Phil Marshall has worked on international development cooperation issues for over 25 years, including more than a decade living and working in developing countries. His primary area of technical expertise is trafficking in persons (TIP)/forced labour, while he also has extensive experience in program design and evaluation, training and communicable disease prevention.

As RCG’s Director of Private Sector Engagement, Phil is leading the overall development of RCG Reflex, a new service area focusing on forced labour issues within global supply chains. He is also a board member of the Mekong Club, a business-led initiative to address modern slavery. His recent work focuses on improving access to remedy for victims of labour exploitation, and on the potential to “crowd out” exploitative business practices through the development of cleaner migration pathways.

Beyond this private sector focus, Phil’s expertise in TIP/forced labour spans all aspects of the response, as well as related areas such as migration and migrant smuggling. This range of experience led the UN Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons to commission him to develop a user-friendly toolkit on trafficking project design and evaluation drawing on accumulated knowledge and lessons learned from both within and outside the counter-trafficking sector.

Phil has worked extensively at the policy level, notably in the development of four national plans of action, and played a central role in the negotiation of the COMMIT MOU on Trafficking in Persons between the six countries of the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS). In the criminal justice area, Phil’s experience includes six years providing strategic and technical direction for large-scale regional projects and two years leading a project in Sudan to develop a unified national curriculum in partnership with government institutions.

Phil is currently working on developing multi-faceted crime prevention strategies for TIP. Drawing on his criminal justice and policy experience, as well as his understanding of behavioural theory, this work seeks to refine traditional – often ineffective – TIP prevention approaches into more focused, measurable and evidenced-informed programs.

Phil has evaluated, assessed or reviewed more than 20 programs at the global, regional and local levels and developed Measurement, Evaluation and Learning systems for a number of others. Recent examples include a global evaluation of the International Organization for Migration’s counter-trafficking programs and two EU-funded migration projects in the Horn of Africa.

Phil was a member of a 12-person panel of experts to develop the UN Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking and a member of a small advisory team engaged in developing indicators for government progress for the Global Slavery Index. He has developed and delivered training programs for trainers in more than ten countries in South and South-East Asia.

Phil holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Administration from Victoria University of Wellington, and a Graduate Diploma of Development Administration from the Australian National University.