Nigeria is not short on anti-trafficking policy. The country has a dedicated national agency in the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), a legal framework that criminalises trafficking, and anti-trafficking content built into the national school curriculum. Like many prevention systems, the gap has not been in policy but in reach; the ability to protect school-age children at the earliest points of the trafficking cycle, where recruitment and grooming take root long before institutional responses can follow.
Often, it is what happens between the framework and the community. A referral pathway can exist on paper and still go unused because communities are not aware of its existence and how to use it. Awareness cannot increase without vigilance following and a message can reach a community without being believed or taken seriously.
For prevention to work, people need to know not only what trafficking looks like. More importantly, it’s knowing who they can turn to when something feels wrong. They need to trust the person carrying the message, the institution receiving the concern and the system that is supposed to respond. That is where the School Anti-Trafficking Education and Advocacy Project (STEAP), a four-year initiative funded by the Government of the Netherlands, was designed to make a difference.
The unique STEAP approach
Implemented by ICMPD in partnership with NAPTIP and state Ministry of Education, STEAP operates across five Nigerian states with high trafficking prevalence — Benue, Delta, Edo, Enugu and Ogun. At full reach, the project covers over 100,000 students in 250 schools. It works through School-Based Management Committees (SBMC), which bring together parents, teachers, guidance counsellors, school principals, and religious and community leaders. It also coordinates directly with state anti-trafficking task forces.
The project rests on three connected pillars. Education and Awareness delivers age-appropriate anti-trafficking content, life skills and safe migration information directly to students. Capacity Building equips teachers, guidance counsellors and school-based committees to spot signals of vulnerability and provide first-line response. Infrastructure Support invests in gender-responsive school improvements that address the material conditions in which vulnerability grows.
But what strengthens STEAP is the work of civil society organisations within their communities. In Delta State, Hope Health Organization (HHO) works where outbound migration and trafficking recruitment have long, documented histories; and in Edo State, for years at the centre of Nigeria’s trafficking discourse, the Girls’ Power Initiative (GPI) brings decades of grounded work on adolescent girls’ rights. In Benue State, Okaha Women and Children Development Organization (OWACDO) operates in communities under acute pressure from prolonged displacement and communal violence. The Divine Era Development and Social Rights Initiative (DEDASRI) engages in schools and communities where trafficking risks intersect with poverty, family separation and out-migration in Enugu State; while in Ogun State, Gender Development Initiative (GenDi) works along the interstate movement corridors of border communities that shape the state’s exposure.
These are not implementing partners. They are trusted organisations that ICMPD works with. Head teachers give them access to schools, and parents open their doors to them. Religious leaders call on them for sensitisations sessions during church/mosques programmes, and traditional authorities receive their delegations. This level of collaboration is not incidental to STEAP's model, but it is the model.
For prevention to work as governance and not just messaging, the actor closest to the community must be the actor that community recognises. In five very different state contexts, that recognition already existed and STEAP built with it rather than around it.
How far STEAP has come
Since its launch in February 2024, STEAP has moved from establishing itself into the system, to large-scale operationalisation across the five states. Now entering its final year, results are measurable.
More than 50,000 stakeholders across the five states, including parents, community leaders, administrators and women’s group members, have been sensitised; and about 4,000 have completed training on trafficking prevention and child protection. Seven hundred and fifty subject teachers have been trained on the revised national curriculum, and 337 lecturers from Colleges of Education have been certified as Trainers of Trainers on trafficking content now embedded in Nigeria’s minimum standard for teacher training.
Sixty per cent of participating schools now have functional School-Based Management Committees actively working on trafficking prevention, while 55 per cent have operational referral protocols in place. Five inter-agency coordination mechanisms have been established across the five states, connecting schools directly to NAPTIP, state anti-trafficking task forces, and social welfare actors.
Anti-Trafficking Vanguard Clubs, which are student-led groups, are putting young people at the front of prevention work in their schools and communities. Members are trained to spot signs of [trafficking], alert and sensitize their peers and neighbours, and route concerns into the referral systems that the project has built. Currently, clubs run in 136 schools and counting, with over 4,000 students formally enrolled and more than 67,000 reached through sensitisation during club inaugurations events.
As an upgrade to the physical school environment, the logic of the targeted School Improvement Projects is simple: trafficking prevention cannot be separated from the conditions in which children learn. A school without functioning toilets forces girls to leave the premises; and a school without fencing cannot control who enters. A school without electricity is not safe after dark. To date, 80 projects have been completed across the five states; most of them incorporating gender-responsive design such as sanitation facilities and safe spaces, perimeter fencing, and electric and solar installations. They make schools materially safer, particularly for adolescent girls whose vulnerability rises sharply when basic infrastructure fails.
