Remittances and Returns: Smuggling and Human Trafficking in Edo State, by Iro Aghedo

To encourage a shift in the mindset of the average Edo person away from a fixation on Europe and other northern countries, the federal and state governments of Edo and their supporters must create an enabling environment for sustainable economic empowerment. This includes providing a steady supply of electricity, improving living standards and employment for those who have acquired vocational skills.

Nigeria is the largest producer of irregular migrants in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to smuggling and human trafficking networks. Edo State in Nigeria's sprawling, poverty-ridden south-south region is the epicenter of this mass exodus to "greener pastures" and a better life.

Over the decades, human trafficking rings based in Edo have spread across the globe, led by a group of self-made bosses, madams, recruiters, fixers, facilitators and financiers who are become qualified specialists in their field.

Despite local and international attempts to shut down these networks, they have remained resilient, compromising socio-economic inequalities to support themselves and shape their own narrative.

The growth of smuggling and trafficking

Nigeria's economy experienced a sharp downturn in the 1980s and 1990s, at the same time as the foreign demand for low-skilled agricultural labour, particularly in Italy, increased. The result was a sharp increase in irregular migration, including many women from Edo, which quickly attracted more workers than needed. This forced many migrants to seek alternative livelihoods, including drug trafficking and prostitution, which proved highly profitable, and the "madams" began to pass off Nigerians in the sex industry as huge fees. As European immigration laws tightened during the 1990s, these pimps increasingly resorted to human traffickers to supply them with young women and girls.

Pressure on local, national and international actors to stem irregular migration and crack down on trafficking has intensified in recent years. Improved technological safeguards led to the increased use of land routes across the Sahara Desert, first via Morocco and then Libya after Gaddafi's overthrow in 2011. But subsequent security interventions increased the prices paid by Nigerians for the crossing, and in 2021 only around 2% of those crossing the Mediterranean from Libya were Nigerians, amid a wider shift in destination from Europe to the Middle East.

The ultimate reason is socio-economic, reinforced by the positive impact of diaspora remittances on the local economy and standard of living. By Community Standards, many people think it's "a shameful thing when a family doesn't have at least one child abroad." In communities where human trafficking and migrant smuggling are accepted as a good thing, smugglers and traffickers are seen as boons.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also led to an increase in migration to neighboring African countries – considered less risky according to SEEFAR, a Nigerian migration-focused NGO. Indeed, trafficking in Nigeria and to other West African contexts is perhaps now more widespread than trafficking to Europe. Children from the poorest rural families are taken to wealthier urban households where they perform unpaid domestic work, often subject to physical and sexual abuse, before being replaced when they grow older. 2019 data from the Nigerian National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) showed that domestic trafficking was responsible for two-thirds of all trafficking cases.

Community Perceptions

Although the ultimate destinations may have changed, the motivation of the communities...