A piece from Emo de Medeiros’s series Vodunaut in the “Revelation! Contemporary art from Benin” exhibit in La Conciergerie in Paris, France. The smartphones within the cowry shell-decorated helmets feature videos taken on four different continents. Credit: Megan Fahrney/IPS

By Megan Fahrney
COTONOU, Benin, Dec 20 2024 (IPS)

Construction of the new Museum of Modern Art is underway in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city. The museum, along with three others being built throughout the country, are part of the Beninese government’s extensive plan to ramp up the nation’s tourism industry and preserve its culture. It is expected to open at the end of 2026.

A traveling exhibition entitled “Revelation! Contemporary art from Benin” serves as the precursor to the new modern art museum. Originally, the exhibition launched in Cotonou in 2022 under the name “Art of Benin From Yesterday and Today: From Restitution to Revelation.” It then traveled to Morocco, Martinique, and it is now in Paris.

At the heart of the initiatives is the repatriation of 26 pieces of stolen art to Benin from France in 2021. The returned royal artefacts were showcased alongside the contemporary art in the original exhibition in Cotonou, and they have remained in the nation’s reserves since.

The exhibition brings together over one hundred pieces of art by 42 artists from Benin and the Beninese diaspora.

Yassine Lassissi, director of visual arts at the Agency for the Development of the Arts and Culture (ADAC), said the exhibit unites works from both distinguished, well-known Beninese artists and emerging young creators.

The featured pieces represent a range of different forms and artistic mediums, Lassissi said.

“There is really a diversity of techniques,” said Lassissi. “We have paintings, sculptures, installations, multimedia techniques, drawings, and photography.”

Artist Emo de Medeiros showcases two works in the exhibition: a series of fixtures entitled Vodunaut and a short film by the name “Tigritude I.”

De Medeiros said “Tigritude I” was inspired by a quote by Nigerian activist and author Wole Soyinka, who said, “A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.” De Medeiros explores the role of the African diaspora in uniting technology and spirituality through the piece.

“It features an alternative past,” said de Medeiros. “An alternative futurism that is very dystopic with the intervention of futuristic tigers.”

Upon the return of the exhibition to Cotonou from Paris this January, Lassissi said she hopes the artwork can continue to travel to new destinations until the opening of the museum in 2026, including potentially to the United States.

While in Cotonou, the exhibition drew more than 220,000 visitors in just sixty days of opening.

“It was really a historic event,” Lassissi said.

In addition to the Museum of Modern Art in Cotonou, Benin is constructing the International Museum of Memory and Slavery in Ouidah, the Museum of the Epic of the Amazons and Kings of Dahomey in Abomey, and the International Museum of Arts and Civilizations of Vodun in Porto-Novo.

The majority of contemporary art pieces from the traveling exhibition will be housed in the Museum of Modern Art in Cotonou. The 26 returned royal artefacts will be displayed in the new museum in Abomey.

The government plans to situate the Museum of Modern Art within an entirely new Cultural and Creative Neighborhood, which would also consist of the Franco-Beninese Institute, coworking spaces, the Art Gallery, the artisanal village, and artists’ residences.

The nation hopes the museums will strengthen its culture and tourism industry, which it projects to be the second pillar of its economy after agriculture.

De Medeiros said he believes Cotonou had been “sorely missing” a contemporary art museum.

“This was something that was necessary,” said de Medeiros. “I think this definitely should be a platform [where] Beninese artists can showcase their work to the world.”

Note: Megan Fahrney is a U.S. Fulbright fellow. The views expressed are solely the author’s and do not represent the views of the United States government.

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Christophe Aïnagnon dropped out science degree because he realized he would not be able to find a job with his degree. Credit: Megan Fahrney/IPS

By Megan Fahrney
COTONOU, Nov 7 2024 (IPS)

At just 11 years old, with a heavy heart, Louis  peered up at his parents and said goodbye. He was leaving his small village in northern Benin to live with his uncle in Parakou, where the schools were better. Ever since, Louis has continued to make sacrifices to pursue a strong education and a better life. 

