Slavery: Libya and Sub-Saharan Africa

(asked on 19th November 2020) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to (a) tackle human trafficking from sub-Saharan Africa and Libya and (b) educate and inform people about the resultant modern slavery.


Answered by
Victoria Atkins Portrait
Victoria Atkins
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This question was answered on 24th November 2020

The Home Office is committed to tackling modern slavery and human trafficking internationally, and to raising awareness to help increase resilience against these crimes and prevent them from happening in the first place.

We work closely with the FCDO, who are working to protect those who are travelling on the dangerous migration route into Libya. As part of their current £70 million migration programme (2017-21), which works along the whole route from West Africa via the Sahel to Libya, they have allocated around £5 million to humanitarian assistance and protection for migrants and refugees in Libya, including targeted healthcare.

UK aid is also making those migrating aware of the dangers ahead and supporting them to return voluntarily. We are educating people before they decide to travel to Libya, informing them about the living conditions and the other risks they may face, such as falling into the hands of human traffickers.

As part of the Home Office’s Modern Slavery Fund, we are working globally including in sub-Saharan African countries, to tackle modern slavery and raise awareness about this crime:

  • In Nigeria, the Fund is delivering a £5 million programme between 2018 and 2021 to fund criminal justice capacity-building, victim support and prevention work in vulnerable communities. Our strategic communications campaign ‘Not For Sale’ reached over 1.1m people, with 93% of families who had heard of it responding positively.
  • In Ethiopia, our work includes projects to raise community awareness of exploitative domestic work and to negotiate better conditions for those who want to enter this sector.
  • In Sudan, our partners have advised the National Committee for Combatting Trafficking on how they can best deliver awareness raising campaigns on human trafficking and forced labour, tailored to their local context and based on UK experiences of similar communications campaigns.

In addition to these programmes, we continue to push for change on a global scale as part of our efforts to tackle modern slavery and human trafficking, by working with other countries and multilateral fora such as the G7, G20, Commonwealth and UN. We also work with partners to combat the criminal gangs who exploit and traffic people internationally.

Reticulating Splines