The debt arrives before the first client does.
Survivors describe sums of two million CFA francs, sometimes two and a half million. They owe it to the “madam” who arranged the journey.
That arithmetic is how Abidjan’s sex trade holds many foreign women in place.
Nigerian women feature most often in the public cases, but they are not alone. The US State Department’s 2025 report says foreign trafficking victims identified in Côte d’Ivoire also came from Burkina Faso, Ghana, other West African countries and Vietnam.
Not every woman in Abidjan’s sex trade was trafficked. A former Nigerian diplomat told reporter Eromo Egbejule that many women claim to work of their own free will, yet look younger than the age they give. Proving it is costly. A dental scan to test age can run to about 50,000 CFA, he was told.
Money is the lure, and in Abidjan’s sex trade the money can be real. A 23-year-old woman from Lagos told Vanguard she was promised clothes-selling work, then forced into prostitution. She handed her handler 10,000 to 26,000 CFA francs a day for about a year. She still said it paid “more than what I could make here in Nigeria”.
A 16-year-old from Delta State, interviewed by the same paper, had left home at 15 without her parents’ consent. She was handed to a madam and ordered to repay two million CFA francs. She paid. Her boss still refused to free her.
Same country. Same trade. Different endings.
None of this is new. In 2010, Human Rights Watch documented Nigerian women moved overland through Benin, Togo, Ghana and Burkina Faso into Ivorian brothels. Some had worked for between two and six years without clearing their debts.
Sixteen years on, the road that feeds Abidjan’s sex trade looks much the same. Egbejule describes buses and minivans leaving Nigeria daily. Drivers pay border bribes of 1,000 to 2,000 CFA a head. Recruits are coached to say they are only visiting a market in Cotonou.
Treichville is where the cost of Abidjan’s sex trade often surfaces. The Nigerian Community office there receives girls who have been found or have fled. Its chairman, Michael Emeka Onwuchelu, said by 2024 it had sent 952 girls home since May 2021.
Then comes the figure that will not sit still. In October 2025, the community’s spokesman, Davidson Ogbu, said about 1,500 to 2,000 girls under 16 had been repatriated in three years. He added that the girls “keep coming”.
The two counts are hard to reconcile. The US State Department blamed a missing central data system, and the blurring of trafficking with other crimes, for muddying victim figures in its 2024 report. That is why the real size of Abidjan’s sex trade stays unclear.
The state’s record looks thin by comparison. In 2025, Ivorian authorities investigated 92 trafficking cases, 37 of them for sex trafficking, and secured 18 convictions, nine for sex trafficking, according to the 2026 US report. It added that the government “did not make efforts to reduce the demand for commercial sex acts”.
Nine convictions for sex trafficking look slight beside the repatriation figures. The gap suggests Abidjan’s sex trade faces little real risk of prosecution.
The second risk comes from the people meant to police Abidjan’s sex trade. Some women told Egbejule that security personnel take weekly payments and sometimes return escapees to madams for a fee. Ivorian police and gendarmerie did not respond to his requests for comment, and Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency, NAPTIP, declined to comment. These remain allegations.
Recruiters are still working. On 3 November, Nigerian police said they had rescued a 21-year-old woman sold for CFA420,000 and taken to Mali. She told investigators that about 42 other Nigerian women were held in a gold-mining camp there. Her price was a fraction of the debts survivors describe in Abidjan.
In August, Delta State police arrested a 26-year-old woman accused of sending two women to Côte d’Ivoire with a hairdressing promise. One was rescued. The other was still believed to be there.
The madams, Egbejule found, do their sums at dawn. In Abidjan’s sex trade, the most careful counting is done by them. No government involved can yet say how many women are in those accounts.
