A large body of literature on child trafficking in Africa imagines the problem as mostly stemming from the failure of law enforcement and state institutions. Framed differently, these works tend to understand the problem as a failure of policy and then proceed to present policy recommendations for resolving it. To buttress the point, we appraise some of the most recent works on child trafficking in Africa to indicate the linearity of this mode of imagination of the problem.
In examining the geographical and gendered dynamics of child trafficking in Africa, Okunade and Shulika (2021) recommended that governments, in collaboration with NGOs, need to develop and implement robust and supportive outreach, early warning, and awareness programs for communities that are susceptible to and at risk of human trafficking. In their mixed-method research, Ezeibe et al. (2021) found that the lack of free education, which caused many children to be out of school, elevated the risk of child trafficking. In view of their findings, the authors recommended that sustained implementation of free education programs, and other integrated multi-level approaches to social and economic inclusion, will reduce child trafficking. Gill and McKinnon (2021), whose research focused on the pervasiveness of child trafficking in West Africa compared to other regions in the continent, recommended that education, family, politics, and religious organizations must work collaboratively to end trafficking crimes.
Researching on cross-border trafficking of children from Uganda to Sudan, Kenya, Rwanda, and the DRC, Nakaiza (2021) recommended that the Ugandan police, civil society organizations, and faith-based organizations ought to integrate a strong component of public information in their programming to reach those in need of their support. Further, discussing the dynamics of internal trafficking in South Africa of children from poor rural areas to urban centers, Motseki (2022) suggested that specialized courts dealing with human trafficking should be established in the Gauteng Province and other provinces in South Africa to facilitate speedy access to justice. What is more, Jappah and Smith’s (2022) study on contemporary child trafficking and servitude in post-war Liberia recommends that policies must be formulated that address child servitude and other forms of exploitation against Liberian children.
The above notwithstanding, there is an equally critical body of literature on child trafficking in Africa that challenges the law-enforcement deficiency argument as the cause of child trafficking. These works contended that the current anti-trafficking framework on which the experiences of African children are being measured is dismissive of children’s agency and portrays them as passive actors with respect to practices designated as ‘trafficking’ (Koomson et al. 2022; Olayiwola 2021; Howard 2017). Ethnographic studies by Olayiwola (2022, 2023) and Howard (2014, 2017) in Nigeria, which utilized the voices of children themselves, made a case for the recognition of diversity in childhood, as child labor does not automatically entail child trafficking as imagined in Western-centric models of child development.
While orthodox scholars of the phenomenon may begin their evaluation of the problem from what the law defines as years of children, critical scholars do not align with the same point of departure. Instead, they call for an imagination of childhood not as a universalizing ideal with a provenance from developed countries where children are ‘immature’ and incapable of exercising prudent judgement on issues concerning their lives (Okyere 2017) but to recognize the multiplicity of childhood. Experiences that constitute childhood in Africa, they argue, do not necessarily exclude the participation in labor, being primary carers of incapacitated parents, and living outside the family realm as the Western understanding of childhood implies (Hashim and Thorsen 2011, p. 3; Sabates-Wheeler and Sumberg 2023).
Further, Okyere et al. (2023) noted that the narrative of Africa’s failure to live up to international standards of curbing child trafficking ignores the conceptual distortion inherent in the language of critique since it assumes ‘Western standards’ to be the same as ‘international standards’. While these critical sentiments are not without merit, it is necessary to point out that we have focused on approaching what childhood means from a legal perspective, particularly as defined by the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC). Again, while the call for the appreciation of a diversity of childhood may be persuasive, there is a need for caution to avoid the risk of relativizing Africa’s challenges in a way that diminishes the impetus of state actors to set ambitious goals for ending the exploitation of children. In other words, since a majority of African governments adopted the ACRWC and, as such, are obligated to conform to its dictates, we have considered it a useful metric to judge their lack of responsiveness to the plight of children.
At any rate, we do not suggest that the works we have appraised here are necessarily linear in their understanding of child trafficking or diminished by virtue of their linearity, only that both modes of conceptualizing the child trafficking problem presents certain conceptual frailties. The first perspective focuses too much on the weaknesses of state institutions, so it underplays how the problem is equally shaped by a myriad of social factors. The second relativizes Africa’s peculiar economic challenges and cultural configuration to a point that it runs the risk of excusing the government’s lack of ambition in appreciating the welfare of children as a paramount responsibility of the state.
That said, our position is that it is equally important for scholars to plough the depths of this intractable human rights problem and scrounge for alternative perspectives of understanding and imagining. This undertaking should be guided by the need to scout for questions that have yet to be asked, not necessarily for the purpose of providing instant answers but for the goal of recognizing that something can be more than one thing. In the next section, we explain why the intractability of child trafficking in Africa is not merely down to the absence of policies or strong institutions but to the current and problematic image of childhood in the continent.
