Addressing child trafficking in high-risk states and regions of Nigeria through real-time data surveillance and early-warning systems

Nigeria remains one of the largest source, transit, and destination countries for human trafficking in West Africa, with children accounting for a disproportionate share of detected victims and internal movement accounting for the majority of documented cases. Building on National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) statistics indicating that roughly six in ten trafficking cases in Nigeria occur within or across state boundaries rather than internationally, this research proposes and evaluates the design of a real-time data-surveillance and early-warning system (EWS) intended to close the information gaps that currently delay detection, referral, and rescue. The study focuses on nine states associated with documented trafficking networks and source, transit, or destination activity: Edo, Delta, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Rivers, Cross River, Akwa Ibom, and Ebonyi, together with Borno and Adamawa States, where a protracted armed conflict has produced mass displacement, family separation, and eroded child-protection infrastructure. Using a mixed conceptual-and-design methodology, the study maps the trafficking process chain of recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, and exploitation; identifies technology-facilitated and traditional recruitment vectors; and specifies a five-layer surveillance architecture that securely integrates de-identified data from NAPTIP, law enforcement, immigration, health, education, internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, transport terminals, hotlines, and legally obtained digital-platform and financial-transaction reports. The system generates rule-based alerts on repeated entities such as telephone numbers, accounts, vehicles, addresses, recruiters, and routes; produces state and local-government-area (LGA) trafficking risk maps; and supports an interstate victim-referral and case-tracking mechanism. A phased pilot in Edo, Delta, Lagos, Rivers, and Borno States, to be evaluated on reporting speed, data completeness, victim-identification rates, investigative response times, case linkages, and referral outcomes, drawing on established public-health surveillance-evaluation attributes (Manahan et al., 2022). The study concludes that a coordinated, privacy-compliant national surveillance network, anchored in the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2022, offers a practical pathway to disrupt fragmented reporting, accelerate victim identification, and strengthen child-protection response across Nigeria's highest-risk states.