Now, at 23 years old, Louis finds himself with an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Benin’s largest public university, speaking nearly perfect English, unable to find formalized employment. His response?

“Hustle,” he says.

“I’m an entrepreneur,” Louis said. “It won’t be easy for me to create a startup, but I have to tell myself in my mind that I can do it even if it is hard. I will [do] whatever I can to make it possible.”

Louis said he is currently launching a company providing computer programming services. He and his team hope to develop apps, create websites and solve technical problems for clients.

In Benin, college graduates struggle to find formalized work. Educated young people find themselves working odd jobs, creating their own companies or remaining entirely financially dependent on their parents.

Few in the country decide to pursue higher education at all. According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, only 15% of men and 8% of women in Benin enroll in tertiary education.

Of those who do enroll, the percentage of students who complete their degree is even lower. In the 2022-2023 school year, 58,456 undergraduate students enrolled in the University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin’s largest public university. That same academic year, only 6,614 received a diploma .

Christophe Aïnagnon, now an English student at the University of Abomey-Calavi, dropped out of the science department after two years because he recognized he would not be able to find a job with his degree.

Aïnagnon said he has many friends who drop out of college altogether because they do not think it is worth it to continue. Other friends of his have finished their degrees but cannot find work.

“They think that if they finish, they won’t find a job, [so] they vanish,” Aïnagnon said. “I even have many friends… they study, they work hard, they did everything to finish, but… they didn’t happen to find a job. It’s not that they didn’t know how, but a lot of them are at home now doing nothing.”

Aïnagnon, for his part, has launched his own business breeding rabbits to earn an income.

“It’s the kind of business [through which] I can become who I want and live my best life,” Aïnagnon said.

Last month, the Ichikowitz Family Foundation published a survey that found 60 percent of young Africans ages 18-24 want to emigrate in the next five years. The report surveyed 5,604 individuals and was conducted in 16 different countries.

Louis said it is his dream to immigrate to the United States and has applied for the visa lottery many times.

“That’s why I’m motivated to speak English: to immigrate, to go to the U.S.A.,” Louis said. “When I was a kid, I wanted to study at MIT.”

Others do not wish to emigrate, citing lack of connections abroad, the challenge of finding employment in a foreign country and the difficulty of the immigration process.

Mirabelle Awegnonde, an English student at the University of Abomey-Calavi, said she wants to be a teacher but has to start thinking of alternative self-employment options in case she cannot find a teaching job.

“It makes me afraid sometimes,” Awegnonde said. “I’m afraid. I tell myself, how can I get a job in the future? How can I make myself a job instead? Because I’m a shy person, so… it is hard for me.”

Note: Megan Fahrney is a Fulbright scholar currently living in Benin.

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Poverty plays a huge role in the trafficking of women and girls in West Africa. Credit: CC by 2.0/Linda De Volder

By Issa Sikiti da Silva
COTONOU, Benin, May 3 2019 (IPS)

On a bus in Cotonou, Benin’s commercial capital, four Nigerian girls aged between 15 and 16 sit closely together as they are about to embark on the last part of their journey to Mali, where they are told that their new husbands, whom they never have met, await them.

They started off from their homes in Eastern Nigeria where their parents had reportedly agreed that they be “commissioned” to become the wives of Nigerian men living in Mali.

“Four compatriots asked me to bring them young wives because they want to get married. I’m sure they will be happy,” a human smuggler, who only identifies himself as Wiseman, tells IPS as the bus prepares to depart for Bamako, Mali’s capital. IPS is not allowed to speak to the young girls, who appear anxious.

When asked if the girls’ parents are aware they have to travel to Mali, Wiseman says: “I negotiated with them and gave them something as a down payment for their dowries, which will surely help them [the parents] start a small business or buy seeds for farming. These kids should count themselves lucky because they will work and perform wives’ duties, so their lives should improve big time.”

But nobody knows the real intentions of the men who ”commissioned” these girls. Or if they exist.

Pathfinders Justice Initiative, an international non-government organisation dedicated to the prevention of modern-day sex slavery, says Nigeria is a source, transit and destination country when it comes to human trafficking with Benin City, in Nigeria’s Edo State, being an internationally-recognised sex trafficking hub. 

