Siddharth Kara

Siddharth Kara is first Fellow on Human Trafficking at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and he is a founding member of Harvard's Advisory Collective on Human Rights. He is also the author of "Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery," the first of three books he is writing on the subjects of human trafficking and contemporary slavery. Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Beginning in 2000, he set aside his finance career and commenced a global journey across eighteen countries on six continents to further research these crimes, interviewing over five hundred slaves of all kinds, witnessing firsthand the sale of humans into slavery, and confronting some of those who trafficked and exploited them. Kara focuses his work on providing a rare business and economic analysis of contemporary forms of slavery, designed to provide more effective measures to help eradicate these offences once and for all. Kara advises several governments and international organizations on antislavery policy and law. He serves on several antislavery NGO boards, and he lectures on slavery and related human rights issues around the world. Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a Law degree from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.