the drivers of forced labour in Nigeria and offer a basis for future research and more targeted policy interventions.