Nigeria ranks 32 out of 167 countries with the highest number of slaves (1,38 million), according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index report. While Nigeria has the institutional framework and laws against trafficking, at least one million people are trafficked there every year, according to the country’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).

NAPTIP, working in collaboration with Malian authorities, recently said that nearly 20,000 Nigerian girls were forced into prostitution in Mali. The girls were said to be working in hotels and nightclubs after being sold to prostitution rings by human traffickers.

Children the most vulnerable

In West Africa, children remain the most vulnerable to trafficking.

The latest Global Report On Trafficking In Persons by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that young boys and girls where among those most  trafficked in the region. 

At the end of April, Interpol announced that it rescued 216 trafficked victim—including 157 children—from Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, and Togo. Interpol is part of a global task force formed to address human trafficking.

Some of the trafficking victims were working as sex workers in Benin and Nigeria, while others worked all day in markets and at various eating places. Some were as young as 11 and had been beaten, subject to abuse, and told they would never see their families again.

Forty-seven people were arrested.

“Many of the children are shipped actually into these markets to carry out forced labour. These are organised crime groups who are motivated by making money. They don’t care about the children forced into prostitution, working in terrible conditions, living on the streets, they are all after the money,” Interpol’s Director of Organised and Emerging Crime Paul Stanfield said in a video.

Benin, the transit stop for traffickers

Benin, a low-income country, has always been a transit route for west African migrants looking to irregularly make their way to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and finally to Europe.

The city of Cotonou appears to be a huge transit route through which women and girls trafficked to North and West Africa pass as they are transported to various countries of their destination. While Togo, Burkina Faso, Benin and Mali have laws against child trafficking, nothing covers trafficking in persons above the age of 18, according to the UNODC report. Niger has no laws against trafficking.

The Economic Community of West African States’ policy of free movement of goods and people seems to make this easier as corrupt immigration officers at border posts look away in exchange for a few euros. When IPS asks Wiseman about border controls, he brushes aside the issue, saying he knows “how to handle them”.  

When asked if he is responsible for the girls’ welfare, Wiseman replies: “I’m not a social worker, I’m a businessman and a helper. I help people to get good wives and lift the girls’ families out of poverty in exchange for money. The rest is history.”

When the incident about the Nigerian girls is described to Hassan Badarou, a community-based caregiver and religious leader from Benin, he says “they could be used as sex slaves by those men or sold to crime syndicates to serve as prostitutes in Mali or even as far as in North Africa.”

“It’s a pity parents allow their children to just leave the country in exchange for a few dollars. All of this wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t poor,” he says.

Poverty, culture and child labour

Poverty plays a huge role in the trafficking of women and girls in the region. But so too does culture.

In 2014, a female friend of Suzie’s family came to collect the then 12-year-old from her home in northern Benin.

“She promised to help me attend school after working at her home for one year, but she didn’t,” Suzie tells IPS in the local language, Fon, through a translator.

“Things started to go wrong when I started to remind her about that. She stopped paying me my salary and increased the workload and cut my meals down from two to one per day. And she started beating up me every time I protested,” the 16-year-old who lives in Cotonou tells IPS.

As time went by, the women’s male family members, who lived in the same house, started to make sexual advances towards Suzie. She refused the advances but eventually ran away because she could no longer bear the situation. 

No police please

When asked why she doesn’t report the incidents to the police, she says: “I can’t do that. The woman is like my aunt so I couldn’t do it as this would have brought a conflict between the women’s family and ours back home.”

Badarou, the religious leader, explains that he has mediated in cases like Suzie’s.

“If you see the way these women ill-treat these girls, it should make you cry. I have documented many cases of abuse and have tried to mediate between some of these women and the girls.”

But he’s never reported any of these cases, however abusive, to the police.

“The only thing you cannot do is to report these cases to the police. We are all brothers and sisters of this country and we believe in solving our problems in harmony and peace through dialogue. Besides, it’s not our culture to report everything to the police. I blame West African governments for allowing this thing to go on and on to the extent of becoming a cultural norm institutionalised deep in the fabric of society. It’s now hard to break it,” he says.

