Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent estimate he has made of the incidence of modern slavery in (a) Sudan and (b) South Sudan.

Estimates of the number of people currently living in modern slavery in Sudan and South Sudan continue to be high. In 2016, the Global Slavery Index ranked Sudan and South Sudan joint 6^th out of 167 countries for the highest proportion of the population living in modern slavery.

The British Government is committed to the eradication of all forms of modern slavery and human trafficking by 2030, as unanimously adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015. The Prime Minister has made eradicating this scourge one of her top foreign policy priorities. She has pushed the UN and the broader international community to step up efforts in this respect, most recently by convening Leaders to launch a Call to Action to End Modern Slavery, which has so far been endorsed by 40 countries, including a number of African nations. The Prime Minister has committed to doubling UK aid spend to tackle modern slavery to £150 million.