In February, GAATW Secretariat spoke with May Ikoghode, Co-ordinator from Girls Power Initiative (GPI), to learn more about how the organisation's community-based programmes are reaching and empowering adolescent girls across Southern Nigeria, how research into girls' vulnerabilities directly shapes their prevention and educational interventions, and how awareness-building, skills training, and advocacy remain central to GPI's work combating child trafficking and advancing the sexual and reproductive health rights of young women and girls.

Vivian: Thank you, May. I would like to understand a little bit more about the history of how and why the Girls' Power Initiative was founded? Who were the founders? In which year? And what was the context in which this organisation was born?

May: Girls’ Power Initiative was founded in 1993 by two great feminists. Professor Bene Madunagu, she passed on last year, and Lady Grace Osakue. They were friends and they belonged to another organisation which was also a feminist movement known as Women in Nigeria. In Women in Nigeria, they talked a lot about gender issues and discovered that the older women in Nigeria, they already had a mindset, that having grown up in a patriarchal society, things cannot change. So, Professor Bene Madunagu and Lady Grace Osakue said, it will be better to carry our feminist message to the younger generation of girls. If we give this message to girls when they are young, they will grow up with a positive mindset, unlike their parents who grew up in a patriarchal society, with negative mindsets about what women can do and what women should not do.

First Bene and Grace set up the organisation, with about 12 girls and their immediate family. Their original agenda was to talk about gender issues, but when they interviewed these girls to understand what they wanted to talk about, they discovered that the girls really want to know things about themselves, their sexual health, sexual rights and what they were not learning in schools. So that's how GPI was formed and Comprehensive Sexuality Education became a major part of what GPI does on a daily basis.

Over time, GPI identified other challenges that were hindering the girls from achieving their full potential. One of these was child trafficking. So preventing child trafficking became part of our agenda.

Then the HIV and AIDS epidemic arrived and we added this to our agenda. We realised the stigma around girls' sexual and reproductive health and rights meant that girls could not go out to say they want to purchase anything like a female condom. They could not go out to purchase antiretroviral pills. They also could not even say no to men who do not want to use any form of protection during sex. So we had to empower the girls concerning HIV/ AIDS, and tell them how to protect their bodies and their health. Teenage pregnancy was also part of the problem that girls were facing, so we have also taught them about how to prevent teenage pregnancy, how to make the right choices at the right time. That's the agenda of GPI.

We started with two offices in two states and later we expanded to five states. We now have five offices in five different states. We have GPI in Benin, in Calabar, in the federal capital territory, in Delta State, and in Akwa Ibom. Our desire is to also have GPI in Bayelsa, so that the six states that are in the south-south geopolitical zone would be fully covered by GPI.

We have also expanded our outreach to a wider audience including boys, teachers and parents, who play a major role in the life of girls.

Vivian: How do you approach these communities that you work with, whether girls, boys, their parents, their brothers, their extended families? Are they close to the office that you have? Or do you approach schools?

May: We have a programme for girls where it is mandatory for them to come to the office once a week. Every Saturday in the district or every Sunday in Calabar and Delta state. So, when they come for the programme, for about three hours, every week for three years, we provide comprehensive sexuality education training.

For those girls who are not able to come to the office, we go to their schools. Schools know what we do in GPI, they write to us to ask us to come and set up clubs in their school. So in these schools, we have GPI staff who become facilitators, go to these schools twice or once in a week, as the case may be.

Then in our programming on anti-human trafficking issues, we take these messages to the communities. We are the ones that travel to these communities to meet with them. When we go, we meet with the stakeholders in the communities, pay advocacy visits to them, tell them what we want to do. They get interested in what we are going to do in their communities and then we carry out the activities depending on how long the project is. Some projects may be one year, some may be two or three years. We also have a boy-girl forum, for the brothers of the girls that we interface with.

Vivian: Ok, so there are many ways to approach them. You just mentioned trafficking. Can you explain how you work in these anti-trafficking efforts? For example, you mentioned that the founders of the organisation realised that there were high rates of child trafficking for many purposes. How do you approach boys or girls that have been trafficked? Do you provide any sort of support and do you work along with a network of organisations there in Nigeria?