Badarou explains that the actions are cultural.

“In the face of this deeply-entrenched culture of ”helping each other” by ”handing over” your girls to someone well established who is living in the cities, even the United Nations and children’s organisations sometimes have no choice but to turn a blind eye. I’m not saying they are not doing anything about it, but you can’t break up someone’s culture, especially in a region such as this where grinding poverty rules,” he says.

Richard Dossou seems to agree. He tells IPS that his uncle’s friend, a father of 18 children, is looking for “Good Samaritans” from Benin to take in some of his girls as he is unable to provide for them. 

“I’m planning to travel to their village to negotiate with him with a view of taking even one, not as a wife, but as a maid. Then we will see how it will lead us. We help each other like this to fend off poverty and misery in this region,” Dossou says.

While Benin’s poverty hovers at about 40 percent, a report released in 2018  by the World Poverty Clock said in Nigeria a total of 86.9 million people are living in extreme poverty.

The fine line between cultural norms and child trafficking

Asked if this West African practice of “handing over” girls is a cultural norm of lifting families out of poverty, Jakub Sobik, communications manager for London-based Anti-Slavery International, tells IPS via email: “What you describe above are cases of child trafficking, when children are being recruited or harboured with a view of exploiting them.”

“Slavery doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it is underpinned by many factors, including poverty, discrimination, lack of access to education and decent job opportunities, the lack of rule of law, as well as practices that are culturally accepted in societies,” he explains.

He says that it is often the case that parents are “deceived about the conditions their children will be offered, and send them away in a genuine belief that they will get a better chance of education and life opportunities in surroundings of cities and perhaps better-off societal circles.” 

He adds that in some societies children working is culturally accepted, because it has been the norm for generations. “We have a lot to do to change that and offer children childhoods, education and opportunities in lives they deserve.”

As the bus continues on the final journey that is meant to lift the Nigerian girls out of ”poverty” to ‘’freedom”; back in Cotonou Suzie wanders the city’s dark streets hand in hand with a Zemidjan—a motorcycle taxi driver—who appears to be aged between 40 and 50 and whom she describes as her boyfriend.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

Felicienne Soton is part of a women's group that produces gari (cassawa flour). She and her group in Adjegounle village have greatly benefited from Benin's national CDD project. (Photo: Arne Hoel).

By Issa Sikiti da Silva
COTONOU, Benin, Apr 30 2019 (IPS)

Théophile Houssou, a maize farmer from Cotonou, has spent sleepless nights lying awake worrying about the various disasters that could befall any farmer, often wondering, “What if it rains heavily and all my crops are washed away?” or “What if the armyworms invade my farm and eat up all the crops and I’m left with nothing?”

Maize crops in Benin, like in at least 28 other African countries, are being threatened by the Fall Armyworm (FAW), an invasive crop pest that feeds on 80 different crop species. Houssou is thankful to have missed an infestation and gives thanks to “God for the good season, but it was not easy,” he tells IPS.

Maize production in Benin reached a record 1.6 million tons during the 2017-2018 season, compared to 1.2 million tons two years ago, according to the ministry of agriculture’s figures.

In downtown Cotonou, the country’s commercial capital, five men are busy loading pineapples onto a 10-ton truck, while four more heavy vehicles wait to be loaded. The produce will be taken to several countries in the region, including Nigeria, which receives 80 percent of all Benin’s exports. Benin is Africa’s fourth-largest pineapple exporter, producing between 400,000 and 450,000 tons of pineapple annually. Exports to the European Union (EU) increased from 500 tons to 4,000 tons between 2000 and 2014, according to official figures.

Further away, the famous Dantokpa Market is flooded with agricultural products, including red tomatoes, okra, soya beans, mangoes, orange, green pepper, lemon and all sorts of spinaches and fruits. Competition is fierce and the selling price is very low, amid an excellent agricultural season.

Room for improvement
While the agricultural sector here may look lively, it boasts several fault lines.

