Lured With a Bakery Job: Two Teenagers’ Escape From Trafficking in Cote d’Ivoire

Kaduna State – Monica is seventeen. Juliet is eighteen. Both are from Benue State, Monica an Idoma indigene, Juliet a Tiv indigene, and until recently, both were living in Kaduna State, trying to build something like a future in a country where that has become harder than it should be.

That is precisely what made them targets. As the world marked the 2026 World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, the two teenagers were among a group of Nigerians rescued from Cote d’Ivoire, where they had been trapped in forced labour, prostitution and sexual exploitation after being lured from home with a promise as ordinary as it was devastating: jobs in a bakery.

It is a familiar pattern to anyone who studies how trafficking networks operate in Nigeria, and that familiarity does not make it any less effective. Traffickers do not need elaborate lies. They need only find someone facing poverty, unemployment, and a genuine desire for a better future, and offer them the smallest, most plausible version of that future.

For Monica and Juliet, that offer was baking. Steady work, a wage, a reason to leave Kaduna for what they were told would be a legitimate job across the border. What they found instead, according to their accounts after being rescued, was a system built to trap them the moment they arrived, with no bakery, no wage, and no way home.

Their rescue came through a joint operation involving the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women’s Nigerian partner organisation, GAHTO, and the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, NAPTIP, part of a broader campaign targeting trafficking networks operating between Nigeria and its West African neighbours.

GAHTO described the rescue as another major breakthrough in its sustained campaign against human trafficking and the protection of vulnerable Nigerians across the region, a description that, for Monica and Juliet, translates into something much simpler: they are home, or at least out of Cote d’Ivoire, and no longer trapped in the exploitation that awaited them there.

Their testimonies, given after regaining their freedom, are now being used by anti trafficking advocates as a case study in how these networks continue to evolve, always finding new covers, new false promises, new ways to make exploitation look, for just long enough, like opportunity.

Anti human trafficking advocates who worked on the case have urged Nigerians, particularly young people in states like Benue and Kaduna where economic pressure runs high, to verify overseas employment and migration offers through appropriate government channels before accepting them.

Both survivors are now receiving support as part of their reintegration, though what that process actually looks like, for a 17 year old and an 18 year old trying to rebuild a sense of safety after being trafficked and exploited, is not something any agency statement can fully capture.

What is captured, clearly, in every account of their rescue, is the mechanism that got them there in the first place: not force, not kidnapping in the dramatic sense, but the quiet, devastating effectiveness of an offer that sounded, for just long enough, like exactly what they needed.