Human trafficking as a practice is one of the greatest on ongoing problems on the African continent.

Article 3, paragraph (a) of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons
defines Trafficking in Persons as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of
persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of
deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of
payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the
purpose of exploitation. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans nationally or inter
continentally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim's
rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial exploitation (UNODC, n.d.)
Human trafficking is the trade in people, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the
person from one place to another. Trafficking in persons is a particularly virulent offence against
human rights, which has mostly been treated as a sub-set of irregular migration.
The exact number of victims of human trafficking is not known. However, the International Labour
Organization (ILO) estimated that 20.9 million people were victims of forced labour globally in 2012.
This estimate includes victims of trafficking in persons (ILO, 2012). According to the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2012 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, between 2007 and
2010, people from at least 136 different nationalities were trafficked and detected in 118 countries.
During this time, women accounted for 5560 per cent of all trafficking victims detected globally,
while 27 per cent of all victims were children. Almost half of trafficking flows were intraregional, i.e.,
victims were trafficked within the region of origin. Approximately one quarter were trafficked
interregionally, while another quarter of victims were trafficked domestically (UNODC, 2012).
Given its clandestine nature, there is little empirical data on the trafficking of persons, and even less
theoretical work on it. This makes it quite a difficult issue to study. While cross-border trafficking is a
crime and a breach of immigration and labour laws in many countries, it is also and principally a
human rights violation that affects mostly people in vulnerable, usually low income, socially
deprived, circumstances, such as women, children and minority groups. People often fall prey to the
lure of traffickers the offer of employment, higher income, better life opportunities for themselves
and their family out of necessity and a lack of information and resources to take their own action.
These are typically the circumstances of the poor, and while available data show that it is not
necessarily the poorest who are trafficked, many of the victims assisted by NGOs and IOs invariably
come from some of the most poverty-stricken countries. Some people classify human trafficking as a
modern day kind of slavery.
The act of human trafficking does not have limitations in terms of the violators or the traffickers and
the victims associated with it. The violators could be family members, close friends, neighbours and
even colleagues at work. The victims can also be children, men or women. In the modern world,
human trafficking does not only happen with force but it can also happen with the consent of the
victims. The trafficker is the link between supply and demand, on the one hand increasing supply
through the recruitment, deception, transportation and exploitation process and on the other,
boosting demand by providing easy access to victims. For both legal and practical purposes, this
includes everyone involved in the human trafficking chain from the point of recruitment to the point
of exploitation. Human trafficking is committed by males and females of varying ages and ethnic,
social and economic backgrounds, operating within varying degrees of organization.
Africa has become the home to one of the highest rates of human trafficking in the world. The act of
human trafficking on the continent is quite rampant and it serves mostly as the source for the supply
of most of the victims in terms of the intercontinental aspect of this form of human right abuse.
Human trafficking in Africa has taken place in almost every country if not all the countries. Human
trafficking in Africa is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon involving multiple stakeholders at the
institutional and commercial level. it is a demand-driven global business with a huge market. These
traffickers operate through certain specific routes across the continent. According to UNESCO
(2007), A number of relatively small-scale trafficking networks operate using minivan taxis to
smuggle both migrants and women across local borders. They are based at transit houses in the
border region between Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa and operate through a network of
accomplices in Johannesburg, Maputo and in the Lebombo region who recruit, transport and
accommodate and transfer young women. African traffickers face low risk of arrest, prosecution or
other negative consequences. They have exploited the lack of rule of law, the non-implementation
of existing anti-slavery laws, and corruption of judicial systems.41 These lapses allow perpetrators to
go unpunished. Prosecutions are rare and fraught with difficulties.
The victims, all the women and children and men who are deceived, transported and delivered into
the hands of those who exploit them for profit. The complexity of actors and dynamics of the human
trafficking markets is also the key factor that make trafficking so difficult to detect and combat, and
which makes victims so difficult to identify and assist. Victims of trafficking can be male or female, of
varying age groups, coming from different backgrounds, and targeted for different purposes.
Trafficked victims are either coerced or deceived into a trafficking situation depending on the
explanatory factors at play. Broadly, poverty,45 war, lack of information, gender imbalances and a
high level of demand for cheap labour and sexual services put a certain demographics at higher risks
of being trafficked. Women and children happen to be the main component of this group.
The users of trafficked victims are the people who arrive at the end of the trafficking chain. They can
either be prostitute users, head of a farm or a shop who need access to cheap labour. Users may act
as individuals or are networked through access to other illegal activities prostitution and sexual
abuse of children and forced labour. They may be unaware or unconcerned about trafficking or not
perceive themselves as part of the trafficking network. According to UNICEF, very often they [the
users] do not perceive themselves as part of the trafficking network, although they are, in fact an
engine in the machinery of exploitation. All aspects of the role of users require further research. In
South Africa, it is the sexual exploitation of children and its different actors that has received most
attention in the research on human trafficking. As a result we know more about trafficking in
children for sexual abuse than for other purposes. The practice is normally caused by mainly poverty,
lack of vocational and economic opportunities, high demand for cheap labour, profit margins, the
institutional lapses and conflict on the continent.
Poverty is one of the most important issues that drives the practice of human trafficking. Poverty
and wealth are relative concepts which lead to both migration and trafficking patterns in which
victims move from conditions of extreme poverty to conditions of less-extreme poverty. The practice
of entrusting poor children to more affluent friends or relatives may create vulnerability. Some
parents sell their children, not just for the money, but also in the hope that their children will escape
a situation of chronic poverty and move to a place where they will have a better life and more
opportunities. As a result of this situation, the destination of the practice is mainly in the developed
parts of Africa which is mainly South Africa and other countries. An increased demand for cash
incomes reduced economic opportunities in rural areas, the reduction of subsidies and other
protective means, loss of traditional livelihoods, especially in agriculture combine with more
personal and subjective rationales. Young women with some education are aware of the gap
between urban and rural life, reject the drudgery of enforced domestic work as daughters in the
family and increasingly have access to information about the lack of opportunity and how others live
their lives. In Ghana for instance one can find the head porters or kayayos who are mostly
trafficked from the remote northern part of the country to the cities for greener pastures and some
live in harsh conditions.




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