Despite being mostly a subsistence sector, agriculture contributes about 34 percent to this West African nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Almost 80 percent of Benin’s 11.2 million people earn a living from agriculture, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) says. FAO adds that the country’s farmers face challenges such as include poor infrastructure and flooding, which can wipe out harvests and seed stocks.

In a document titled “Strategic Plan for Agricultural Sector Development (PSDSA) 2025 and National Plan for Agricultural Investments and Food Security and Nutrition (PNIASAN) 2017 -2021”, the Benin government has admitted that the agriculture sector’s revenues and productivity are low, and the labour force is only partially rewarded, making agricultural products less competitive.

“Most farmers have very little use of improved inputs and engage in mining practices that accentuate the degradation of natural resources,” the document states.

“We can do better than this,” Marthe Dossou, a small scale farmer supervising the offloading of thousands of boxes of red tomatoes from a rundown truck, tells IPS. These tomatoes will be exported to Nigeria but Dossou feels that considering the high quality of the harvest, Benin can produce more for export. “If we can be given a helping hand like more resources, including loans, new farming methods and how to master water control techniques,” she says.

Dr Tamo Manuele, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Benin country representative, tells IPS that agricultural innovation “is key to eradicating poverty, hunger and malnutrition, mainly in rural areas where most of the world’s poorest live.”
“Innovation can, first of all, increase small-scale farmers’ productivity and income, and secondly diversify farmers’ income through value chain development; and lastly create more and better opportunities for the rural poor,” he says.

“Farmers or at least actors in agricultural value chains need support for conservation and processing of agricultural commodities. With e-agriculture, farmers can better manage their production and especially be informed of market opportunities. Innovations such as warrantage system [an inventory credit system where farmers instead of selling their produce use it as collateral to get credit from a bank] and group selling can help solving this problem. NGOs and specialised experts in agriculture have to strengthen and support closely farmers,” Manuele urges.

Headquartered in Ibadan, Nigeria, the IITA has been present in Benin since 1985 and it supports national agricultural research and extension services.

“Research is one of the main links leading to innovation. Many studies have reported that communities living near the research centre are more informed, exposed to the innovations and more supervised by scientists. Therefore, their willingness to adopt innovation is very significant. So IITA-Benin is more present on fields through several on-farm-innovation testing managed by scientists,” Manuele says.

IITA launched a jatropha-based biofuel project in 2015 in Benin. This involved the development of a biofuel chain to create profitable and viable small businesses. These women make soap from the jatropha tree. Courtesy: International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA)

Some farmers say they are aware of agricultural technologies, but complain about the lack of promotion of such innovations in the areas where they operate.
Koffi Akpovi Justin, a seasonal farmer, was introduced to the 4R method, where four scientific principles are used to ensure that the soil has the right levels of nutrients for planting.

“Everybody brags about how fertile the African land is…I used to be frustrated and almost gave up on farming because I strongly believed in the natural way of doing things. I would just labour the land, plant seeds (plenty of them) and start the painful process of watering it, and at the end I got mitigated results. But not anymore.”

But Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s most expensive fertiliser market, where small scale farmers make up about 70 percent of the population. “If you will use it, use it carefully because not practicing the 4R method could see some of it spill all over the fields and pollute nearby water resources and groundwater. I experienced it many years ago, but now I’m wiser.”

He adds that many farmers who live in remote areas are unable to access information about agricultural innovation. “Many of them, who operate mostly in very remote places, always say ‘We know that these things exist and we would like to use it but where can we find it?’ Maybe the international organisations, like the UN and the IITA, could do more to make sure that as many farmers as possible get access to agricultural innovations to boost food production and fight hunger.”

Monique Soton is one such farmer. She lives in north-western Benin, about 500 km from Cotonou, the country’s commercial capital.

“We operate in remote areas and there our lives are concentrated only about leaving in the morning to work on the land and come back in the evening. There is no radio, no TV, no electricity. We may miss out on important information about new methods of farming or new developments going on in the sector, like if a census were to be held to determine the number of farmers who need financial support. It’s sad,” the tomato farmer tells IPS.

