PRESS RELEASES

Trafficked Children Return Home In Benin

April 17, 2007

This is the story of a woman who went from a career in child trafficking to championing women's rights.

She accomplished this by empowering women and girls in her community with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Community Action for Girls' Education (CAGE) project.

In 2001, USAID awarded World Learning, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization (NGO), a four-year grant to promote girls' education in targeted communities in the areas of Bopa, Aplahoue, Ouinhi, Zagnanado, Banikoara, Karimama, Kerou and Boukoumbe in Benin. Tokpoê, a rural village in Bopa, approximately 95 kilometers from Cotonou, Benin's largest city, is one of those communities.

World Learning conducted community sensitization programs, including meetings in villages to raise awareness among parents, teachers and local authorities about the importance of education -- in particular girls' education -- and about the evils of child trafficking.

The NGO also established local monitoring committees to see that school-age girls enroll and stay in school. It offered students the opportunity to meet after classes to study.

Débora Houndessegan is a dynamic woman who for several years was an intermediary between trafficked children's parents and families offering to put the trafficked children to work for money.

For agreeing to have their child placed with another family, parents received the equivalent of approximately $10 and a few yards of cloth.

The trafficked children usually ended up working long hours, in poor conditions, and sometimes were subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Usually a trafficked child is provided with minimum necessities -- a place to sleep and basic food. There is no monetary compensation. Once a child was taken away, parents knew little about the child's whereabouts.

With regular visits of two Bopa CAGE workers to the targeted communities and their sensitization efforts, things began to change. Houndessegan, for one, realized she was not working toward the betterment of her community. She realized that by trafficking girls, she had contributed to increasing poverty among women. She felt guilty and went to the CAGE community workers to confess her trafficking activities.

Houndessegan promised to stop her business and committed herself to bringing back home the children she had sold. She became the village's main advocate for girls' schooling and an influential member of the local committee created to promote that goal.

Houndessegan maintained that girls could achieve as important positions as men if they were given the chance to attend school.

Other people in the community also became aware of the benefits of sending girls to school and renounced the practice of child trafficking.

Houndessegan brought girls she had trafficked back to Tokpo, where the younger girls started school and the older girls became apprentices.

Houndessegan has used her business acumen to develop a women's collective that harvests and processes cassava, a staple food of Benin, and palm tree products, both of which are important commercially. She has been a major catalyst in changing the community of Tokpo.

 

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(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)