Big Data Analytics Solution Helps India Nonprofit Organization "My Choices Foundation" in Efforts to Prevent Human Trafficking

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - May 30, 2017) - Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) -- My Choices Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in India, is using big data analytics to help alleviate one of the world's worst social problems: human trafficking. While many organizations work to rescue girls and prosecute the traffickers, Operation Red Alert, a program of My Choices Foundation, is a prevention program designed to help parents, teachers, village leaders and children to understand how the traffickers work so they can block their efforts. Poor village girls are typically targeted by traffickers with promises that the girls are being offered wonderful opportunities for an education, jobs or marriage. But with over 600,000 villages in India, Operation Red Alert needed help to determine which areas were most at risk to prioritize their education efforts.

As a pro bono project, the Australian analytics firm Quantium developed a big data solution that runs on Cisco UCS® infrastructure and uses the MapR Converged Data Platform. The solution analyzes India's census data, government education data and other sources for factors such as drought, poverty level, proximity to transportation stations, educational opportunities, population, and distance to police stations to identify the villages and towns that are most at risk of human trafficking.

"The general Indian public is still largely unaware that trafficking exists, and most parents have no idea that their children are actually being sold into slavery," said Elca Grobler, founder of the My Choices Foundation. "That's why grassroots awareness and education at the village level is so important to ending the human traffic trade."

Operation Red Alert
With the vision to end sex trafficking in India by preventing girls from ever entering it, Operation Red Alert began its efforts in 2014 by conducting research on root causes and by building relationships with long standing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the field. Working with Quantium they analyzed data while constantly refining and iterating to define a model that could identify villages most at risk. Red Alert now has 40 NGO partners which have helped conduct the Safe Village education program in 600 villages throughout four states in India, reaching over 600,000 villagers. Red Alert was also instrumental in creating India's first national anti-trafficking helpline, and is conducting mass media awareness campaigns.