In 2025, human trafficking continues to loom long over West Africa. Economic turmoil, lack of border checks, war and the digitalization of communication have enabled the traffickers to expand their activities with expanding finesse. The trend in which 40 Ghanaians have been rescued out of a compound in Ondo state in Nigeria since it is such a familiar sight of opportunity that gives people hope and then they are unable to find a way out because criminal gangs hold their lives.
As the case shows, the scenario represents a trend that involves traffickers trying to exploit existing vulnerabilities as well as novel tools in order to expand further. The problem is not just on rescuing victims but on destroying the infrastructures which enable these crimes to sustain, whether they are economies, technologies and/or institutions.
Deceptive recruitment and entrapment
The illusion of opportunity
Across West Africa, trafficking begins with a lie. Syndicates offer promises of jobs, education, or safe passage to Europe and North America. In the Ondo incident, victims were promised work and visas in Canada. They were instead held captive, denied access to travel documents, and controlled by threats and false debts.
Such methods are not new. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), traffickers tend to use the trustful middlemen children to befriend the victims, family members, neighbors, or community representatives. As victims, they are no longer independent of their own accord; they are usually subjected to extremely harsh terms without the assistance of law and institutional help.
Systemic vulnerability
The existence of trafficking in West Africa is dictated by socioeconomic issues that are profound. Many people, particularly young people, are vulnerable and are ready to be exploited by high unemployment levels, lack of education and poverty in rural areas. Families that do not know or are deceived sign documents to allow children to be taken away by traffickers hoping they will be relieved financially.
The most common one is child trafficking. Children in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali are trafficked into dangerous mining fields and cocoa farms. Debt bondage is another mechanism of control, the cost of travel is exaggerated, and the victim of forced labour is tied with this debt that has no chance to be paid off.
Digital tools: enablers and obstacles
Social media as a weapon
Digital platforms have reshaped trafficking methods. Recruiters now operate through social media ads, encrypted messaging apps, and fake recruitment websites. Networks based in Ivory Coast and Cameroon have been found using WhatsApp and Facebook to lure victims with job postings, only to extort or exploit them upon arrival.
Digital communication allows syndicates to coordinate across borders while avoiding detection. Victims may be threatened with exposure of private photos or videos captured during the grooming process. The digital footprint often becomes a tool of both recruitment and continued coercion.
Law enforcement’s digital lag
While traffickers benefit from technology, law enforcement efforts remain under-resourced. Interpol’s Project THB West Africa, launched in 2023, aims to address this by improving digital forensic capacity and data-sharing across five West African countries. But progress is slow. Most agencies lack the technical infrastructure or training to keep pace with evolving online trafficking methods.
Until digital evidence is integrated effectively into investigations, the operational edge will remain with criminal networks.
Patterns of exploitation in West Africa
Forced labor in key industries
The majority of human trafficking cases in the region involve forced labor. Artisanal gold mines, palm oil plantations, construction sites, and fisheries are common sites of exploitation. Victims, often lured with false contracts, are kept in inhumane conditions with little or no compensation.
In Chad’s northern mining zones, recent interviews suggest that a majority of migrant workers were in debt to their recruiters and remained unpaid for months. Many lacked documentation, making it difficult to report abuse or return home.
Gender-based exploitation
The victims of sex trafficking are mostly women and girls. Internal and international trafficking of victims result in forced prostitution, pornography and domestic servitude. Silence and obedience are also often obtained through ritual threats like JuJu, being employed by Nigerian syndicates.
In 2024, police in Nigeria and Togo took down a transnational network of trafficking girls to Libya. The testimonies of the survivors of these trips are used to talk about rape, beatings, and deprivation. Others changed hands on several occasions before being saved or some ran away.
It is also in the war areas that sexual exploitation is prevailing as the armed groups subject women and girls to violence as a method of domination. This kind of abuse is seldom brought to the prosecution and is usually covered in stigma.
Traffickers, networks, and armed groups
Organized crime’s grip on trafficking
Slave trade in west Africa is not a marginal activity. Syndicates are well-financed to operate in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, among other countries, with support of weak institutions and in some cases of corrupt officials. The networks deal with recruitment, transportation, forgery of documents, and dissemination and work efficiently as businesses would do.
