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afrol News, 4 February - After registering 571 children as slave labour in the inland fishing industry of Ghana, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has achieved their liberation. Initiatives to fight poverty was what it took, according to IOM. The IOM office in Accra today announced it had registered 571 children trafficked for slave labour in fishing communities around Lake Volta in the central regions of Ghana. According to IOM Ghana's Ernest Taylor, local traditional leaders helped to win the cooperation of the fishermen, locally known as 'slave masters'. "We met on a one-to-one basis with 96 of the 136 fishermen who are known to employ under-aged labour in Bong Ahafo region. All of them promised to free the children. We told them that, in exchange, they would receive training and modern fishing equipment, so they won’t have to employ children in future," he says. IOM and the Ghanaian authorities have now identified a transit building in Yeji town at the shores of Lake Volta, where the children were to stay once they have been released. - We will continue to register all cases of trafficked children in the region, said Mr Taylor. "We will then start the process of tracing families with the help of the traditional leaders and the fishermen. Once the families have been identified, we will contact them and provide them with enough help to ensure that the return of the children is sustainable," he added. Family reunification was to be consolidated through activities aimed at allowing children to return to school or join vocational training programmes, IOM noted. "Poverty, which led to the trafficking of the children in the first place, will be addressed by giving the parents access to income generating micro-credit schemes." According to IOM, child trafficking in Ghanaian society is only partially explained by poverty. "Traditionally it has been a common practice for poor parents to hand over their children to be looked after by relatives and friends. This has sometimes resulted in parents sometimes effectively selling their children," the organisation says. There are currently no laws against human trafficking in Ghana. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that about 250
million children between the ages of 5 and 17 years worldwide are engaged
in various forms of child labour. Of these, some 80 million are found in
Africa.
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