The National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons has raised the alarm over the alleged use of civil society organisations as fronts by human traffickers to gain access to vulnerable communities and traffic children.

The agency said traffickers were increasingly exploiting communities affected by insecurity, including farmer-herder conflicts, by masquerading as representatives of non-governmental organisations and offering assistance to families.

The Head of Press and Public Relations of NAPTIP, Vincent Adekoye, disclosed this on Tuesday in Abuja while speaking at a joint press briefing of security spokespersons.

Adekoye said the agency had discovered that traffickers were approaching distressed communities under the guise of running educational and humanitarian programmes.

He said, “Traffickers also now masquerade under the umbrella of civil society organisations and move to communities that are already distressed; moving to communities where you have farmer-herder crises, and promising parents that, ‘Oh, we will take your children back to school,’ under a fake back-to-school project.

And from there, they harvest children, move them.”

According to him, NAPTIP recently rescued four children in Onitsha, Anambra State, who had allegedly been trafficked from Kajuru in Kaduna State in 2023.

He added that some of the children were recovered from a high-rise building, while another was found in the custody of a nurse at a Federal Medical Centre in Onitsha.

Adekoye said the agency was planning to profile CSOs, particularly community-based and faith-based organisations operating in vulnerable areas, to prevent criminal elements from exploiting their credibility.

He said, “We have continued also to ensure that we want to profile the Civil Society Organisations in Nigeria. My DG has asked me to convey to them, the leadership of the CSOs in Nigeria, to do an in-house cleansing.

“Because these are people that are known to the community. Some of them are community-based organisations, faith-based organisations, and non-governmental organisations. So, the people are familiar to them, so they take advantage of the vulnerability of the community—those who have been ravaged already—and they walk to them and take the children away.”

The NAPTIP spokesman said the agency had so far recovered 118 children allegedly trafficked from Nasarawa, Benue and three other states in the North-Central.

He urged Nigerians to be vigilant and report suspicious activities involving organisations seeking to take children away from their families.

“As of last count, we have recovered 118 of such children from those that were trafficked from Nasarawa and from Benue, and three other states within the North Central. So, we are appealing to Nigerians to be watchful. When you see them, please contact NAPTIP,” Adekoye said.

The warning comes amid recent operations by NAPTIP in which more than 180 children were reportedly rescued from trafficking networks allegedly posing as civil society organisations and offering educational support to vulnerable families.

NAPTIP has also warned of a growing technology-driven dimension to human trafficking, with traffickers using social media to recruit young Nigerians with promises of lucrative jobs and better living conditions in Asian countries.

Adekoye said the agency recently rescued 16 young Nigerian men from Thailand after they were allegedly lured with attractive job offers.

He explained that the recruitment process was often made to appear genuine because traffickers offered to arrange travel documents, transportation and other logistics for the victims.

He said, “From the beginning, it looks so real to them that they have no reason at all to doubt. So, the agency has been inundated in recent weeks with calls from some of them who are stranded.

“Just in July, we rescued about 16 of them from Thailand. When you hear their stories, your emotions will be overwhelmed by what they went through. Some of them couldn’t survive. Those who survived had a narrow escape from death.”

The development highlights the growing challenge of protecting vulnerable Nigerians from trafficking networks that increasingly exploit both trusted community structures and digital platforms to recruit victims.