A couple months ago, the US State Department released the 2016 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report and it was not good news for Ghana. For the second year in a row, Ghana was placed on the Tier 2 Watch List, which means that if the government does not make significant anti-trafficking efforts, next year Ghana must be downgraded to Tier 3, losing around $600 million of aid from the United States.
Estimates of Modern Slavery in Ghana
According the 2016 Global Slavery Index, there are an estimated 45.8 million people in modern slavery today. That is more people that ever before in history, and in spite of slavery being illegal everywhere, there isn’t a place that isn’t touched by modern slavery. In Ghana, it’s estimated that there are 103,300 people in modern slavery, particularly in the farming, fishing and mining industries, and 21,000 of them are children on Lake Volta. That means that one of every five people enslaved in Ghana is a child on the lake.
Both of these documents evaluate the efforts of the government of Ghana and neither of them have good things to report. The Global Slavery Index gave Ghana a “CC” rating, which is the third-lowest rating possible and means that the government has had a limited response to modern slaver.
The analysis done in the 2016 TIP Report shows that the government has not funded the Human Trafficking Fund for the last four years. Police and prosecutors have not received any training for handling trafficking cases for the last five years. The 2005 Anti-Human Trafficking Act stipulated that there should be a shelter in each of the 10 regions for victims of trafficking, but there is currently only one — it is only for child victims, has no security, shares space with a juvenile delinquent facility and is in serious disrepair and has received no funding. Investigations and prosecutions last year continued to highlight the bleak efforts of the government: of the 238 investigations, 21 were prosecuted and zero resulted in convictions.
These numbers are all really disheartening.
The Organization Fighting to End Child Trafficking
However, it’s not all terrible. The organization that I work for, Challenging Heights, is the foremost local NGO doing anti-trafficking work in Ghana, with a specific focus on children on Lake Volta. Challenging Heights has a comprehensive rescue and recovery operation for survivors of child slavery and works with a community-based approach.
Rescue and Recovery
Three times a year, rescue operations are conducted on the Lake, to rescue children who have been identified by their family or friends as being enslaved. After the team rescues them, the children are brought to our shelter which is staffed by trained social workers, where they receive counseling and therapy and begin schooling. They recover at the shelter for a minimum six months, but stay as long as they need to based on assessments by the team.
While they are at the shelter, the field team works in locating and identifying their families and facilitates meetings between the child and their family. They determine which family members are the best for the child to live with upon reintegration and help to settle any kind of disputes of responsibility between the parents through Alternative Dispute Resolution. The reintegration officers also make sure that the family has a stable and secure source of income, and if they don’t Challenging Heights provides in-kind microloans to the families.
Once the children are reintegrated, Challenging Heights provides them with the supplies and uniforms they need to be enrolled in school that is in their community or if they are 15 or older they’re set up with an apprenticeship. The Reintegration Team follows up with monitoring for two years and helps to ensure that the children are doing well in school and that the family is financially secure.
Prevention
However, to end trafficking there needs to be more done than just rescues and rehabilitation. The majority of trafficking is done because an extended family member will come to the child’s mother and say, “I know you have so many children and that you are struggling. I can provide a nice home and education for your youngest; let them come with me.” It’s very much a part of the culture to have children live with extended family members and this sounds like a better situation than the parents can provide, so they let them go. It isn’t until later that they realize that their children are essentially slaves on the Lake.
In order to address the root problem of trafficking – poverty – Challenging Heights runs a handful of women’s economic empowerment programs. There is a fish smoking site with 58 sturdy smoke ovens right next to a cold store that provides a year-round steady supply of fish. A horticulture program provides a microloan of seeds to women so they are able to grow vegetables to sell at the market. Finally, the Youth Empowerment Program trains young people in business and ICT skills so that they can open their own business.
Success Stories
As trafficking cases have declined in Winneba, where Challenging Heights is located and began, efforts have expanded to other source communities along the coast, where many of the children are trafficked from. In this election year, Challenging Heights is hoping to put pressure on the candidates running for president of Ghana to make anti-trafficking efforts a part of their campaign platform and a priority.
Challenging Heights has been around for more than 10 years and has rescued more than 1,500 children from Lake Volta and impacted thousands more through education, poverty alleviation and awareness raising in the source communities; the organization and its efforts to protect children’s rights are only growing.
If you’d like to know more about Challenging Heights, you can check out the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages, and if you feel inclined to support the work, donations are always appreciated.