Traffickers hold thousands of children, women in bondage - Continued

Efforts to control trafficking Police chiefs from Togo, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria met in the Togolese capital Lome in October, to discuss cooperation in dealing with cross-border crimes. Human trafficking was top on the agenda. They decided, among other things, to reduce immigration protocols that often hinder collaboration and rapid response in criminal cases where response speed is critical, a source who attended the meeting told IRIN. Another meeting later in October in Accra, Ghana, brought together security officials from Ghana, Nigeria and the ILO, the US Department of State and anti-child labour NGOs to discuss how to tackle what was seen essentially as a trans-border problem. “We need to put in place wide networks of informants to work with security services. Laws and sanctions on child trafficking need to be revised constantly in order to tackle this problem,” Cornelius Dzakpasu, ILO head in Ghana, told delegates. Mark Taylor, a US State Department specialist in trafficking of persons, said though figures on trafficking and child labour are hard to come by, an estimated 400,000 children are involved in labour across West Africa based on baseline estimates. “Trafficking is illicit. The activity is underground and it is very difficult to find and track people who have been trafficked,” he told IRIN. Taylor said it had become more difficult to tackle child trafficking within the less organised sector of domestic labour. It was equally difficult to track the movement of girls within West Africa and to Europe. Governments in all the worst affected countries in West Africa have initiated measures aimed at curbing human trafficking. Mali and Cote d’Ivoire have jointly set up a commission to study child trafficking between the two countries while Benin enacted a new law in 1995 to regulate the travel of children under 14 years. It subsequently signed an agreement with neighbouring Togo to cooperate in the rehabilitation of victims of trafficking. Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo in July signed a new law prescribing stiff sentences, including life in prison, for perpetrators of trafficking. Ghana is in the process of passing new legislation. All the countries in West and Central Africa have signed major international conventions forbidding trafficking of children. These include the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Organisation of African Unity’s African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the ILO’s Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and of Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. Need to address poverty first. Most children and women rights activists say much will not be achieved towards eradicating human trafficking without first dealing effectively with widespread poverty in West Africa because poverty is the single major cause of the trade. Sharp losses in revenue by cocoa farmers in Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon have actually become an incentive for farmers to take in cheap, child labourers to cut costs, the activists say. Among the poorer countries in the region, relatively affluent countries such as Cote d’Ivoire and oil-rich Nigeria and Gabon remain attractive destinations for parents to send their children to work in the care of intermediaries. Yinka Aderigbigbe, who has been involved in rehabilitating Nigerian women who had been trafficked to Italy, said poverty is the biggest issue exploited by traffickers to lure away young women away from their homes. “If a young prostitute can make as much money in six months of walking the streets of Italy than she would make from 10 years of working in a farm, then you can see we have an uphill task against traffickers,” she told IRIN. It is poverty that perhaps explains why 15-year-old Jedo Gliza had no regrets as he was being returned by the Nigerian authorities to Benin in October in the company of 73 other children who had been working in granite quarries. “Back home in Benin, there was hardly anything to eat and no paying work to do,” he told reporters. “After five years working in Nigeria I had gained the trust of my boss and was earning enough to even save some money. If I have the chance I will return to the quarries.” There is also the problem of conflict in several West African countries. Ghana’s Interior Minister Hackman Owusu-Agyeman fears that with the region’s conflicts, (such as those of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire) refugee camps teeming with poor displaced women and children provide attractive recruitment grounds for traffickers. [Ends]