May: Yes, we work in a network. We also work alone. We also work with the agency which is set up by the Government, known as NAPTIP, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons. Why do we work with NAPTIP? Because we don't have the right to arrest, nor the right to prosecute. We are mainly into prevention. But NAPTIP is the one that has the duty to arrest, to prosecute. NAPTIP are also the first responders when trafficked children are returned to the country.

We then support those who need to reintegrate. NAPTIP reaches out to us and gives us a list. If the person falls within the age range or within the communities we serve, we are able to support their reintegration.

Many of them may want to go back to school, to learn a trade, to be mentored by other people who are in their field. So we are able to facilitate all of this, depending on the resources that we have.

In the area of prevention, we work solely by going to schools, setting up clubs, giving them the messages we think are important for them to know. But when we are having field work, we work with other organisations because, in GPI Benin, we have 20 staff and 50 girls, so we partner with other organisations when we have road walk (rally) at least once in a year, which is on the 30th of July every year. That's the International Day against Human Trafficking.

Vivian: When you say that the trafficked children come back to Nigeria, what is the background of these victims or survivors? Why have they been trafficked in the first place? Have they mostly been lured for a job? And also, you mentioned that if it falls ‘‘within the age limit’’ you are able to support their reintegration. What is that age range?

May: For GPI programming, we interface with girls between the ages of 10 to 19 in our three-year curriculum program. But for human trafficking, it is between the ages of 10 to 35, because this is the age range for which the IOM will fund reintegration work. Our other partners ECPAT France and ECPAT Luxembourg in our current project Act Against Child Trafficking in Nigeria, are only interested in children and adolescents that are aged below 24, i.e. from 13 to 24.

On the purpose for which these children are being trafficked, we have two major types of trafficking, which is the internal and external. The purpose for internal trafficking is usually for child labour. Traffickers go to rural communities, bring in children to stay as housemaids, and then they don't go to school. They make them do all the household chores and everything. Then at the end, they don't pay them any money. Instead, they pay the trafficker who has brought them to that place. They pay the middle person. And it is exploitation because the children that are doing all the work do not have anything apart from the meals that they take. They don’t even have clothing, nothing.

On the other hand, our children are also trafficked abroad. They are deceived. They are told that there is a greener pasture abroad. There are better jobs abroad or better job offers. These children know how to do hair, know how to weave, know how to do one thing or the other. And they tell them that their skills will be very useful abroad, and that they will be paid in dollars. And you know, the dollar rate to the Naira rate is so huge. One dollar is over 1,300 Nigerian Naira.

So, with $3 you can buy a cone of ice cream abroad, but by the time that $3 gets to Nigeria, it would be able to buy you food that a family of five can depend on. So there are a lot of people wishing to go and work, and earn dollars. They prefer to migrate than to remain in Nigeria, where the minimum wage is not even enough for them to take a taxi outside a State to attend a programme.

This vulnerability to trafficking is caused by a combination of illiteracy, lack of information, and greed. Sometimes parents themselves encourage their children to go abroad, driven by the visible wealth of neighbours whose daughters have traveled overseas and sent money home. They are building houses, supporting their families — without considering or caring about the kind of work their own children will actually be doing there.

Then there is another form of trafficking which we call ‘‘baby factories’’, where girls in certain parts of the country get pregnant, go to individuals who assist them in delivering their babies, and then sell the newborns.

Vivian: Do you mean that they act like surrogates? Is it surrogacy?

May: No, this is different from surrogacy. These are girls in financial need, sometimes university students, sometimes just poor girls, who get pregnant and are taken in by someone who offers to care for them for nine months. Their parents don't know where they are. When they deliver, the baby is taken away and they are paid as little as 400,000 to 500,000 naira ($200-$300), while that baby is sold for 3 million naira (about $2,200).

Vivian: Ah ok, more like illegal adoption as in one form of trafficking that has been legally and widely recognised.

