Nepal Human Trafficking Statistics

Nepal Human Trafficking Statistics

Last reviewed: August 2026. Every figure on this page is attributed to a named source with a publication year and a link. Where credible sources disagree, we say so. Where a widely repeated number cannot be traced to primary research, we leave it out — and we say why at the bottom of the page.

Garden For Hope runs a rescue home for sexually exploited girls and young women in Nepal. We built this page because we kept finding trafficking statistics online with no source attached to them, and because students, journalists and donors kept asking us which numbers are real. You are welcome to cite this page or the underlying sources directly.

The global picture

• An estimated 49.6 million people were living in modern slavery on any given day in 2021 — 27.6 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. 6.3 million were in forced commercial sexual exploitation.
  Source: ILO, Walk Free and IOM, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery (2022), reference year 2021.
• Detected trafficking victims worldwide rose 25% in 2022 compared with 2019. Detected child victims rose 31%. 38% of all detected victims were children, and 58% were trafficked within their own country’s borders.
  Source: UNODC, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024, covering 156 countries.

How many people are affected in Nepal

• An estimated 97,000 people were living in modern slavery in Nepal on any given day in 2021 — a prevalence of 3.3 per 1,000 people. Nepal’s vulnerability score is 46 out of 100 and its government response score 45 out of 100.
  Source: Walk Free, Global Slavery Index 2023, Nepal country snapshot.
• Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission estimated in 2019 that 1.5 million Nepalis were vulnerable to human trafficking.
  Source: The Asia Foundation, “Nepal’s Silent Crisis: Human Trafficking Under the Spotlight”, citing the NHRC Trafficking in Persons Report.
• Approximately 1.1 million children in Nepal are engaged in child labour, 87% of it in agriculture. Among children working in informal economies, 74% were found to be in hazardous conditions.
  Source: Free the Slaves, Modern Slavery in Nepal (2024).

Children in Kathmandu’s adult entertainment sector

This is the most methodologically rigorous data available on the population Garden For Hope serves. It comes from research by John Jay College of Criminal Justice, commissioned by The Freedom Fund and published in 2019.

• Approximately 1,650 children aged 17 and under work in adult entertainment venues in the Kathmandu Valley.
• 17% of the adult entertainment sector’s total workforce are minors.
• 62% of all workers in the sector began before they turned 18.
• Over 60% of workers aged 17 and under are in sexually exploitative environments.
• 99% of those children meet the International Labour Organization’s definition of the worst forms of child labour.

Source: The Freedom Fund and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “Prevalence of minors in Kathmandu’s adult entertainment sector” (2019).

What the justice system does — and does not — do

• Nepal remained on the U.S. State Department’s Tier 2 Watch List in the 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report, its second consecutive year at that ranking.
• Between 2019 and 2021, only 270 trafficking cases were registered with Nepal Police and 1,179 cases with the judiciary.
  Source: The Asia Foundation, citing the NHRC Trafficking in Persons Report (2022).
• In 2020–21, only 39.6% of human trafficking cases registered in Nepali courts received a final verdict.
  Source: Free the Slaves (2024), citing Nepal Supreme Court data.
• From 2019 to mid-January 2026, Nepal Police’s Human Trafficking Investigation Bureau registered 435 cases involving 657 survivors, 249 of them girls. Across the same period 1,679 survivors were rescued, 1,078 of them women. Of 887 people accused, only 671 were arrested.
  Source: Centre for Investigative Journalism Nepal, “The Silent Crisis of Internal Trafficking”, citing Nepal Police HTIB and the Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens.
• Rehabilitation centres nationwide housed 4,200 survivors in FY2024/25, up from 798 across ten institutions in FY2022/23.
  Source: Centre for Investigative Journalism Nepal, as above.

That last pair of numbers matters more than it looks. Demand for aftercare beds in Nepal grew more than fivefold in two years. Safe, long-term housing is the bottleneck — which is precisely why Garden For Hope exists.

Trafficking inside Nepal, not only across the border

Nepal is commonly described as a source country for trafficking into India, and it is. But recent investigative reporting emphasises that internal trafficking within Nepal — girls moved from rural districts into Kathmandu and Pokhara and placed in dance bars, dohori restaurants, massage parlours and cabin restaurants — now accounts for a large and under-recognised share of cases.

The structural driver is labour migration. Nepal issued 1,512,616 foreign labour approvals across fiscal years 2022/23 and 2023/24 combined, and roughly 5.7 million over the fifteen years to 2023/24. Women made up 12.9% of approvals in 2023/24, the highest share on record. Traffickers work inside that pipeline.

Source: Government of Nepal, Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security, Nepal Labour Migration Report 2024.

Who is most affected

• Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission found in 2019 that Indigenous nationalities comprise 49% of trafficked women survivors, compared with 15% Dalit, 6% Madhesi and 29% other ethnicities.
  Source: Cultural Survival, “Indigenous Women and Girls Disproportionately Trafficked in Nepal”.

Education and early marriage

• 15% of upper-secondary-age children in Nepal are out of school. Only 28% of girls and 27% of boys complete upper secondary education. Among children aged 7–14, 61% lack foundational reading skills and 63% lack foundational numeracy skills. UNICEF notes that at all three education levels, the majority of out-of-school children are girls.
  Source: UNICEF, Nepal Education Fact Sheet (March 2023), based on Nepal MICS6 data collected in 2019.

One honest clarification, because it is often reported the other way round: UNICEF’s data shows Nepali girls complete school at slightly higher rates than boys at every level. The accurate and still-urgent framing is that fewer than three in ten Nepali children of either sex finish upper secondary school, and that the majority of children who are out of school altogether are girls.

Numbers we deliberately do not use

We think a statistics page is only as good as the figures it refuses to repeat. These three are widely circulated and we have left them out:

• “54 girls and women are trafficked from Nepal to India every day” and “over 20,000 per year.” These appear on several anti-trafficking websites with no citation. We could not trace either to primary research.
• Maiti Nepal figures published by GRID-Arendal in 2011 (around 2,000 girls rescued annually, 4,000+ missing-woman reports annually). The underlying publication is fifteen years old and should not be presented as current.
• “52% of Nepalese girls are married before 18.” This figure appears on ECPAT’s Nepal country page and is materially inconsistent with UNICEF’s data, which puts the share of women aged 20–24 married before 18 at roughly 25.6% as of 2024.

Using this page

Journalists, students and teachers are welcome to cite this page. If you are working on a school project, a Magnified Giving presentation or an article and you need help finding a source, contact us and we will point you to the original document.

If these numbers have moved you, the most direct thing you can do is sponsor a rescued girl or give to the rescue home. Garden For Hope is a 501(c)(3) and gifts are tax-deductible in the United States.