Another major obstacle facing small scale farmers in Benin is also the lack of market. “The only local market I use to sell my products is Dantokpa in Cotonou. Just imagine the distance from our area [about 500 km from Cotonou] to the commercial capital,” Soton says, adding that there aren’t adequate roads or vehicles to get the produce to the marketplace.
“There were many times the rundown vehicle we were using to transport our products broke down in the middle of a no man’s land at night and that’s very scary.”

Agricultural innovation
The IITA has been reaching out to various communities. In Benin it launched a jatropha-based biofuel project in 2015. This involved the development of a biofuel chain to create profitable and viable small businesses.

“Specifically, it is consolidating the profitability and sustainability of jatropha value chains through a public-private partnership approach that creates jobs for young people, women and men. The project is set up according to the value chain approach including jatropha production, jatropha oil extraction, soap making, grain milling and rural electrification, among others,” Manuele explains.

Since the start of the project some 2,050 producers, including 538 women, have benefitted.

Apart from this jatropha project, the IITA said that it has implemented several other projects that contribute to the food and nutrition security and income improvement of many rural households.

Magic solution?
While innovations in agriculture have proved successful, Dr Jeroen Huising, a soil scientist based in Nigeria, cautions that this is not the ‘magic bullet’ for Benin. “I do not believe in magic solutions and agricultural (innovation) is certainly not magic. The question about the rural poor has little to do with the agricultural innovations. There are economic factors that determine that,” he tells IPS.

“Also, if the ‘innovations’ would increase yield for the smallholder farmers, it would not solve their problems. The production has to do primarily with use of inputs and even then the prices are often too low to make a decent living.”

Soton agrees that economic factors pay a huge role in being a successful smallholder, explaining that “the lack of financial support is a serious problem.”

She says that banks do even consider small holder farmers for loans “because we don’t fulfil not even one of their requirements needed to lend us money. So, we invest our money we get from the tontines [an investment plan] and from selling some of our properties.”

“We have the land but we lack everything from seeds to fertilisers and cash to hire labourers.”

Africa's children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

“Poverty has become part of me,” says 13-year-old Aminata Kabangele from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me.”

Aminata, who fled her war-torn country after the rest of her family was killed by armed rebels and now lives as a as a refugee in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp in Chipinge on the country’s eastern border, told IPS that she has had no option but to resign her fate to poverty.

Despite the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, African children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent.“Poverty has become part of me. I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me” – Aminata Kabangele, a 13-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“In every country you may turn to here in Africa, children are at the receiving end of poverty, with high numbers of them becoming orphans,” Melody Nhemachena, an independent social worker in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Based on a 2013 UNICEF report, the World Bank has estimated that up to 400 million children under the age of 17 worldwide live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in Africa and Asia.

According to human rights activists, the growing poverty facing many African families is also directly responsible for the fate of 200,000 African children that the United Nations estimates are sold into slavery every year.

“Many families in Africa are living in abject poverty, forcing them to trade their children for a meal to persons purporting to employ or take care of them (the children), but it is often not the case as the children end up in forced labour, earning almost nothing at the end of the day,” Amukusana Kalenga, a child rights activist based in Zambia, told IPS.

West Africa is one of the continent’s regions where modern-day slavery has not spared children.

According to Mike Sheil, who was sent by British charity and lobby group Anti-Slavery International to West Africa to photograph the lives of children trafficked as slaves and forced into marriage, for many families in Benin – one of the world’s poorest countries – “if someone offers to take their child away … it is almost a relief.”

Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ and civil society organisations working to eliminate and prevent all forms of child labour, has reported that a 2010 study showed that “a staggering 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years worked in cocoa farms of Ivory Coast and Ghana at the cost of their physical, emotional, cognitive and moral well-being.”

“Trafficking in children is real. Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children,” Gabon’s Social Affairs Director-General Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga told a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire in 2012.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 human trafficking report.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, a study of child poverty showed that over 70 percent of children are not registered at birth while more than 30 percent experience severe educational deprivation. According to UNICEF Nigeria, about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school.