May: Yes, exactly! These are usually university students. They pass the message from one to the other, and you can see girls getting pregnant and going to a particular home to deliver — we see that as another form of trafficking.

For the boys, they go through cybercrime. A guy rents a very big apartment, gets a group of boys, they all have laptops, and they are taught how to defraud people without even leaving their homes. Many of these boys are then trafficked to neighbouring countries like Ghana. They are not given their entitlements, they are not allowed to leave, they are locked up and no longer have their freedom.

Then there's this new one now: organ harvesting. Boys are brainwashed and told that they have two kidneys and only one will be useful to them. They are lured, offered maybe 700,000, 800,000, or even 1 million naira ($600 to $750), and they allow their kidneys to be harvested - which are then sold for millions. They are not given the proper information that one kidney cannot carry them as much as two. That lack of information, that deceit, is what makes it exploitation and further makes it trafficking, because they are usually told not to tell anybody.

Vivian: It is definitely very interesting what you have mentioned. The one you mentioned about cybercrime is becoming known as trafficking for forced criminality. I would like to understand if Nigeria or NAPTIP is naming it as such, and whether Nigeria is passing any law that recognises, first, that the main victims are children; second, that they are being taken out of the country; and third, that they are committing crimes, but forced crimes? How is the situation around this?

May: Well, as GPI we try to pass information, because it is only when you are able to pass information that people will understand the magnitude of the problem. Initially, people didn't know that our girls were going to Italy for prostitution and further exploitation. We just knew that: ah, in this family, they've gone to Italy. By the time the girl stays four or five years there, she comes back to pick another girl from the family and takes her to Italy. We didn't know that was trafficking until the news got out.

So with cybercrime, we are trying to pass out the information to let people know that it is a crime. The fact that these children are taken unwillingly out of the country makes it a crime. Maybe, initially, the parents allowed them to go to a particular place to learn about trade, not knowing that those children are then taken from that place to another country and that is when it becomes trafficking. Now, when NAPTIP knows about cybercrime, they spring into action. Wherever they know that boys and girls are doing cybercrime, they bust them. And these boys, many of them have a particular way of dressing, they carry dreads, so you can identify them. They are known as ‘‘Yahoo Boys’’. When law enforcement sees them, they stop and interrogate them. We are trying our best to address it.

Vivian: What is the range of age of the victims of cybercrime?

May: We have adolescents and children as young as 14. Then we have adults as old as 30. They are mainly male, but the role of the girls there is to be their cook. Because the boys are locked up in a room. The girls that are also locked up with them are the caterer and even partners to those boys. For instance, in a big house of maybe 20 boys, you can have two girls. And their role there will be to be sex partners and to be cooks.

Vivian: I understand. And what you mentioned about organ harvesting, we have already heard from others doing research across Africa about this growing phenomenon, where people who have gone abroad for work have willingly sold their organs, not knowing the consequences of selling a kidney, for example. It is still a gray area, but it has of course become discussed as trafficking, which is really, really important. So with all these dynamics you have mentioned, e.g. child labour internally, cybercrime abroad, sexual exploitation abroad, what are the biggest challenges in addressing these issues?

May: The government is trying to address it, that is why they set up NAPTIP. There is also a state task force against human trafficking that has become a state migration agency because Nigeria is not only a country of source, it is also a transit and destination country when it comes to human trafficking. People come from neighbouring countries to lodge in hotels and drag girls into sexual exploitation. So one of the major tasks of the migration agency is to identify such hotels where there are underage girls, bust them, and go on social media to let people know that it is wrong for any hotel to accept underage girls for prostitution, which is also a crime in Nigeria.

But one of the biggest challenges comes from within the communities themselves. Some of the women whose children were first trafficked, now have become traffickers. These women have unions - communities of people whose children are abroad. And so, for example, when we go to the market to campaign against human trafficking, they push us back. They will tell you they have five girls who graduated and there are no jobs so what do you want them to do? So these women justify it, because the government has not put anything meaningful in place to engage the youth. There is supposed to be a place where young people can go to learn about trade, but there is only one in the whole state, that is not sufficient. So when you come preaching against sending their children abroad for prostitution, they see you as the enemy.

