for farm labour and domestic work, but also in the mining, fishing and other sectors; and trafficking in women and young persons for sexual exploitation, both inside and outside the region including to Europe and South Africa.258 West African victims are mainly trafficked within the same country or into neighbouring countries;259 those countries within ECOWAS identified to be most heavily affected by trafficking, as origin, transit and destination countries, are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Togo.260 Many other children are transferred to the care of persons other than their parents in circumstances which may not amount to trafficking, including under traditional systems of guardianship (confiage) that are in principle a system of protection rather than exploitation, but nonetheless potentially leave the children in a highly vulnerable situation. Whether or not they have been trafficked, children working away from their families, especially those who have crossed borders, are often completely undocumented in the country where they have work; many of them also have no birth registration in their country of origin. For example, a Human Rights Watch report on girls working as domestic servants in Guinea, among whom some came from neighbouring countries, noted that most girls crossing the border from Mali to Guinea entered the country without documentation (neither identity documentation, nor documentation indicating that the adult in whose care they were at the time was authorised to be so).261 A report by Anti-Slavery International on children working in the cocoa plantations in Côte d’Ivoire similarly reported that many crossed borders without any identity documents.262 This lack of documents not only leaves the children vulnerable to (further) trafficking and exploitation, but also will prevent them from establishing their nationality once they become adults. As in the case of adult migrants, even if they return to their home countries, many are ashamed to return to their families – who could confirm their identities – because they are returning “with empty hands” (especially, but not only, if the family itself decided to send the child away). 4.8.3. Enfants talibés Across Muslim West Africa, there are children in the care of imams or marabouts who promise to teach them the Koran. In many cases these children, known as enfants talibés (in the francophone countries) or almajiris (in Nigeria) are willingly entrusted to the marabouts by poor parents who believe that their sons will be looked after and receive an Islamic education, as well as being fed and clothed. However, a traditional system has become subject to modern abuse, and some of the children receive little to no education in the Koran, and are rather exploited as income generators through a practice of forced begging. Many, perhaps most, of these children are without any documentation of their identity or origins; including the many children who have crossed borders, some of them trafficked. While there have been measures to regulate the system and prohibit child 258 Aderanti Adepoju, “Review of Research and Data on Human Trafficking in sub-Saharan Africa” in Frank Laczko and Elzbieta Gozdziak (eds.), Data and Research on Human Trafficking: A Global Survey, IOM, 2005 (Special Issue of International Migration, Vol. 43 Nos.1&2); Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, UNODC, 2012; Claire Healy, Counter-Trafficking: Baseline Assessment, FMM West Africa, 2013. 259 UNODC, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, 2012 260 Alexis Aronowitz, Human Trafficking, Human Misery: The global Trade in Human Beings, Praeger Publisher, Westport, 2009, cited in IOM, Trafficking in Persons in West and Central Africa Brief: Regional figures and trends, 2014. 261 Human Rights Watch, Bottom of the Ladder: Exploitation and Abuse of Girl Domestic Workers in Guinea, June 2007. 262 Anti-Slavery International, Ending Child Trafficking in West Africa: Lessons from the Ivorian cocoa sector, 2010. 78