The Latest
Published on January 27, 2010
Strong Voices: Stop Child Trafficking and Malaria
A year long project to stop child trafficking and the impact of malaria including a four day conference in Ghana.
The children in the leprosy colony near Oji River have lived isolated from the rest of Nigerian society. Leprosy is a curable disease, and though most of the people in the colony do not have it, it has been a constant source of stigmatisation and discrimination for those who live there.
That is more than enough for a child to have to worry about.
Except these children have another fear: a fear of being kidnapped and trafficked across the world, to be slaves, prostitutes or soldiers. Child trafficking is a crime which can be left undetected for years, estimates suggest that as many as 1.2 million children a year are trafficked across the world1.
This is not a new reality, unique to the 21st century or to Nigeria - Victorian England was shocked when Thomas William Stead uncovered the use of young English girls as prostitutes in brothels throughout Europe2. One would hope that 100 years was enough time to stop this from happening. Yet trafficking is still a reality today and looks set to remain one in the future.
What is just as disturbing, is the fact that children and young people trafficked from Nigeria, can easily end up here, in the UK, exploited as domestic slaves, with no rights and nobody aware of their plight3. This is a sign of a bigger UK problem: children are trafficked into, within and out of, the UK. The shocking fact is that children from the UK are trafficked, too.
This is not an African problem. It is a global problem.
And it's not just trafficking the Nigerian children from the leprosy colony fear. There is another terrifying possibility on their horizons: malaria. Young children are one of the groups who are most vulnerable to this disease4. Some estimates say that 70% of all those who die from malaria are under the age of 5, because they have yet to build up their immune systems enough to fight it4. That is a shocking percentage of the up to 2.7 million people who are killed by the disease5.
This is not an African problem. It is a global problem.
We need a global solution. Young people need to be part of it.
For hundreds of years, adults in the UK and across the world have been fighting to deal with these global problems. They haven't solved them yet. Which is why, Jigsaw4u International is going to try and make a difference in a unique way. We need a new perspective and who better to tackle these problems than the people who will be effected by them. It is time to have a young person's perspective. The Nigerian children have led us this far: they have identified their (valid) biggest fears. Now it's young people from the UK who have a chance to help fight these problems.
We want young people aged 13-18 years from the UK to apply to be part of the battle against child trafficking and malaria. We are running a year-long project, wherein 15 young people from the UK meet others from Ghana and Nigeria, where they can plan how to make a difference in the world. This conference, Strong Voices, will take place in Accra, Ghana in July 2011.
Interested? Visit our contact form to request further information on how you can get involved.
