
Children in Makoko, a slum of houses on stilts in central Lagos, Nigeria. Some 15,000 people live here in the most basic conditions imaginable
KANO, 7 July 2008 (IRIN) - The trafficking of girls from villages to cities in Nigeria is increasing and the state is powerless to stop the trade, officials told IRIN.
“The business of recruiting teenage girls as domestic help in rich and middle-class homes is booming despite our efforts to put a stop to it”, Bello Ahmed, head of the Kano office of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP), told IRIN.
Girls aged 12-17 are regularly trafficked from villages and brought to the city to work as maids for an average monthly wage of 1,500 naira (US$13) which they usually send back to their parents who are caring for several of their siblings, according to Ahmed.
“Apart from being denied access to education, these girls are in many cases raped and beaten by their employers and this is why we keep a dormitory to rehabilitate them”, Ahmed said.
“Bringing in girls from the villages to the city to work as house helps continues unabated. In fact it is on the rise”, agreed Mairo Bello, head of Adolescent Health Information Project, a Kano-based non-governmental organisation (NGO).
As well as poverty, trafficking in girls and women is driven by the extreme income inequality which exists in Nigeria, and gender inequality. The problem is prevalent all around the country.
The dangers
Saudatu Halilu, a 16 year-old girl who moved to Kano from a rural village to work as a maid, has been a victim of the trade’s dangers.
Saudatu was brought to Kano from Nassarawa State in central Nigeria 10 months ago to work as a domestic help, but she said her master forced her into sleeping with him and threatened to kill her if she told anyone.
“I was too scared to tell my mistress or anyone what happened for fear of what my master would do to me and I did not realise I was pregnant until a medical check after I began to show some signs which attracted the attention of my mistress”, Halilu told AFP.

Ruth, 13, doing her homework. From the age of five to nine she was denied the right to go to school and had to work selling water at a market in Gabon, after having been trafficked from Nigeria
Poverty
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Tags: abuse, child, children, Food, human rights, poverty, rape, U.N.