Giving Compass' Take:

• Hadiza Alooma and her friends are helping Nigerian victims of human trafficking. Alooma finds ways to fund individual projects to help them start their own small businesses. 

• The victims do not receive any support services from their local government. How can NGOs and development organizations work to change this? 

• Read about the Australia-based company tackling the human trafficking issue by offering more employment opportunities. 

In northeast Nigeria, which is being wracked by the violent insurgency of jihadist group Boko Haram, there are barely any programs to support survivors of human trafficking who come home empty-handed. Rejoining their families and communities can be so difficult that some women decide to go back abroad and return to domestic work instead of enduring the daily struggle of making ends meet.

But 15-year-old schoolgirl Hadiza Alooma believes trafficking survivors should not have to make that choice. Together with 10 of her school friends, she is helping trafficked women find ways to make an income and rebuild their lives.

The Nigerian foreign affairs ministry said in May that there has been an upsurge in trafficking of Nigerians to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, where they often end up in involuntary domestic servitude. In some cases, the women are made to believe that they are being taken to the country to perform a pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.

According to the Nigerian embassy in Saudi Arabia, a total of 1,000 Nigerian women who were working as housemaids in the Gulf state have been deported home in the last seven months.

“Unfortunately, when many [trafficking] survivors from northeastern Nigeria return to the country, they can’t make it back to their communities because of the conflict there,” says Dollin Holt, director of Caprecon Development Foundation.

“These women needed help and since the government wasn’t forthcoming, we decided to act,” says Alooma, who says she and her friends are raising the funds through donations from their peers, teachers and community members, with no support from any NGOs or other organizations.

“We are not an organization, just girls who feel the need to assist women who have gone through so much pain.”

Read the full article about human trafficking by Philip Obaji Jr. at News Deeply