Orphans in secondary schools are now in danger of being exploited by child traffickers who lure them out of school with promises of training them in Europe, but instead exploit them for money, it has been revealed.

The government of Tanzania is conducting a rigorous screening of visa applications, especially those for children, to check the practice.

According to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare Assistant Commissioner Jeanne Ndyetabura, they have so far halted some visa applications in order to investigate whether the submissions were genuine.

“The problem was brought to our attention by teachers who were concerned about the number of students, especially orphans, who were being taken out of school with promises of being trained outside the country,” said Ms Ndyetabura.

Ms Ndyetabura said after following up on the lead, they discovered that instead, the children were being exploited through working for “charity” organisations outside the country that required them to sing on the streets for money.

Ms Ndyetabura revealed this when launching a book on children’s rights and a council for children during a national children’s conference organised by Save the Children in Tanzania.

“We are working round the clock to deal with this serious issue, including taking to task the perpetrators as the problem is a national concern,” said Ms Ndyetabula.

According to the 2011 Trafficking in Persons Report (Tanzania) by the United States Department of State, Tanzania is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking.

Internal

The incidence of internal trafficking is higher than that of transnational trafficking, and is usually facilitated by family members’, friends’, and intermediaries’ offers of assistance with education or finding lucrative employment in urban areas.

It further states that the use of young girls for forced domestic service continues to be Tanzania’s largest human trafficking problem.
“Girls from rural areas are taken to urban centres and Zanzibar for domestic service,” the report says.

In the Arusha region, unscrupulous agricultural subcontractors reportedly trafficked women and men to work on coffee plantations.
Smaller numbers of Tanzanian children and adults are subjected to conditions of forced domestic service and sex trafficking in surrounding countries, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, France, and possibly other European countries.

“The government of Tanzania does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so,” the report says.

Despite these significant efforts, particularly the conviction of three trafficking offenders during the reporting period, the government did not demonstrate overall increasing efforts to address human trafficking over the previous reporting period; therefore, Tanzania is placed on Tier 2 Watch List for a second consecutive year.

The government made limited progress towards implementation of its Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act, in part due to poor inter-ministerial co-ordination and lack of understanding of what constitutes human trafficking; most government officials remain unfamiliar with the Act’s provisions or their responsibility to address trafficking under it.