In the 2025 Ondo case, there was an obvious incidence of transnational coordination. Victims had been transported to another country, kept in distant enclaves, and deprived of identification papers, a formula that has become a common denominator in other trafficking activities reported by NGOs within the last two years.
Armed actors and forced recruitment
Beyond economic exploitation, trafficking is increasingly weaponized by armed groups. Militias in Mali, Burkina Faso, and northern Nigeria recruit children through abduction or coercion. The UN verified 1,200 cases of child recruitment across Africa in 2024, many originating from conflict zones with little government control.
These groups use trafficking not only for manpower but for financing, trafficking girls into forced marriages or prostitution. The line between insurgency and criminal enterprise is often blurred.
Enforcement and international efforts
A promising operation in Ondo State
In May 2025, Nigerian authorities successfully rescued 40 Ghanaian victims in Ondo State, with assistance from Interpol and local intelligence. Three suspects were arrested, and the victims repatriated through Ghana’s Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection.
The operation demonstrated the potential of cross-border cooperation and intelligence-driven policing. However, it also revealed systemic fragilities: many of the victims had crossed borders without detection, and traffickers had operated openly for months.
Resource gaps and strategic weaknesses
Project THB West Africa, a regional initiative supported by the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, remains underfunded. With a budget of just under $1 million for five countries, the program is stretched thin. Anti-trafficking units in Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone report ongoing training and equipment shortages.
Moreover, data sharing remains inconsistent. Without harmonized legal definitions and procedures across the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), many cases stall at jurisdictional boundaries.
Victim recovery and the limits of support
Challenges of reintegration
Trafficking survivors have many challenges. After they come back home, they are traumatized, stigmatized and they are poorer than when they left home. Devoid of psychological support, job training, and financial help, the chances of re-trafficking run high.
Joyce Vincent, a Nigerian slave who was brought over the Sahara desert wrote;
“If they catch you, they will either sell you into prostitution or they will take your organs.”
This testimony points to the cruelty that victims undergo and to the extent of the trauma they bear.
In many cases, even when government programs are available to address the problem, it is difficult to see programs with significant scales or that enjoy community support as the promotion of their continued implementation may unlikely be sustainable.
Survivor-centered policies needed
There is an increasingly vociferous advocacy to follow survivor-centred policies and ensure that the rights, agency and long-term health and wellbeing of the victims are prioritised. Shelters, legal services, and entry into identity restoration should become the norm when governments respond to the national level.
Some of these are being filled by the NGOs but since they do not have firm funding or are not even coordinated with their respective national governments, their effects are not that strong. The development of a new draft protocol under current discussion at the ECOWAS in 2025 can potentially standardize the policies of victim protection, and aimed at this, it is necessary to maintain pressure and control.
The power and peril of technology
One of the indisputable effects of technology on the topic of child sexual trafficking is that it has given traffickers a wider reach but capabilities of prevention are also yet to be explored with its help. The suspicious recruitment patterns can be determined with the use of data-driven profiling, online monitoring tools, and artificial intelligence. In Ghana, NGOs are testing applications that will enable people to report suspected trafficking anonymously.
But such tools are up against high hurdles: The rural regions of the country have limited connectivity, cybercrime legislation is weak, and the majority of police agencies lack technical competence. Digital assistants should be combined with offline support infrastructures education, awareness programs, and safe migration channels, to be effective.
What the future may hold
The Ondo State case is a wakeup call: the nature and magnitude of human trafficking in West Africa is evolving at a higher rate than the one of response. Traffickers are flexible, well financed, and more tech aware. In the meantime, organizations set with the mandate to prevent them are usually responsive, disjointed, and underserved.
Until then, and unless talking about victim care ever turns into a serious practice, human trafficking will continue to exist as a profitable yet fatal activity. It is not only about saving people; however it is also about the conditions that put people in vulnerable situations in West Africa.
A critical question has now been raised on how the region can develop an organized, survivor-led and technologically-competent approach to combating human trafficking, or whether yet another generation will be lured to the same pitfalls with the same illusions.