A Cycle Of Debt, Sex Work And Cocaine: The Women In West Africa Caught In Europe’s Drugs Trail
In recent years, women who have become trapped in sex work in the Niger city of Agadez have found a new way to blot of the pain of what their lives have become. Crack cocaine.
Agadez has long been a transit point for people trying to pass through north Africa and across the Mediterranean to Europe. Now the Nigerien city is a hub for the flow of drugs heading towards Europe too.
For those such as Azizou Chehou, trying to provide support for the increasingly desperate migrants coming through the city, the impact of the greater availability of cocaine on the streets is clear. Agadez is in the grip of an addiction crisis and its biggest victims, says Chechou, are female migrants.
After being forced to pay for their transportation debt with sex work, he says, women are finding themselves trapped in a cycle of sex work, drugs and debt.
“Women are held by traffickers in houses where men pass by and use them,” says Chehou, who runs a Nigerien development organisation in Agadez. “When they have paid that debt these women are passed to another trafficker. Even after leaving a trafficker, the women are caught in a cycle of dependence on earning money from sex work and drug use to block out the nightmares.”
Chehou and others in Agadez say the recent increase in the amount of cocaine in Niger is to blame for the addiction crisis, which the local health system is ill-equipped to cope with.
Ibrahim*, a clinical psychologist who works at a support centre for migrants, says women caught up in sex trafficking or dealing with the frustration of not being able to get work to pay for their onward journey need long-term treatment and support to be able to quit cocaine use.
“Many are very stressed and deeply traumatised from their experiences of rape and trafficking while on the move, and seek escape through smoking crack cocaine,” he says.
While politicians in Europe obsess about stopping migrants, say observers, they have shown little interest in addressing the impacts of Europe’s own cocaine addiction on transit countries and communities such as Agadez.
“The whole debate is focused on how can we stop drug traffickers in European ports,” says Ulf Laessing, a Mali-based specialist in the Sahel region for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. “There is not much awareness of the devastating impact the drug trade has on countries in Africa and how consumption and addiction have taken root in countries like Niger.
“It’s a big business driven by consumption in Europe. Every time I go to Niger, officials complain more about it.”
It is hard to estimate the total amount of cocaine flowing through Niger but the size of drug seizures in the Sahel region, which stretches across Africa from Senegal to Sudan, have risen rapidly since 2020, according to UN figures, from an average of 13kg a year seized between 2015 and 2020 to 1,466kg in 2022.
Brazilian drug cartels have wrested control of shipping the cocaine grown in Peru, Colombia and Bolivia, taking advantage of the relatively short distance to Africa’s Atlantic coast. Substantial amounts are then moved overland through Mali and Niger. From there it moves onwards to Libya, Tunisia and Europe, which can’t seem to get enough of it.
As well as being hidden on cargo ships, cocaine arrives in Africa via pleasure craft and is often dumped overboard for local fishers to pick up and land, says the Africa specialist Lucia Bird, from the criminal research group the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
The trans-Sahelian route has several advantages, as the region is “characterised by weak governance and lack of law enforcement, as well as the trafficking routes lying along ancient trade routes”, says Bird.
Once landed, shipments are divided between sea-bound and overland delivery, which is trucked out by a chain of traffickers. In Mali and Niger, movement is controlled by armed groups, and jihadist groups tax consignments at checkpoints along the route. The UN has warned that the involvement of armed groups is undermining peace and stability in the region.
Traffickers have been paying local transporters in cocaine, which they then have to monetise, usually by converting it into more affordable crack cocaine that they can then sell to local users. In 2020, officials in Niger reported the dismantlement of two clandestine drug laboratories producing crack cocaine destined for the local market.
Some people in Niger believe drug smugglers are also making transporters dependent on drugs to keep them involved in the trade.
Back in Agadez, Chehou says they are trying to support the women as best they can. They want to raise funds to build a centre to support drug addicts in the city, he says, but “don’t have the money” and the military government running Niger since last year’s coup “are not engaging”.
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