20,000 children smuggled yearly in Ethiopia: study

Oct 19, 2005 (ADDIS ABABA) — At least 20,000 Ethiopian children are trafficked annually by unscrupulous dealers who dupe impoverished rural parents with bright prospects for their offspring, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said the children, most of them between the ages of 10 and 18, are bought by agencies for 10 to 20 birr (one to two euros, one to two dollars) from parents in the villages and later sold in the capital Addis Ababa.

According to the study, trafficked girls usually end up as domestic workers or prostitutes while boys do menial work or become professional beggars contrary to lavish promises of education and good jobs made to parents by buyers.

“The parents are often deceived with promises of money or that the child will be educated,” said IOM legal advisor Alem Brook.

“A trafficker identifies a potential client, goes to the countryside, finds a child, buys it … and delivers it to the client,” she said, adding that the figure is an estimate owing to the difficulty in tracking the dealers.

Human traffickers can face up to 20 years in jail if convicted, but Ethiopia’s law on the matter came to existence only in 2001 and the country is rated low enforcement.

“Human trafficking is one of the fastest growing crime in the world,” Brook said. “People are very rarely condemned for human trafficking, most of the time they cover it as an adoption.”

More than 80 percent of Ethiopia’s 70 million people live in rural areas and depend on subsistence farming, living on less than a dollar per day.

(AFP/ST)