Poverty is a multi-billion industry, people are exploiting it – Kofi Bentil on BBC Africa Eye’s exposé

Senior Vice President and Policy Analyst with Imani Ghana, Kofi Bentil has called on relevant Ghanaian institutions, including the police and the social welfare services, to be proactive in dealing with child labour.

Speaking on Newsfile, he noted that foreign organisations set up in the name of helping to eradicate poverty are exploiting the situation and taking advantage to benefit from it “because we know poverty is a multi-billion industry.”

“We need to deal with how they operate, because, some of them prey on the negative stories and it is showing up. But, then these are the same institutions that throw light on the kind of exploitation our children are going through which is not being dealt with by our institutions,” he added.

Kofi Bentil indicated that if Ghanaian institutions were ensuring that children are being taken care of, these foreign institutions and NGOs could be driven out of the country and the welfare of children left to the state-empowered entities.

He noted that “there is a line beyond which reasonable child labour becomes unreasonable child exploitation and exposing the child to danger. It’s easy to identify these things, so the institutions here, why would you wait for somebody to fly from the US to set up an organisation here to tell you a child is being exploited on the Volta Lake?”

Kofi Bentil said that “If we could be sure that our institutions will take care of our children, we could drive out all these people who come here supposedly to do us good. But we can’t be sure, so we can’t drive them out, but if they are also going to be here and profit over the misery of our children, then did we go or did we come?”

His comment comes after the BBC Africa Eye published a documentary alleging that the anti-slavery charity International Justice Mission- (IJM-Ghana) Ghana supported rescue missions that wrongfully removed children from families in Ghana.

Among other things, the documentary revealed that in a series of rescue missions in 2017, International Justice Mission removed over 100 children from Kpala island and other fishing communities, out of which only 20% of the children were confirmed as victims of trafficking.

Also, BBC Africa Eye went undercover to reveal two more ‘rescue missions’ supported by IJM, resulting in relatives being prosecuted and communities stigmatised.

But in an initial response, IJM Ghana described allegations against aspects of its operations in Ghana contained in the documentary as “incredibly concerning” and of “material inaccuracies”.

Kofi Bentil called for the documentary to be probed and recommendations made to ensure that children are protected.

Meanwhile, speaking in defence of her organization on Newsfile, the Country Director of the International Justice Mission (IJM), Anita Budu, said that the situations covered by BBC Africa Eye’s documentary are more nuanced than they are presented and seem to allege that the NGO is intentionally involved in wrongfully separating children from their parents under the guise of child trafficking rescue missions.

Sne said that the work of IJM is in direct tangent with Ghana’s Children’s Act and Human Trafficking Act, thus the impression created by the BBC’s Africa Eye of the organisation being purely target driven at the peril of children and poor families is wrong.