“These boys and girls, some as young as 13-years-old, serve in the ranks of terror groups like Boko Haram, often participating  in suicide operations, and act as spies,” Hillary Akingbade, a Nigerian independent conflict management expert, told IPS.

“Girls here are often forced into sexual slavery while many other African children are abducted or recruited by force, with others joining out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival,” she added.

Akingbade’s remarks echo the reality of poverty which also faces children in the Central African Republic, where an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 boys and girls became members of armed groups following an outbreak of a bloody civil war in the central African nation in December 2012, according to Save the Children.

Violence plagued the Central African Republic when the country’s Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the country’s capital Bangui in March 2013, prompting a backlash by the largely Christian militia.

A 2013 report by Save the Children stated that in the Central African Republic, children as young as eight were being recruited by the country’s warring parties, with some of the children forcibly conscripted while others were impelled by poverty.

Last year, the United Nations reported that the recruitment of children in South Sudan’s on-going civil war was “rampant”, estimating that there were 11,000 children serving in both rebel and government armies, some of who had volunteered but others forced by their parents to join armed groups with the hopes of changing their economic fortunes for the better.

Meanwhile, back in the Tongogara refugee camp, Aminata has resigned herself. “I have descended into worse poverty since I came here in the company of other fleeing Congolese and, for many children like me here at the camp, poverty remains the order of the day.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Subsistence-oriented small-scale agriculture is often not the preferred choice of work for many young Africans. Photo credit: FAO

By Kwame Buist
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 27 2015 (IPS)

Over half of the African continent’s population is below the age of 25 and approximately 11 million young Africans are expected to enter the labour market every year for the next decade, say experts. 

Despite strong economic growth in many African countries, wage employment is limited and agriculture and agri-business continue to provide income and employment for over 60 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population.

However, laborious, subsistence-oriented small-scale agriculture is often not the preferred choice of work for many young people.

In an effort to reap this demographic dividend and attract young people into the agri-food sector, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have launched a four-year project to create decent employment opportunities for young women and men in rural areas.

The four million dollar project, funded by the African Solidarity Trust Fund, aims to develop rural enterprises in sustainable agriculture and agri-business along strategic value chains.

Speaking at the project signing ceremony on Mar. 25, NEPAD’s chief executive officer, Dr Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, said: “The collaboration between NEPAD and FAO will go a long way in ensuring that the youth, Africa’s future, are not forgotten.

“It is by creating an economic environment that stimulates initiatives – particularly by conducting transparent and foreseeable policies – and at the same time by regulating the market in order to deal with market failures that we will attain results and impact through the new thrust given to our farmers, entrepreneurs and youth.”

The project – which is expected to see over 100, 000 young men and women benefit in rural Benin, Cameroon, Malawi and Niger – is anchored in the Rural Futures Programme of NEPAD, which is centred on rural transformation in which equity and inclusiveness allow rural men and women to develop their potential.

FAO Assistant Director General for Africa Bukar Tijani said that the project “marks an important milestone in moving forward and upward in terms of empowering youth in these four countries – especially women, as 2015 is the African Union’s Year of Women’s Empowerment.”

The project is seen as part of a drive to stimulate the agriculture and agri-business sectors into becoming more modern, profitable and efficient, and capable of providing decent employment opportunities for Africa’s young labour force.

In 2012, the African Union Commission, NEPAD Agency, the Lula Institute and FAO formed a partnership aimed at ending hunger on the continent. A year later, the four partners organised a high-level meeting of ministers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leading to a declaration to end hunger and a road map for implementation.

This declaration was subsequently endorsed at the 2014 African Union summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, and incorporated into the Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods as the “Commitment to Ending Hunger in Africa by 2025”.

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Siphosethu Stuurman
Dec 20 2011 (IPS)

Young people from across the globe gathered in Benin’s economic capital city of Cotonou to share their success and experiences in the agricultural sector with each other.

By Siphosethu Stuurman
Dec 19 2011 (IPS)

Young Beninese rabbit breeder, Samuel Agossou, inspired youth from across the globe when he shared his success story during the Global Youth Innovation Workshop held in Benin late last year.