Nigeria's 'baby factories': When poverty threatens all values

Illegal baby factories are common in Nigeria, and these factories are part of the broader human trafficking industry.

A baby factory is often a small, illegal facility masquerading as maternity homes, hospitals, welfare homes, or orphanages, where it is fertilizing women, negotiating and selling children. These are institutions where women give birth to children who are then offered for sale in the illegal adoption market. Women or girls are carried by force or willingly, and they are kept illegally until the birth of children who are then sold to buyers.

According to a UNESCO report in 2006, baby factories, or baby farms, are the third most common crime in Nigeria after drug trafficking and financial fraud. The sale of children on the black market has increased, despite government efforts to combat this crime.

On June 16, Nigerian police said they had rescued at least 35 teenage girls, including four pregnant, at a hotel in Nkpor, a suburb of the commercial city of Onitsha in Anambra State, southeastern Nigeria. According to the police statement, the hotel serves as a “baby factory”, where women were used as sex slaves and their children were sold on the black market.

“We recovered three pump action guns, seven cartridges and the sum of 877,500 naira. The suspects arrested are being interrogated with a view to eliciting information on their involvement and unmasking other gang members,” said the police statement.

This is not the first time that Nigerian police have raided sites of this kind. The Nigerian police managed to free hundreds of underage women and children from illegal maternity homes where women were forced to give birth to children for sale on the black market.

Experts say several factors contribute to the spread of baby factories in Nigeria. The social stigma associated with early teenage pregnancy fuels this trade. On the other hand, the social stigma associated with infertility leads to a high demand for children, especially by couples who are unwilling to use public adoption or surrogacy due to the additional stigma attached to it.

Poverty also provides an environment for its prosperity, in which the sale of children is a source of financial gain. According to Nigeria's National Bureau of Statistics, 40% of the total population, approximately 83 million people, live below the poverty line in the country, with an income of about $381.75 annually. This poverty is often rooted in social structure and passed down through generations. Young women are most vulnerable to coercion from human traffickers, being tempted to raise their children in better alternative families as an easy way to earn money.

The crime of baby factories is common in poor countries, such as Guatemala and Thailand, where this form of human trafficking is an easy lucrative business. Sometimes women are kidnapped and raped to have children, and these children are then forcibly taken away and sold for adoption (often abroad) or trafficked as prostitutes or child laborers.

The Nigerian authorities established the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) on July 14, 2003, by the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act 2003.

The agency says that it represents “the response to addressing the scourge of trafficking in persons. It is a fulfillment of the country’s international obligation under the Trafficking in Persons Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Transnational Organized Crime Convention (UNTOC).”