The Nigerian Ambassador to Burkina Faso, Ramatu Ahmed says no fewer than 10,000 Nigerian girls are forced into prostitution in Burkina Faso.
She said the victims of sex-trade were mainly underage girls kept in appalling conditions in Ouagadougou and in mining camps across the West African country.
Ahmed who had been in Burkina Faso since August 2017, said that over 200 Nigerian girls had been voluntarily repatriated this year. According to the Ambassador, many of the girls who were promised jobs in the country and Europe by the human traffickers are not willing to return home.
he spate of human trafficking here in Burkina Faso is a big concern to the embassy because at present, we have nothing less than 10,000 Nigerian girls who have been trafficked into Burkina Faso as commercial sex workers and most of these girls are underage, most left school and are roaming about doing commercial sex work in Burkina Faso.
I am pleading with Nigerian parents that they should know what their children are doing, most of the girls said that their parents don;t know what they are here and some will tell us that their parents know and some will say that they were sent by either their father, mother, Uncle.
“This is problem that emanates from the family, for the girls, i wish to tell them that anybody they see that comes to tell them that he is taking then to somewhere, either employed as hair dressers or work in the shop, these are human traffickers.
Anybody that will tell them not work in Nigeria but to move outside is simply a human trafficker and they should be weary of such persons. she said It will be recalled that the U.S.
Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report (TIR) 2019, Burkina Faso is a source, transit, and destination country for women and children subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking. Shocking: Nigerian girls sold N210,000 as sex slaves in Mali(Opens in a new browser tab)
It was reported that the Director General of National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking In Persons (NAPTIP), Julie Okah Donlie while briefing the ECOWAS Parliament on the spate of trafficking in West Africa in December 2018 said that 500 girls were trafficked from Nigeria on daily basis.
(FILES) In this file photo taken on March 29, 2017 prostitutes stand walk on the street in Benin City, capital of Edo State, southern Nigeria. – On April 17 and 26, 2019 dozens of women were arrested in night clubs, strip-tease clubs, luxury hotels and in the streets of Abuja for prostitution, but many of them strongly deny it.The scandal revived the debate on women’s rights in the Nigerian society. (Photo by AFP) She added that a whopping 20,000 Nigerians girls were also discovered in Mali. Ahmed bemoaned the activities of Nigerian syndicates operating in Burkina Faso, vowing that the Embassy will continue to track them down and bring the perpetrators to book in collaboration with the local authorities
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