Between the Golden Triangle and Golden Crescent – the

major producers of psychotropic drugs, lies South Asia and

The Pacific. Afghanistan tops the opium market. In 2015,
the country still accounted for almost two thirds of the global
area under illicit opium poppy cultivation. Most of Europe is
supplied with Afghan opiates through the "Balkan route", via
the Islamic Republic of Iran, Turkey and South-Eastern
Europe, which continues to be the most important conduit
for heroin trafficking. The total value of illicit opiates
trafficked on the Balkan route is estimated to amount to an
average of USD 28 billion per annum, which is roughly a third
bigger than the entire GDP of Afghanistan, while only a
fraction of these profits remain in the source country. The
"southern route", through Pakistan or the Islamic Republic of
Iran by sea to the Gulf region and Africa (particularly East
Africa), has grown in importance.
Highway 10 was a translatic route to take millions of African
slaves to South America.
Now the parallel is in use again as one of the preferred
routes for South-American drug cartels for cocaine, with
West-Africa as a stockpiling stopover along the way to the
growing European market.
In the fourteen years since the route has been fully
functional, West-Africa has suffered the spillover effects of
the drug trade. After the seizure of first eight tonnes of
cocaine and then 1.2 tonnes of cocaine in South-America,
with the port city of Abidjan as destination, this story focuses
on the little-known effects of the drug trade in Cote d’Ivore, a
country that has suffered a great deal of civil unrest in the
last decades. Cote d’Ivore believes in no illicit drug trade and
we need your help to make drug use be past not present!
Human trafficking and smuggling of migrants represent great
challenges for West and Central Africa. They are an obstacle
to development, to the rule of law and a serious threat to
human security as both crimes affect directly the lives of
human beings.
There are several different sub-regional patterns of trafficking
and smuggling and the crimes are continuously changing as
the traffickers and smugglers exploit the factors that make
countries and persons vulnerable to the crimes. Forms of
trafficking include among others sexual exploitation, forced
labour at mines, in agriculture and in domestic work, forced
begging, and organ trafficking. It is very important to protect
the vulnerable migrants and it can only be possible with your
help, for Africa and for the world.
Sexual exploitation, something that happens every day.
Sexual exploitation mainly affects women and girls. Human
trafficking is one of the main reasons of increasing sexual
exploitation.

The delegate of Cote d’Ivore wants to propose a solution to

this. We can have special police branches in every country
fighting human trafficking and sexual exploitation of women
and girls and we can also educate the families that is okay to
report the issue and not just think it a disgrace and hide it.

A day without human trafficking and sexual exploitation is

the day we need to aim for and it won’t be long if we break
boundaries, work together and take action!