In every two or three girls who travel abroad for prostitution, only one may succeed. By succeed, I mean she is able to pay off her madam. Maybe she spent 40,000 and worked for five years to pay off her debt. Then she comes back to recruit someone else, who works as a prostitute and pays her. She builds up to four or five girls who are paying her, she is making money, and she sends that money home for her parents to build houses and set up businesses. So even though she was initially a victim, she has now become a trafficker. When you go to the market and speak to the women who have benefited from the exploitation of others and tell them that human trafficking is evil, they will tell you it is the proceeds that built everything they have. To them, it is not evil.

There is a Nigerian law that says any trafficker who is caught and prosecuted should have all goods and proceeds from trafficking confiscated by the government. That law has been in existence, but we have never seen anybody whose goods have been confiscated. They are still able to exploit others and keep the proceeds.

And there is another challenge: survivors of human trafficking are not willing to prosecute their traffickers, because many of them see their traffickers as people who helped them out of poverty. As long as we are not able to prosecute traffickers and confiscate their goods, trafficking will continue.

Vivian: And these trafficked persons who do not seek justice by filing against their traffickers, how do they access justice? Is there any alternative way for them to do so? Is it perhaps that they look only for reintegration rather than revictimisation from the legal system?

May: They don't seek justice. All they are interested in is reintegration. The hold that the trafficker has on them is huge. Many of them, before they were trafficked, took an oath. Nigeria is a society with deep spiritual beliefs so the girl is asked to cut a strand of her hair, cut her fingernails, provide pubic hair and menstrual pads, and deposit all of it with a voodoo priest, promising that she will never reveal the identity of her trafficker. She believes that if she reveals it, harm will come to her or to any member of her family. So by the time they have paid their debts and become traffickers themselves, they are still not willing to give out the identity of their trafficker. And many of these traffickers are actually their own aunties, boyfriends, or uncles, people they have a very close relationship with. They will not speak out because it would bring stigma to their family.

In Nigeria, when somebody goes to prison and comes back, they are no longer treated as a normal human being. Everybody runs away from them, they are treated as criminals. So they will not want any member of their family to be stigmatised or sent to prison.

Vivian: Wow, that is a very comprehensive explanation of how the cultural beliefs and societal stigma pose a challenge to the prevention work that you do. So I have one last question. Regarding your membership in GAATW, how do you expect that this experience of working in alliance will strengthen the work that you do? For example, we were discussing trafficking for forced criminality, do you see any value in working together on this?

May: Of course, we have been a member of GAATW for a very long time. We are happy that this is a space where we are able to express ourselves. I thank God for this project that has brought together vulnerable women, migrant women, and women in situations whereby they need to be able to speak up for themselves. Women advocating for women, and that is what GAATW is all about, and we are glad to be part of it.

When we were in the programme with you, we selected a mixed group of women: teachers who don't earn much, traders, housewives, people who are into their own skills. When we started, only the teachers knew about Zoom and online meetings. Many of them did not even have access to Android phones. But now they are able to hold meetings online, twice a month, and they also meet together physically and some topics are shared with them to facilitate. You can imagine somebody who did not even know how to use the internet to search for words, now being able to facilitate online discussions. Somebody who could not stand before a crowd, now being able to speak up. It has really opened their eyes. It has been wonderful, very wonderful!

Vivian: Thank you so much, May, for all this information and for sharing a bit of the work and the history of GPI. I don't have any more questions. Would like to add about the future plans that you are developing with GPI? Something that you are going to develop this year?

May: Our plan this year for GPI is to achieve sustainability, to be able to sustain ourselves even without external funding. That is what we are working seriously towards. Our next strategic plan is being developed in October this year, and in that strategic plan we are going to build-in components of entrepreneurship and ways to fund the organisation without depending on external funding. That is what we are working towards for the future.

Vivian: Thank you, May. You have given me such wonderful information and really helped me understand the current context in Nigeria, specifically for the children, girls, and boys that you work with.