How rapid growth in Burkina Faso’s mining industry has led to an increase in the trafficking of women
AP uncovers human trafficking amid Burkina Faso’s mining towns, The Fuller Project explains how domestic workers are using social media to publicize their plight, and Walk Free looks at digital insights in modern slavery reporting.
The Associated Press has uncovered a sex trafficking operation within Burkina Faso’s gold-mine encampments. During a months-long investigation published last week, it met with nearly 20 Nigerian women who said they had been brought to the country under false pretenses, then forced into prostitution. Interviews with local sources confirmed that their experiences at the mining sites were not unique.
People with knowledge of the trafficking say most of the women come from Nigeria’s Edo state. They are promised jobs in shops or salons in Burkina Faso, and believe they will be able to support their families. Once they arrive, however, they are sent to work off debts in squalid conditions at or near small-scale gold mines.
While both Burkina Faso and Nigeria have signed the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, neither has finalized a joint plan on how to combat trafficking. Burkina Faso’s security sector, already struggling to stem a violent jihadist insurgency, is undertrained and ill-equipped to disrupt the expansive network of recruiters, traffickers and pimps responsible for this exploitation. As a result, the country not only struggles with trafficking within its borders but has also been identified as a transfer point for trafficking women into other countries, according to reports from the U.S. State Department.
The AP article mentions that Burkina Faso is likely to be downgraded in this year’s Trafficking in Persons Report, the annual publication issued by the U.S. State Department, according to two people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak on the record.
Burkina Faso’s gold mining industry is relatively new. The first of its 15 industrial mines, all but one of which produces gold, started production in 2007, a few years after the government changed the mining law to attract commercial investors. Today, Burkina Faso is the fastest-growing gold producer in Africa, and currently the fifth largest on the continent after South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, and Mali. The industry employs about 1.5 million people and was worth about US$2 billion in 2019.
With the precious metal present in every region of the country, the gold-mining industry has steadily grown over the past decade, and the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASGM) sector has grown along with it. The gold from the country’s approximately 800 small-scale mines is hard to track – much of it, particularly from the east, is smuggled across Burkina Faso’s borders with Togo, Benin, Niger, and Ghana, according to the Institute for Security Studies, based in South Africa. Industry experts say this gold likely ends up in Dubai.
While mining companies say they respect and implement corporate social responsibility standards, those further up the supply chain admit that they are unable to verify with absolute certainty the source and chain of custody of gold used in their products. Due diligence reports only look at the human rights abuses and trafficking that are directly tied to supply chains, not the trafficking of women for sex work that occurs near the operations that mine the gold.
“These kinds of exploitation [can] take place outside of the mining areas, so stakeholders don’t see it as their responsibility. However, the product is being produced in an ecosystem of human rights violations/sex trafficking,” according to Livia Wagner, senior expert at the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, who is quoted in the article. Human trafficking experts say abuses will continue until the mining industry — including buyers atop the supply chain, such as jewelers and electronics makers — take responsibility for the gold’s origins.
Here’s a round-up of other noteworthy news and initiatives:
Reflecting the initial phase of the Artificial Intelligence Against Modern Slavery (AIMS) project, Walk Free, in collaboration with The Future Society, WikiRate, and the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, has published a paper on digital insights into modern slavery reporting, which discusses the challenges and opportunities of machine readability in this area.
Human trafficking into Ireland for prostitution has remained hugely problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state’s human rights institution has told the European Union. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) has raised concerns with the EU about “systemic failures” in identifying victims of trafficking in Ireland.
As the UK pours millions into security measures, migrants say the smuggling gangs who control the Channel just get more powerful, according to a new report. For years, refugee charities have called for the government to process asylum claims on the UK’s external border and to focus on expanding safe routes rather than border controls.
Gulf-based Migrant-Rights.org surveyed other countries’ management of labour migration, specifically at the lower-waged end of the spectrum, to see if there were examples of foreign workers being afforded greater flexibility, stability, and more comprehensive labour rights compared with GCC states. While it is impossible to make a direct comparison between the Gulf and other migrant-receiving countries around the world, the analysis can offer useful examples.
On BBC Woman’s Hour, The Fuller Project explains how TikTok became a platform for raising awareness of domestic worker abuse in the Middle East and why these workers are turning to the popular video-sharing app.
The 21st Conference of the Alliance against Trafficking in Persons, organized by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), will take place in Vienna and via Zoom on 14-16 June 2021, and will put a spotlight on addressing demand as a means of prevention. It will focus specifically on discouraging the demand that fosters trafficking for the purposes of labour and sexual exploitation, as a core, long-term strategy towards ending trafficking in human beings.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is looking for a senior data scientist to help it increase the value of its data by engineering new data science solutions, from pipelines to natural language processing to machine learning. Applicants must be U.S.-based.
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