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Sierra Leone’s President, Julius Maada Bio has today, Tuesday 25th April 2023 opened a two-day Regional Conference of ECOWAS States on ending Human Trafficking at the Freetown International Conference Center, Aberdeen.
The Conference is Co-hosted by the government of Sierra Leone in Patnership with Economic Community of West Africa States, International Organisation For Migration (IOM) and the Africa Programming and Research Initiatives to End Slavery[APRIES] on a two-day Regional Conference of ECOWAS members states to eradicate human Trafficking.
The regional conference seeks to create opportunity to build deep cooperation between ECOWAS member states in the fight to end human trafficking.
As the keynote speaker of the official opening ceremony, President Bio told members of the Economic Community of West African States [ECOWAS] to bolster education and awareness at the community level on prevention, protect survivors by providing services that will dignity to survivors. He affirms that life is a precious gift which should never be put on sale.
“No doubt traffickers and trafficking networks are becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect. Previous speakers have indicated that they are deploying technology to and using unethical model and illicit financial flows to evade laws enforcement,” President Bio said.
Dr. Omar Alieu Touray, ECOWAS president reveals that there were 3.5 million human trafficking victims on a monthly basis and a majority was from West Africa and affirmed that ECOWAS members should see the fight as a humanitarian Obligation.
Christopher Gascon , Regional Direct of IOM, expressed his delight to be part of the programme. He pointed out that its privilege for him to be able to see all the regional players and also thanked the donors for making the conference to happen.
He further pointed out that the conference is an example of a key role ECOWAS can play in Coordinating actions that will lead to implementations at the National level. He further commended ECOWAS for it commitment towards working together with IOM to achieve it goals.
Director of APRIES, Dr, David Okech, congratulated the government of Sierra Leone for hosting the conference. He revealed that they are in collaboration with the University of Georgia in United states of America and the university of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. He added that n Sierra Leone they are mainly focused in reducing child trafficking and also focus on Sex trafficking in Senegal.
