Growth in Burkina Faso gold mining fuels human trafficking

For months, human traffickers beat and drugged Blessing, hauling the 27-year-old in one gold mine encampment to the next, where every night she was forced to sleep with dozens of men for less than $2 a person. The madam who lured Blessing to the landlocked West African nation of Burkina Faso with promises of a beauty salon job, threatened to kill her if she tried to hightail it. "Nobody involves your rescue," said Blessing, wiping tears from her cheeks during a recent interview.

In December 2019, while the madam was away, Blessing finally got the courage to flee. By using local residents, she and six other women left the encampment and walked to safety, finally ending up in a US transit center for migrants in the administrative centre city of Ouagadougou. Blessing's experience in the gold mining encampments is not unique. Within a months-long investigation into sex trafficking and the gold mining industry, The Associated Press met with practically 20 Nigerian women who said that they had been taken to Burkina Faso under false pretenses, then forced into prostitution.

A few of the women, who like Blessing spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his or her safety, said they knew a huge selection of others with similar stories. To protect their safety, AP is identifying the women by the names they used for sex work. The AP verified the women's stories through interviews with aid workers, lawyers, police, local anti-trafficking activists, health workers, a trafficker, and members of the Nigerian community in several towns throughout Burkina Faso.

People with understanding of the trafficking say most of the women result from Nigeria's Edo state, where promises of jobs in shops or salons in Burkina Faso sounded such as a good way to aid their own families. Once here, they were delivered to work off debts in squalid conditions at or near small-scale gold mines. While both Burkina Faso and Nigeria have signed the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, neither has finalized a joint plan on how to combat trafficking.

Burkina Faso's security sector, already struggling to stem a violent jihadist insurgency, is undertrained and ill-equipped to disrupt the expansive network of recruiters, traffickers, and pimps. Subsequently, the country not merely struggles with trafficking within its borders but has also been discovered as a transfer point for trafficking women into other countries, according to reports from the US STATE DEPT..

One man arrested and detained by local authorities for trying to traffic three women over the Burkina Faso border into neighboring Mali told the AP he didn't contemplate it human trafficking because he said the ladies knew they'd be working as prostitutes. "I feel somehow bad because it isn't a good job to allow them to do. They say it's just a voluntary decision," said the 48-year-old car parts salesman from Nigeria, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation.

He told the AP that he previously bought the ladies for $270 each in Benin and was likely to sell them for a lot more than twice that to a Nigerian madam in Mali. He'd done the same with two other women back 2019.Burkina Faso may very well be downgraded in this year's Trafficking in Persons Report, an gross annual report issued by the U.S. State Department, according to two persons acquainted with the discussions who weren't authorized to speak on the record.

Generally, countries are downgraded if they haven't made significant steps to curb trafficking. Downgraded countries could also risk US financial and diplomatic penalties.Burkina Faso's gold mining industry is relatively new. The first of its 15 commercial mines, all except one which is for gold, started production in 2007, a couple of years following the government changed the mining law to attract commercial investors.

Today, Burkina Faso may be the fastest-growing gold producer in Africa, and the fifth major on the continent after South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, and Mali. Gold may be the nation's most important export, according to a February report by the German-based research group GLOCON. The industry employs about 1.5 million persons and was worth about $2 billion in 2019.

A lot more than 70% of the professional gold mined is delivered to Switzerland, according to 2019 data from the US Comtrade Database, and the vast majority of it really is processed by Metalor Technologies, a Swiss-based refinery of treasured metal and one of the largest on the globe. Metalor Technologies said its suppliers are owned and managed by listed companies with a higher sense and respect of corporate social responsibility standards.

"In Burkina, as in all other countries we do use, our suppliers have followed an intensive homework and compliance process to ensure that just how they operate do respect human rights and environmental standards," the company said in a statement, adding that it follows guidelines set by groups including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a global organization composed of 37 member countries established to stimulate financial progress and world trade.

Gold from Burkina Faso can be likely used to make products sold by companies in a number of industries, including the technology sector, according to conflict mineral reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the filings, companies say they perform homework to make certain that the gold found in their products is not being mined or processed by forced labor or exploited workers. But many companies admit they are struggling to verify with absolute certainty the foundation and chain of custody of gold found in their products.

The SEC reports are made to cover human rights abuses and trafficking that are directly linked with the supply chains, not the trafficking of women for sex work occurring near businesses that mine the gold.

"These kinds of exploitation (can) happen beyond the mining areas, so stakeholders don't see it as their responsibility. However, the merchandise is being stated in an ecosystem of human rights violations/sex trafficking," said Livia Wagner, senior expert at the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, in a note via WhatsApp.Experts and local officials say most documented human trafficking cases of women appear at small-scale gold mines, not the bigger industrial mines.

The gold from the country's approximately 800 small-scale mines is hard to track. A lot of it, particularly from the east, is smuggled across Burkina Faso's borders with Togo, Benin, Niger, and Ghana, in line with the Institute for Security Studies, located in South Africa. Industry specialists said this gold likely ends up in Dubai. The federal government of Burkina Faso estimates the illicit market produces more than $400 million worth of gold a year.

Salofou Trahore, general director for Burkina Faso's regulatory body for small-scale mines, said he was unaware that women were being exploited at the sites. The government is in the process of regulating small-scale mines more strictly, he said. Trahore added that would provide better oversight of the mines, together with tracking environmental and human rights abuses.

