Preying on Aspirations: Human Trafficking in The Gambia | IOM Storyteller

The Gambia, 25 July 2022 – After dropping out of secondary school, employment opportunities for Fatou*, a single mother, were difficult to come by. Knowing this, one of her friends reached out to inform her about the ‘opportunity of a lifetime'.

“She told me that there's a country where Gambian women can easily find work, find a job and be able to make ends meet for their family,” Fatou shares, reflecting on how she was lured into travel.

Fatou's friend turned into her trafficker, who made all the arrangements for her passport, visa and flight in exchange for money from a trafficking network in Lebanon. Shortly after she arrived, Fatou was placed in a small room with several other women.

“When I got there, I was really scared,” Fatou recounts. “When their name was called, they would leave the room and never come back. I didn't know if they would try and kill me or not.”

When Fatou was assigned to an employer, the agent picked her up and delivered her to the family that paid for her flight and travel documents. Here, she was forced to work as a maid in exchange for meagre and inconsistent pay, which she stopped receiving a few months after the Beirut explosion in 2020.

Through social media, Fatou got in contact with an anti-trafficking activist to draw attention to her situation, which eventually led to her return to The Gambia. In 2020, she was among 6,900 people in Africa estimated to be victims of labour trafficking, according to the US Department of State's 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report.