Case study - evaluation and risk assessment for Deakin University

Deakin University has over 60,000 students and 6,000 staff across four Victorian campuses, two international branch campuses and online. Their supply chain includes more than 5,000 suppliers, with around $400 million in annual procurement spend.

In 2024, Deakin University engaged Fair Futures to evaluate their existing modern slavery processes, and assess risks at their newly opened international campuses in India and Indonesia.

In the words of Deakin’s Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor:

“To ensure we are leveraging best practice, we engaged an external human rights expert, Fair Futures, to evaluate our organisation on our readiness to meet modern slavery requirements and support our efforts to deepen and sharpen our understanding of where risk lies in our supply chains and operations.” (Modern Slavery Statement 2024, p7)

Deakin’s Modern Slavery Statement summarises our work, and the context it responded to:

“The establishment in 2024 of international branch campuses in India (GIFT City) and more recently in Bandung, Indonesia, in partnership with Lancaster University (DLI), have been identified as countries having a medium to high likelihood of modern slavery risk. This remains a priority in terms of taking proactive measures in 2025 to undertake deeper due diligence and mitigations against these risks within our supply chains and operations. Fair Futures conducted an initial scoping of risk in the operations and supply chains of GIFT City and DLI. This identified the following potential risks:

• Risk in operations: student recruitment and facilities management (cleaners, security, janitors, gardeners)

• Risk in supply chains: IT hardware, catering, merchandise.” (p29)

“In 2024, building on its own internal review, Deakin has brought in external expertise to independently review the foundations we are building for our modern slavery risk management response (as set out in the Modern Slavery Framework and Action Plan), with a specific focus on the International Branch Campuses. In 2024, human rights specialist consultants Fair Futures completed a benchmarking exercise on Deakin's Modern Slavery Framework (MSF) against the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) to identify gaps and opportunities to improve, with particular reference to the IBCs. 

The exercise found that Deakin’s Modern Slavery framework, in terms of planned actions, closely mapped to the UNGPs when applied to modern slavery, covering 43 of the 66 indicators across v. However, while Deakin’s Modern Slavery Framework provides the right ‘exoskeleton’ for next steps, the review noted that Deakin is at the very beginning of implementing the action plan to put the MSF into place. Also, there is a need to ensure that as the Framework is implemented, specific steps are taken to adapt elements of the Framework to the IBC context. 

Recommendations have been provided from the review which Deakin will continue to focus and prioritise as part of its Modern Slavery Risk commitments.” (p36)

“Through 2025 and beyond, Deakin remains committed to continuing its progress in implementing the recommended improvements identified in the 2023 Modern Slavery internal audit, the AUPN modern slavery initiatives and the Fair Futures risk assessment and benchmarking.” (p37)

Read Deakin’s Modern Slavery Statement in full here.