Cameroon steps up fight against child labor, trafficking

When Annette Beri was 13, her parents arranged to have her work as a nanny for a couple in Douala, Cameroons economic capital.

Beri and her parents, who lived in a little village in the Donga-Mantung division of Cameroons Northwest region, 300 kilometers (186 miles) from Douala, saw the role as an extraordinary opportunity.

I was happy to go to the city, she says. So too were my parents. My parents and I had never left the village never. So they were happy that I would be the one to make them visit the township someday.

Beris parents, who could not afford to send her to secondary school after she completed seventh grade, struck the deal with a man from their tribe whose wife was pregnant.

Under the agreement, Beri was to work for the family for two years, solely as a nanny. Her employers would then send her to learn a trade of her choice.

Things did not work out that way. Beri worked for the family for five years and took on several demanding roles.

Besides doing domestic work, she was required to hawk foodstuffs. Such traders move around selling goods they transport on their heads or in handcarts.

Ultimately Beri became the familys home manager, a role that includes baby-sitting, managing the kitchen, and buying and selling foodstuffs. During my fourth and fifth year, I worked like a jackass, she says.

But hard work was the least of her problems, Beri says.

Whenever the woman of the house found the baby crying, she denied Beri food, she says. She also deprived her of food whenever she came home late from the market where she hawked food.

During her first two years with the family, Beri says she was beaten regularly too. She says her bosses assaulted her with their hands or a gas pipe. The beatings tapered off over the years but still occurred every three months or so, Beri says.

Many times when my mistress comes home when the baby is crying, she makes sure she beats me up too, she says through tears. For five years, they treated me like a real slave.

Beris parents never knew about the abusing, she says. They were too poor to visit her. And because she was never paid for her work, she was not able to visit them.

Beri begged her employer to honor his side of the agreement by sending her to train as a tailor, her dream job, she says.

For five years, my employer did not pay me a franc, she says. They were not even ready to send me to learn a trade, as the agreement stated.

Frustrated and angry, Beri finally packed her belongings and left.

It has been five years since she left, and her employers have yet to settle the debt, she says.

Since Beri, now 22, already spent her own money on the training the couple had promised to fund, she thinks the couple should settle the debt in cash.

I cannot be suffering when I have my hard-earned money that is buried somewhere, Beri says. In Cameroon, many girls and young women who enter domestic service say their employers mistreat them. Whats more, many domestic servants are victims of trafficking, local advocates say. In response to growing demand for action, nongovernmental organizations are fighting for the rights of trafficked domestic servants and working to ensure that employers who abuse their employees are punished under a law enacted in 2005.

That law defines child trafficking as the act of moving or helping to move a child within or outside Cameroon with a view to directly or indirectly reaping any financial or material benefit therefrom. The crime is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and fines ranging from 50,000 Central African francs ($100) to 10 million francs ($20,000). Higher sentences and fines are for violators who traffic children under 15.

Cordelia Ndagha, the Mezam divisional delegate for the Ministry of Womens Empowerment and the Family, says the trafficking of children for domestic work still occurs in Cameroon but is becoming less common. She says she does not have statistics to reflect the decrease because she is new in her role.

A 2011 survey by the Center for Human Rights and Peace Advocacy, a Bamenda-based independent organization that promotes the rights of Cameroonians, found that the Northwest region has the highest incidence of child trafficking in the country.

And Donga-Mantung, where Beri grew up, is the biggest supplier of trafficked children among the seven divisions of the Northwest region. This could be because the Northwest region has a large population more than 1.8 million people as of the 2010 census and most of the residents are poor, Ndagha says.

Most children trafficked in Cameroon are still in primary school or have just completed primary school, says Ndagha, the officer responsible for all women and family issues in the division. She also mediates in cases of domestic conflict and abuse.

Female children have been victims of child trafficking and domestic work in Cameroon, Ndagha says. This has led to abuse of the rights of these children. Trafficked children are commonly taken from villages to big cities, where they are put to work as domestic servants, she says. Agreements typically call for employers to send children to learn a trade after they have worked for at least two years.

But employers often break these agreements, leaving the children with no form of compensation and often further impoverished. This poverty fuels child trafficking in Cameroon, she says.

Poor rural parents are unable to send their children to school, Ndagha says. Instead, they send them to cities to work as domestic servants. In some cases, a servants wages are paid directly to the childs parents.

In addition to withholding pay and committing physical abuse, there is also evidence of employers sexually abuse their servants.