Challenging Heights has called for dedicated human trafficking courts and specialized investigative capacity, as girls trafficked into Ghana are made to buy back their freedom for GH¢20,000.
Over the weekend, Challenging Heights supported an operation led by the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit of the Ghana Police Service which brought 33 girls out of trafficking and sexual exploitation. Challenging Heights is providing their care, medical attention, psychosocial support and shelter, and we commend the officers of the Unit for the professionalism with which the operation was carried out.
Some of the 33 are believed to be children. Many are reluctant to disclose their ages, which is itself a familiar consequence of the coercion they have lived under, and we are working carefully to establish the facts.
We have spoken publicly on this crisis many times over recent months. What these 33 girls are telling us has changed our assessment of what this country is dealing with.
The girls tell us they paid their own way into Ghana. The transport, the travel costs, the money handed over to those who arranged the journey, all of it came from them or from their families. On arrival, they were then told they owed sums reaching GH¢20,000 to buy back their own freedom. They paid to come, and they are made to pay again to leave. Until that money is paid, they are held as property and compelled to sell their bodies, with the earnings taken from them. They are set daily financial targets and punished when they fall short.
What we are seeing is a commercial operation with pricing, quotas, supervision and enforcement, and it runs on a chain of specialized roles: recruiters working in communities and increasingly online; transporters; immigration officials we have reason to believe are compromised; madams who travel with the girls from Nigeria into Ghana; and senior madams who supervise those madams. Every link in that chain takes a profit, and every link must be prosecuted.
Ghana has the law, and our investigators and prosecutors have secured real convictions, 273 investigations, 65 prosecutions and 25 convictions were recorded in 2024. What is missing is machinery equal to the networks we are facing. Accordingly, Challenging Heights calls on the Government of Ghana and the Judiciary to:
- Establish dedicated human trafficking courts without further delay. We welcome the Chief Justice’s announcement that specialized courts for human trafficking and cross-border crime are to be rolled out, and we now ask for a published timetable and judges trained in trafficking and trauma.
- Increase personnel and resourcing for the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit, the Ghana Immigration Service and specialized prosecution teams.
- Equip investigators with sophisticated tools, financial investigation and asset tracing, digital forensics, analysis of online recruitment, and intelligence sharing with Nigerian counterparts.
- Institutionalize trauma-informed, specialized investigative and prosecutorial training, and prosecute official complicity wherever it is found.
“These girls paid their own way into Ghana and were then told to pay again for their own freedom. A young woman who is told she must pay GH¢20,000 to redeem her freedom. You are certainly selling her back to herself. Thirty-three girls came out this weekend, and unless we reach the people at the top of this chain, all thirty-three will simply be replaced.”
— Dr. James Kofi Annan, President, Challenging Heights
Challenging Heights stands ready to work with the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, the Human Trafficking Secretariat, the Ghana Police Service, the Ghana Immigration Service, the Judicial Service and our civil society partners to bring these networks to an end.
End.