In a single now-vibrant mining community, the southwestern town of Hounde, the opening of an professional gold mine four years ago led to a rise in brothels from one to six, according to Jean-Paul Ramde, whose organization, Responsibility Hope Life Solidarity Plus, gives women HIV/AIDS tests and condoms.

"Where there are gold mines, there are many evils that develop around it, including prostitution," said Oumarou Dicko, the top of the government's Department for Family and Children in the region that serves Hounde.Prostitution exists in a legal gray area in Burkina Faso - it isn't illegal, but soliciting it really is. Police say it's hard to prove if someone has been trafficked into sex work because women fear retaliation from criminal networks.

The limited available figures show a rise in reported trafficking cases recently. The U.N. International Organization for Migration helped over 35 persons trafficked last year in Burkina Faso, weighed against 12 for most of 2018, said Claire Laroche, the organization's protection officer.

AP's investigation showed the situation is far larger. In Secaco, a makeshift mining town tucked behind uneven dirt roads deep in the brush, trafficked women live and work in tiny, ragged tents with plastic sheeting. Here they have sexual intercourse on thin mattresses on the dirt floor with 30 men a night, trying to earn their freedom.

A 27-year-old called Mimi said recruiters informed her she'd have a job to aid her three children when she found its way to Burkina Faso. 8 weeks later, she still owed her madam $1,200. "It's a jungle and I want to survive," she said.

Like many others, Love thought a steady income awaited her in Burkina - in the 35-year-old's case, to aid her 13-year-old daughter. "In Nigeria, there are a lot of graduates but no jobs," Love said. She was told she'd be employed in a boutique but was instead forced into sex use miners.

Joy, a divorced mother of four, said she arrived early in 2020 because she couldn't make enough profit Nigeria to aid her children. The 31-year-old was told she'd work in a shop. Upon arrival, she was presented with a condom and taken to a mining site for prostitution, she said. The clients, mostly local miners or men from neighboring Mali or Ivory Coast, often won't pay and become physically abusive, the ladies said.

Nigerian women are usually taken to the western city of Bobo-Dioulasso and sold for upward of $700 to different Nigerian madams, according to interviews with several women, a trafficker, and local authorities.The madams confiscate the women's passports, phones, and money, then force them into sex work in brothels in makeshift mining towns next to the small-scale mines or in larger towns nearby the mines. Several women speak the neighborhood language or know the region.

Boukary Ouedraogo, the authorities commissioner in Bobo-Dioulasso, said that on many occasions whenever a trafficker or madam was arrested, community leaders have tried to negotiate because of their release, which points to complicity within the Nigerian community, he said. "When the (Nigerian) representatives in Bobo-Dioulasso come, what they need is that we release the person," he said. "If someone's in breach of regulations and you ask us release a him, it implies that you defend him," he said.

Women are bound to the madams until they pay back their debts - which frequently approach $2,700. Madams often threaten to kill them with juju, a form of witchcraft, if they try to escape.A number of the women were recruited by the madams themselves, approached randomly on a bus or on the market in Nigeria, and asked if indeed they wanted to earn an improved living. Others were referred by friends or acquaintances, usually young boys paid to recruit women.Once recruited, the women travel for about three days with the traffickers. The normal route is through Cotonou, a sizable port city in Benin, and north, sometimes passing through Togo, into Burkina Faso.

They travel on public buses with the traffickers or in private cars. They could tell border police they will be the traffickers' wives. Underage girls are given fake identification cards made in Benin, according to the women, one who showed an AP reporter the forgery.

In some cases, a family group sells a woman. Natasha, 17, said she was told practically two years ago she'd be likely to school but was sold to traffickers by her aunt for about $700."I was like. 'Oh God, is this how my life's likely to be?' This is not my dream. I didn't dream of coming to this place for prostitution. I was thinking of better things, like school," she said.

The traumas these women have suffered are obvious, according to local activists who help them. "When you make an effort to dig deeper, they change the subject and do not want to speak about it," said Stephanie Benao-Ouedraogo, a social worker for Association Tie, an area organization centered on child protection.

Human trafficking experts said abuses will continue until the mining industry - including buyers atop the supply chain, such as for example jewelers and electronics makers - take responsibility for where the gold originates.

"There's a lot of give attention to conflict minerals, but persons need to be aware that gold is also being stated in a context of exploitation," said Wagner. "Folks are being bought and sold, that's basically putting a cost tag on a person."

In January, a fresh European Union law came into effect targeted at stemming the import of conflict minerals and metals. Regulations, the Union's first, requires that gold imports be sourced responsibly, including homework on human rights abuses and forced labor.

Burkina Faso is one of the countries mentioned in the legislation as being high-risk, and for that reason requiring extra oversight. The new law says gold mining is a source of conflict in your community because the late 2000s, usually between local communities, artisanal miners, the state and private security forces.

Meanwhile, the ladies whose lives have been upended are pleading with the traffickers to stop. Blessing wants to start out a business selling sugar and flour with her mother in Nigeria, where she has returned. She knows others have lost hope."Many girls that had good dreams to become something meaningful in life. (The traffickers) utilize this stuff to damage their thinking, to damage their hopes," she said.