The National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) on Monday in Abuja presented to its stakeholders the National Action Plan (NAP) on human trafficking for 2022-2026.

During the presentation, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disasters management and Social Development, Hajia Sadiya Umar Farouq, stated that the document was expected to foster greater collaboration among stakeholders.

Ms Farouq said the document would bring efficiency to Nigeria’s fight against human trafficking and set a yearly benchmark for stakeholders.

The minister noted that the policy document could not have come at a better time than now when the country faced many social, humanitarian and developmental issues.

“My ministry has risen to the challenges of delivering on its core mandate of developing humanitarian policies and providing effective coordination of national and international humanitarian interventions. The ministry has risen to ensure strategic disaster mitigation preparedness and response and managing the formulation and implementation of fair-focused social inclusion and protection programmes in Nigeria,” she stated. “In a bid to effectively coordinate the wide mandate of the ministry, we developed L.I.F.E Cycle – Lead an Inclusive and Innovative Future-thinking Ecosystem.”

The minister said it was an operational coordination initiative aligned with the activities of all the agencies under the ministry in collaboration with relevant stakeholders.

“This initiative finds expression in NAP on human trafficking in Nigeria (2022 – 2026), which is a coordination framework for counter-trafficking interventions,” Ms Farouq added. “Since the approval of the document by the Federal Executive Council in February and its public presentation at the National Stakeholders Consultative Forum (NSCF) on human trafficking in April, the document was yet to be fully mainstreamed.”

She added that it was imperative to convene the meeting to engage heads of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) and other relevant organisations to understand their roles in implementing the document.

NAPTIP director-general Fatima Waziri-Azi stated that human trafficking had remained a threat to international, national, and human security and had become the greatest contemporary challenges.

“You would recall that in 2009, NAPTIP developed a four-year National Action Plan (NAP) on Trafficking in Persons (2009-2012) that became a collaborative framework that set the benchmarks for interventions by all stakeholders. The implementation of the first edition of ‘NAP On Human Trafficking (2009-2012)’ provided the much-needed framework for a coordinated response to human trafficking in Nigeria among the stakeholders,” stated Ms Waziri-Azi.

She added, “The first edition led to numerous achievements recorded by the agency in the succeeding years. Some of these achievements were the landmark upgrading of Nigeria to Tier One status for three consecutive years in the US, 2009 – 2012.”

(NAN)