The National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, NAPTIP is seeking an agreement between Nigeria and neighbouring West African countries to end the practice of Nigerian girls being used as sex slaves in Mali.
At a presentation to the ECOWAS Parliament during its First Ordinary Session, NAPTIP Director-General Julie Okah-Donli told members of parliament that Nigerian girls were being sold for between two hundred and ten thousand to two hundred and forty thousand naira to work as prostitutes.
Presenting the report of the fact-finding mission to Mali, Okah-Donli said that after being sold, the girls were made to pay back over one point two million naira usually within eight months, to their madams.
She said that after gaining their freedom from their madams, the girls would then go into business, making money for themselves through prostitution before graduating to madams of their own.
Okah-Donli said that as part of efforts to curb the trend, the mission recommended among other things, that Nigeria should develop a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU with Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin Republic, Guinea and Senegal.
