STOPPING THIS HUMAN TRAFFICKING (DEC 9)

HUMAN trafficking in our part of the world somehow has a link to the underdevelopment of society.
This has led to unrelenting rural migration with young people — both males and females — moving to the cities to swell the unemployed urban population.
This large number of unemployed people are those who fall prey to human trafficking.
In Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi and some of the urban areas one would find these unemployed youth roaming looking for any job to do with most of them yearning to go abroad to seek greener pastures.
It has become fashionable to see these young people looking for what they term as “connection” and willing and ready to pay as much as between GH¢3,000 and GH¢6,000 for travel documents, mostly fake ones, to get to Europe and America where they are made to believe that they will get better jobs.
They go to these foreign countries only to find out that the jobs they were promised are non-existent and have to do with any job that come their way. Some of them end up doing unimaginable menial jobs. Others, especially the women, end up in brothels to engage in prostitution.
This is how some of our young female compatriots — 50 of them — ended up in the Russian Federation to engage in commercial sex work in Moscow and other cities in the Federation.
To stop this human trafficking requires concerted efforts at the national, regional and district levels.
It must start with the improvement on agricultural practices and methods, since majority of our people are in agriculture. Community development and employment generation initiatives by the government, the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies, will make staying home attractive.
Civil society organisations such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), women groups and co-operatives must play important role in the effort by implementing poverty alleviation policies and programmes in both urban and rural areas and coming up with concrete income generating activities for these vulnerable young people who roam in our cities so that they do not fall prey to these syndicates and rings who lure them to be trafficked.
Fortunately, the government has initiated measures to streamline and modernise agriculture and as part of these, agricultural equipment, fertilisers and Buffer Stock Management Agency which will purchase farm produce through private buying agents at guaranteed prices from farmers to revolutionise agriculture have been put in place.
The government should not stop here but also come up with programmes to develop the rural areas by providing the basic social amenities such as housing units, potable water, electricity and good roads
We believe that if these measures are consciously implemented, our rural sector will open up and these young men and women will be enticed to stay in their various communities to help develop the areas and not make a beeline to the cities to be caught in this obnoxious human trafficking.