A sensitisation against "mistreatments" for local, regional and national level.

Annie Vallée
Founder of
Espoir sans Frontières

Pierre Bio-Sanou
Founder of
Espoir lutte contre l'infanticide au Bénin

Sorcere children, Exploited Children, Excision, Precocious mariages...

Misery is the fertile compost on which the trafficking of children is developping between poor and rich countries of Africa... as a proof, this actuality:

On may 2001, a boat wandered in the Gulf of Guinea with many children on board. The whole world dicovered the trafficking of children . In Benin, one of the main countries source of this cheap workforce, regions more touched by this phenomenon are those which meet more economic difficulties. Parents can't feed their large family. The trade of children can have different form but the main actors remain the parents, the trafficker and the child.

Everything begin with a "recruiter", often from the region, who promises the parents better lifestyle for the child. Then he represents the benefactor for the child since he gives to him the opportunity to "try his luck elsewhere".The debt for the preparation for the departure is moreover relieved by the recruiter himself who participate financially by paying the suffer due to the separation.

The recruiter creates a link between parents and traffickers, who through transporters send children, often very young, to work in the cotton plantations in Cote-d'Ivoire or in Gabon.

An other shape of traffic is the phenomenon "Vidomégons": Families send their little girls in the city, at relative's places, who have more money. Parents hope for a better future for their children. Indeed, girls have to help a little at home and in return, the benefactors take charge of her education and food. But, often, the contract is not honored and the child become the "slave" of the house.

It also exists in some regions of Benin, children's loans to help to the harvest or to the agricultural work. Seldom the child receive the promised wage what makes him a very cheap workforce.

It is really difficult to stop these practices because, in villages, a lot of people can not write or read and so, they don't know anything about different traffics and about the possibility of giving up the customs as for example scarification, excision, forced marriages, ritual executions of their own children.

It is to fight against the obscurantism that Espoir sans Frontières, through Elib, suggested the organisation of seminars for national and local Public Powers, social workers, for representatives of national and international associations for childhood protection and for the main local leaders from civil society.

The first Seminar was hold in the traditional region of Atakora, in Natitingou on November 1997. It favoured a general realization of these scourges and it started a true education, at school but also in the villages victims of these customs from another time.