Ethiopian women face new threat of human trafficking as ...
▻http://news.trust.org/item/20161124000447-2o9q3
Women in Ethiopia live under constant fear of violence, illness, hunger and poverty but they are now also facing a new threat - human trafficking, according to veteran women’s rights campaigner Bogaletch Gebre.
Although a state-led industrial drive has transformed Ethiopia into one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, a third of its 99 million citizens still survive on less than $1.90 a day - the World Bank’s measure of extreme poverty.
Girls are often regarded as a financial burden on their families in the Horn of Africa country long blighted by cycles of disease, drought, hunger and conflict, and expected to drop out of school to get married or find employment.
“When a child is born a girl in Ethiopia ... she is born into servitude. She is literally there to serve the family,” Gebre said, as she recalled growing up in the 1960s in Kembatta, southern Ethiopia. “It’s a tragedy.”
In the past decade, human traffickers have increasingly lured girls away from their schools and homes in poor, rural areas with the promise of jobs and other opportunities in cities like the capital Addis Ababa, Gebre said.
But many ended up being exploited as maids and sex workers.
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