Senegal

Digital Defenders is an initiative addressing the growing use of digital platforms by traffickers and organized crime networks to groom and recruit children and youth in Senegal. The project trains young participants in advanced cyber skills, equipping them to recognize, resist, and counter online exploitation tactics, while providing stipends that ease the economic pressure that makes young people targets for recruitment in the first place. Working with Youth Enginors’ MBarodi AI team, the project also puts artificial intelligence to work, developing digital tools and awareness content to help detect and counter trafficking activity online. Alongside the training, FTS is running community outreach campaigns and knowledge-sharing events with universities and local stakeholders to build wider public awareness of cybercrime and trafficking risks.

FTS is implementing the project in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Youth Enginors’ MBarodi AI team, serving as project manager for financial administration, mentorship, and reporting. The initiative is training 10 to 15 youth participants and is structured across four phases: setup, youth training and stipend disbursement, community outreach, and final reporting.

Our work addressing sex trafficking in Kédougou continues. Free the Slaves sustains a coordinated, community-based protection system across the region’s gold-mining communities, working alongside the Kédougou-based NGO La Lumière and the Association des Juristes Sénégalaises (AJS) to identify women and girls trafficked into the sex trade and support their recovery. Nineteen Community Vigilance Committees remain active across mining communities, identifying people at risk and referring them for help. Once identified, survivors move through the same pathway of care built during the program’s earlier phase: La Lumière’s shelter provides health care, counseling, and education, while AJS delivers legal support and pursues prosecution of traffickers. For survivors trafficked across borders, FTS continues to coordinate with the Emmanuel World Children Foundation in Nigeria on repatriation. FTS also continues to run community awareness campaigns across mining communities to counter the beliefs and social pressures that put women and girls at risk.

Since the original program began in 2021, 270 women and girls have been removed from sex trafficking conditions in the region, 68 of them during this ongoing phase.

In the gold-mining region of Kédougou, Free the Slaves built a coordinated, community-based protection system to identify women and girls trafficked into the sex trade, many of them foreign nationals drawn or deceived into Senegal’s mining camps, and to support their recovery. Rather than responding to individual cases in isolation, the program joined community vigilance committees, government agencies, civil society, and cross-border partners into a single response network capable of finding people trafficked into exploitation, moving them into care, and helping them return home.

That system began with a foundation of institutional partnerships. After signing a memorandum of understanding with the University of Georgia’s Center on Human Trafficking Research and Outreach (CenHTRO) in November 2021, FTS registered as an official NGO in Senegal, and established an office in January 2022. Working alongside the Kédougou-based NGO La Lumière and the Association des Juristes Sénégalaises (AJS), FTS trained and established 19 Community Vigilance Committees, networks of local residents positioned to identify people at risk in mining communities and refer them for help. FTS reinforced these community structures with institutional capacity, conducting 24 capacity-building trainings for 327 government officials, shelter staff, magistrates, journalists, and community stakeholders on trauma-informed care, victim identification, and reporting, and developed a shared trafficking data management system.

It was this coordinated system, community vigilance working alongside law enforcement and civil society, that made possible the removal of 202 girls and young women from sex trafficking conditions. Once identified, survivors moved through a consistent pathway of care: La Lumière’s shelter provided health care, counseling, and education, while AJS delivered legal support to 100 survivors, helping bring 13 traffickers to prosecution, 11 of whom received prison sentences. Three survivor networks were established to sustain peer support and advocacy for continued access to services, and for survivors trafficked across borders. FTS partnered with the Emmanuel World Children Foundation in Nigeria to carry out eight repatriation operations, returning 143 survivors home, 142 to Nigeria and one to Togo.

Beyond direct protection, the program worked to prevent exploitation before it started, connecting 25 at-risk girls to locally appropriate education, vocational, and livelihood support, and reaching an estimated 177,334 people through a public awareness campaign of 12 pieces of content distributed across radio, television, print, and social media.

Judicial Data from Kédougou Regional Court

The Deputy Prosecutor at the Kédougou Regional Court informed us that between 2021 and 2025, 89 trials related to human trafficking cases were held before the Kédougou Regional Court. The majority of these cases involved victims of Nigerian nationality, along with a smaller number of victims from Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Mali.

In Senegal, Free the Slaves and two local partners implemented Aar Sunu Xaleyi, known as ASX, a program to reduce the exploitation of talibé children in Quranic daara schools. The program worked simultaneously in Saint-Louis, an urban destination for children sent to residential daaras, and in the rural Kolda region, where many of those children begin their journey. Alongside community-level prevention, ASX pursued advocacy to strengthen Senegal’s legal and political response to the trafficking of children in daaras.

Community coalitions called CAPEs, made up of local leaders, parents, and daara teachers focused on child protection, anchored the program’s work in both regions. Trained animateurs helped children at risk of exploitation access counseling, health care, and safe spaces to play, while working with residential daaras to arrange non-religious classes in language, literacy, and mathematics and to help children stay connected with their parents. ASX also supported the development of six local daaras and schools as an alternative to sending children away, helped families obtain birth certificates for their children, and used radio broadcasts, public forums, and advocacy campaigns to build wider support for child protection reform.

ASX was funded through a $693,000 grant from the US Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, covering the two-year period from October 2016 to September 2018, later extended through April 2019 at no additional cost. Free the Slaves delivered the program with two Senegalese partners: ENDA Jeunesse Action, which led child protection programming, and La Plateforme pour la Promotion et la Protection des Droits de l’Homme (PPDH), which advocated for the protection of human rights.

Over the course of the program, all four target communities in Saint-Louis and all six target villages in Kolda moved from an initial rating of “starting up” to a final rating of “well established” on the Community Maturity Index, the score generated by FTS’s Community Maturity Tool, which measures a community’s capacity to prevent slavery and protect its members. More than 5,500 talibés in Saint-Louis benefited from ASX activities, including counseling, connections to health care and other services, safe spaces to play, and informal education. In total, 64 talibés were helped to escape conditions of modern slavery, several of them returning home to their families in Kolda. In those Kolda villages, community leaders estimated that the number of children sent away to urban daaras dropped from about 110 in the two years before the program to about three during the two years of the intervention itself, among the clearest signs that community-level prevention was working. Advocacy results proved harder to measure in isolation, though the program’s modest advocacy funding produced a wide range of activity and helped test new approaches to advancing children’s rights in Senegal.