A 2013 US State Department report says that the government is not doing enough to eliminate human trafficking. While the government is making significant efforts to comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, for example by drafting a new five-year action plan and initiating new prosecutions and convictions, it has not provided enough funding to properly run and maintain government-operated shelters and has not provided any specialized anti-trafficking training to law enforcement officials.
Instead, the anti-human trafficking unit of the Ghana Police Service has decreased efforts to protect victims in 2012. For example it identified 262 victims but only referred 33 on an ad hoc basis to government and NGO-run facilities offering protective care. The report recommends that Ghana increase efforts to investigate and prosecute trafficking offences, improve related data collection and ensure the maintenance of government-operated shelters.
Ghanaian boys and girls are subjected to conditions of forced labour in fishing, domestic service, street hawking, begging, artisanal gold mining, and agriculture. The Volta Region has the highest proportion of child prostitution, and possibly child sex tourism, but both are growing in the oil-producing Western regions. During the reporting period, a number of fraudulent recruitment agencies emerged, advertising jobs abroad in the domestic and retail service sectors. This encourages more and more Ghanaian women to migrate to the Middle East, some of whom are forced into prostitution upon their arrival, it said.
© 2013 Menas Associates
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