Human traffickers have expanded, infiltrated online space- NAPTIP

The Director General (DG) of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Prof. Fatima Waziri-Azi says human traffickers in Nigeria have expanded their operations, infiltrating the online sphere as much as the offline world in the last five years.

The NAPTIP DG explained that this shift has brought forth new and unsettling trends that are reshaping the human trafficking ecosystem, compelling the government to revolutionize its strategies in response to the disturbing developments.

She said this yesterday in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria at the project launch of promoting evidence-based anti-trafficking efforts in Nigeria project, being done by the Innovation for Poverty Action (IPA) in collaboration with NAPTIP and supported by the United States (US) Department of State Program to End Modern Day Slavery.

She said the collaboration would help enhance anti-human trafficking, evidenced based interventions.

Her words, “This collaboration is very essential, it us one that would help enhance anti-human trafficking, evidenced based interventions. We know that in the past five years, we’ve witnessed an alarming transformation in the landscape of human trafficking in Nigeria. It’s no longer confined to its conventional, familiar form.

“Traffickers have expanded their operations, infiltrating the online sphere as much as the offline world. And this shift has brought forth new and unsettling trends that are reshaping the human trafficking ecosystem, compelling us to revolutionize our strategies in response to these disturbing developments.

“As the antics of human traffickers change, our laws, policies and strategies must also change, if we want to effectively tackle this scourge and we can’t do that with an intuition or guess work, we can only do that with reliable and verifiable data and statistics.

“At the end of the project, I hope to see informed policy decision making in the human trafficking ecosystem, I hope to see reliable data that can be used by anyone because its one thing having data and another thing for the data to be reliable. Once people know that your data is reliable, you would be the go to person.”

Charge d’affaires, US Embassy Abuja, David Greene said this is just one of the projects the country has with the Nigerian government in various ways especially with its partnership through NAPTIP to try and reduce trafficking in persons which preys on the most vulnerable in our societies.

He said the goal for the project is to identify what works and what doesn’t, to incorporate the use of data gathering and analysis in other to make sure that its awareness campaign and collaborations across with NAPTIP are achieving the best goals.

Greene added, “The impact of trafficking is that it affects the most vulnerable and we want to make sure that every dollar and naira that is spent in Nigeria, on this scourge is spent in the best way. So this project is to make sure that everything we do is backed by research, data and evidence.”

The Country Director IPA, Funmilayo Ayeni Said the organisation woukd be rolling out surveys as part of the embedded lab projects, which has to do with the organisation working with NAPTIP to collect data.

Ayeni said the whole idea of the embedded lab is to work with NAPTIP to develop its capacity, to create its own data and use it to have things more streamlined to have the data and evidence needed to combat human trafficking in the country