Giving Compass' Take:

· Philip Obaji Jr. at Global Citizen explains how a group of young schoolgirls in Nigeria is helping human trafficking survivors rejoin their communities and adjust back into life with their families.

· What can be done about human trafficking and this form of modern slavery? How can donors make an impact on the fight against human trafficking? 

· Read about fighting human trafficking with city leadership.

When a group of women came to Maryam Muhammad and offered to pay for her trip from Maiduguri in Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to take part in the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, she was grateful for their generosity. A single mother of twins, she had no way of supporting her family and had resorted to begging friends and neighbors for money. So she left her children with a friend and accepted their offer.

But once in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad was taken to the home of a woman who made her work more than 12 hours a day as a domestic servant. Her passport was seized, and her wages went to her traffickers to repay the money they spent on her trip.

“I was working every day like a slave,” Muhammad says.

After three years, Muhammad was caught by the police as she walked back to the small apartment she lived in not far from where she worked. They sent her back to Nigeria. With no home and no job, she now lives with her children in a makeshift camp for internally displaced persons (IDP) in Bulumkutu, a suburb of Maiduguri. Life in Saudi Arabia was awful, Muhammad says, but working like a slave was easier than fighting for survival in the camp.

Read the full article about the Nigerian schoolgirls helping trafficking survivors by Philip Obaji Jr. at Global Citizen.