IRIN Focus on child trafficking in west and central Africa

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations] From 14-year-old girls forced into prostitution to domestics just out of their infancy and pre-teen boys leased to cattlemen, west and central African children are being condemned to deprivation and servitude, researchers and officials told IRIN. No-one knows exactly how many young lives are broken in this way. In fact, finding out and keeping data bases on the twin evils of child trafficking and the exploitation of children's labour are part of a common platform for action agreed at a regional consultation held on 22-24 February. In most of the region, girls, some of them as young as eight years old, are taken from from rural areas to towns to work as domestics. Many work for 12 hours each day and more, and are subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse. Those taken from their countries also face isolation, some studies noted. Children from Mali are taken to Cote d'Ivoire via Burkina Faso, which is both a supplier of and transit point for child workers. So are Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, some of which are also recipient countries. Children are taken to Equatorial Guinea and to and from Cameroon. Gambian researchers suspect that there might be children going to work as domestics in Banjul from the southern Senegalese region of Casamance where a guerrilla war has been going on for 17 years. Kounboua Boulo Edoux of the Ministry of Labour in Chad told IRIN that nomadic cattlemen from northern Cameroon and central Chad travel to Moyen Chari region in southern Chad in the dry season, contract boys from farming communities to tend their herds, and take them as far as Central African Republic (CAR). The 'Subregional Consultation on Developing Strategies on the Trafficking of Children for Exploitative Labour Purposes in West and Central Africa' was held in Libreville, capital of Gabon, one of the countries to which people illegally ship children, some of whom die along the way. In one such case some two years ago, Nigerian researcher Professor Peter Obigbo told IRIN, about 30 children drowned when a boat capsized while taking them from southern Nigeria to Gabon. Child trafficking occurs both within and between countries as studies presented at the consultation - organised by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) showed. While doing sensitisation work in southern Chad on the worst forms of labour - the subject of a mid-1999 ILO convention that the Libreville meeting urged African governments to ratify - he met a small group of herdboys who had run away from their masters in the CAR. They were haggard, hungry and covered with wounds sustained while trekking through the bush back to the Chad border, according to Edoux. Their ages? "Twelve, thirteen," he said. The herdsmen approach parents either directly or through middle men, or area residents who earn 3,000 CFA francs (less than US $5) per boy, according to Edoux. The child is supposed to work for six months after which he receives a calf as payment and is taken back to his parents, an arrangement which some masters honour. Others, however, find pretexts to end it prematurely, which means that the child is not paid, wh ile sometake the children with them when they go back to their home areas at the end of the dry season. According to Edoux, soldiers from Moyen Chari stationed in central Chad sometimes rescue children left stranded after being abandoned by or running away from their bosses. Boys are also contracted out to cattle rearers in Ghana, receiving a cow at the end of four years' service, according to Emelia Oguaah, executive director of the African Centre for Human Development and one of a team of consultants who presented at the consultation preliminary findings from research they did for a subregional project of the ILO's International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (ILO-IPEC). Other boys work as assistant fishermen and, according to information she obtained while doing her survey in areas along the Volta Lake in eastern Ghana, these children fall into two categories. "Most are brought by their parents as apprentices in fishing or to work and assist the fishermen," Oguaah told IRIN. "Their parents collect money and visit their children regularly. But there is another group of children who, people in the area suspect, were stolen and sold to the fishermen." Area residents told her nobody visited these children "who become more or less slaves and are maltreated in various ways." Other Ghanaian children, girls, are taken to Cote d'Ivoire to work as maids, helpers in small restaurants or prostitutes, mainly by middle-aged Ghanaian women living in Cote d'Ivoire, according to Oguaah. Their unsuspecting parents generally have no idea of the conditions under which they work, she said, adding that the families of those forced into prostitution are made to believe their children would be given work. Overworked and illtreated, some run away and find their way to the Ghanaian border. "Those who come back are mostly those taken for prostitution and they are usually between 10 and 14," Oguaah told IRIN. Public transport operators, she said, told her they often arranged transportation for the returnees, but some refused to go back home because of conditions there and ended up living on the streets of Takoradi, a major town in the west of the country. Why do parents send their children to town or abroad to work? The reasons are legion, but poverty is one most often cited, according to Oguaah, Ebigbo - who was also a member of the team of ILO-IPEC consultants - and other participants in the Libreville encounter. Other contributory factors include lack of awareness of the risks involved, insufficient training and educational opportunities and a high demand for cheap, submissive child labour, the inexistence or inadequacy of national laws on child trafficking, weak institutional mechanisms and inadequate border controls, according to the platform for action that participants in the consultation have undertaken to implement. The platform includes strengthening sensitisation campaigns - which some countries have already started - targeting not only adult groups such as the media, women's associations and other NGOs that defend the rights of the child, but also children, through children's parliaments and other forms of organisation involving them. The platform also provides for reviewing penal codes to include child-trafficking offences which, it says, should be defined, and adequate and severe penaties set. It includes drawing up an international convention on child trafficking, stiffer regulations on the movement of children out of countries, training people who would implement new laws, and strengthening the capacity of monitoring structures and intervention units in terms of personnel and equipment. Another key area on which the consultation focused was the effect of trafficking and exploitative labour on the children. A UNICEF survey on Nigeria presented at the meeting noted that these practices result in the interruption of children's education, traumatises them and impairs their development. In the long term, children thus abused face a future of poverty and destitution and are sometimes caught up in a cycle of violence, insecurity and lawlessness, and HIV/Aids, according to the survey. A similar presentation on Burkina Faso noted that the traffic, "which is a brutal separation of the child from his or her family with all the emotional traumas this can cause ... develops negative sentiments and violent reactions in this fragile being, and makes him/her accustomed to violence" and certain types of anti-social behaviour. Improving care for the victims is therefore part of the platform. The government ministers, other state officials and non-governmental representatives who participated in the Libreville encounter agreed on a series of actions such as setting up or strengthening halfway houses and transit centres for children subjected to trafficking. They also expressed a commitment to "put in place human resources necessary for the medical and psycho-social support of children, and any other form of support, while waiting to reunite them with their families" and, after reunification, to empower parents to care for them. Empowering and strengthening the capacities of NGOs and providing protection for the victims of child trafficking, are also among the provisions of the platform, which provides further for improved knowledge and monitoring of trafficking. To guarantee implementation of the platform, the ministers undertook to report on its results as soon as they returned home, and delegates agreed, among other things, to set up a standing sub-regional monitoring committee comprising representatives of governments, labour, employers and civil society, with the participation of ILO and UNICEF.