The project has also shown how a coordinated, community-anchored response works in practice. In Delta State, a recent STEAP symposium convened senior officials from the enforcement and protection sectors, including the Ministries of Justice and of Women Affairs and Child Development, the police, Immigration Service, Security and Civil Defence Corps, and National Drug Law Enforcement Agency; along with heads of religious organisations, civil society, and other strategic partners. Four trafficking survivors shared their experiences to help shape a more survivor-informed approach. In another state, a father who lost his daughter to trafficking now works with the STEAP team at community and parent engagements. Drawing on his own experience, he reminds other parents of life-saving warning signs, and how important is to take prevention seriously.
Going beyond the project design
Communities engaged through HHO in Delta State expanded STEAP's sensitisation work in 68 more communities, reaching a further 6,656 people beyond the project's formal footprint. In Ogun State, GenDi's community networks organised 24 independent activities reaching 4,094 more people. These are not simply a list of attendees; but are rather early signs that the model has begun to take root without the project holding it up.
In Benue State, a College of Education participating in STEAP's Trainer of Trainers programme has introduced a permanent Postgraduate Diploma in Human Trafficking. This separates merely delivering prevention from building prevention capacity. When prevention runs through trusted actors and through institutions that can sustain it, its longevity transcends funding availability. The question shifts from how a project can deliver, to how communities and institutions sustain the project through the relationships it has nurtured, and the knowledge and systems they have built.
Prevention also cannot wait for cases to reach a law enforcement agency. When the risks of trafficking manifest in real-time, the response system is regarded even more. In October 2025, NAPTIP publicly disrupted a major trafficking syndicate that had targeted children in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Benue State, where over 300 children had been recruited through a false education scheme. STEAP has since expanded its sensitisation work in and around IDP-affected communities in Benue with OWACDO and NAPTIP, focused on the specific recruitment tactics documented in the case. The earlier a system can recognise vulnerability, the more important, trusted community actors become.
Durable prevention requires sustained efforts
STEAP confirms what prevention practitioners often struggle to demonstrate: community-anchored systems are just as impactful and measurable as institutional ones. But while they can be harder to build, they also tend to be more durable once established. For anti-trafficking systems in Nigeria and beyond, three key lessons stand out:
- Prevention systems must be designed with the actors closest to communities as core partners, not just delivery channels added after frameworks are set. The five CSOs working on STEAP are not subordinate to the national anti-trafficking framework; they are the reason it operates inside communities at all.
- Invest in relationships, not only activities. Sustained investment in organisational health, learning systems, and community linkages of locally embedded organisations builds infrastructure that outlasts individual project cycles. Short-term funding builds short-term delivery. Sustained partnership builds systems.
- And referral pathways connecting communities to NAPTIP, state task forces and social welfare actors are only as functional as the trust that carries information across them. That trust is generated locally. It cannot be substituted with mandates.
As STEAP prepares for its final year, the community structure is now solidly in place, and the operational systems are working. The focus ahead is to scale up referral systems, deepen teacher training and curriculum integration, expand student clubs and youth leadership, strengthen community ownership, and improve monitoring and learning.
The STEAP project’s ambition is not new: Safer schools, informed communities, and protected children. What the three years of STEAP have shown is that the ambition is operable, provided the actors carrying it are the ones communities already trust.
About the authors
Rhoda Dia-Johnson is the project manager for STEAP, a Nigerian development professional with over 20 years of experience in socio-economic development, local governance, migration, and human trafficking prevention. She currently serves as Project Manager of the School Anti-Trafficking Education and Advocacy Project (STEAP) at ICMPD, leading initiatives that strengthen human trafficking prevention through education, community engagement, capacity building, and policy advocacy. She has extensive experience working with government institutions, civil society, and international development partners, including the UN, World Bank, USAID, EU, DFID and GIZ.
Blessing Dagow Lass is a development communication professional and Communication Officer for the Pan-Africa Region at ICMPD, where she provides strategic communications advice across programmes on migration, border management, anti-trafficking and reintegration. With over 12 years of experience in development communication, including with Creative Associates International, Mercy Corps and Action Against Hunger, she specialises in behaviour change, strategic storytelling and translating complex development issues into human-centred narratives that inform, engage and drive action. Her experience spans health, gender, trade, food security, and migration across West Africa.
