West Africa: Ecowas Commission Roll-Up Sleeves to Curb Trafficking in Persons

increased poverty, thereby, making our young people wanting to look for greener pastures elsewhere, thus becoming more vulnerable for trafficking.”

“Insecurity due to activities of bandits and criminal non-state actors has equally not helped us. The use of technology has also not helped because there is now less physical recruitment in favor of recruitment through cyberspace where detection has become difficult. These have made fighting in many countries more difficult and more expensive,” Madam Nkrumah stressed.

At one point, the Ambassador appreciated the Government of Liberia for playing host and at the same time applauded the president of the ECOWAS Commission and officials including the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), the institution that made the meeting possible.

“I am however confident that this meeting which provides a form of peer review for all of us will provide more positive solutions as we team up to counter this menace. We need to all

work hard as individual member states and members of this network to safeguard our region from the hands of criminal networks who seem to be more organized than us and capitalizing on the high profit, low risk nature of the crime to carry out their nefarious activities,” Ambassador Nkrumah said.

She added: “We must brace up to protect victims and survivors of the crime; support them as much as possible in the areas of rehabilitation and reintegration into the society without discrimination or reprisals from the criminals. To achieve these, we need to think out of the box at this meeting to proffer far reaching and practical solutions to make our people

especially women and children safe.”