UK Joins Forces With Nigeria To Fight Human Trafficking

Lagos, Nigeria (CNN)The UK government and Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency launched a new media campaign to prevent women and girls from being exploited and sold into modern-day slavery.

The Department for International Development (DFID) said the ‘NotForSale’ campaign aims to encourage Nigerians to find jobs at home instead of risking their lives to travel to foreign countries in search of work.

DFID said it was committed to ending human trafficking for all nations, and it was working with the UK National Crime Agency and the Nigerian government to tackle the “root causes of dangerous migration,” while preventing vulnerable women and girls from being targeted by traffickers.

Julie Okah-Donli, director general of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) told CNN many vulnerable Nigerian girls, some as young as 10, were being lured by human traffickers to work as domestic help and servants in Britain.

“The UK is a destination for forced labor. These traffickers take Nigerian girls from villages and disguise them as their children, but when they get to the UK, they don’t let them step of the house for years and force them to clean and cook. There are cases where these victims were sexually exploited,” Okah-Donli told CNN.

She said posters for the campaign, which feature inspirational stories of successful Nigerian women, would be placed in schools, mosques, malls, and billboards in Nigeria’s Edo and Delta states, where human smuggling rings operate with impunity.

To read the full article by Bukola Adebayo on CNN: Click Here

Category: Around the World, International Law, Investigative Reporting