A LITTLE after midnight on 6 September, 2022, Musah Mustafa emerged from his thatched-roof hut to relieve himself and saw four cars speeding towards his tiny village.
Mogyigna was barely a village. With just a handful of family homes and two dozen people in total, it was more like a dot in the middle of an expanse of farmland in northern Ghana. Cars were a rare sight during the day, let alone at night. Musah hid behind a tree and watched. When he saw armed men from the cars approach the two homes, he shouted in an attempt to wake the other residents.
But before anyone could act, the men entered the huts and forcibly removed four children, carrying an 11-year-old girl called Fatima by her arms and legs from the room where she had been sleeping with her grandparents.
A gun pointed at her neck, Fatima’s grandmother Sana pleaded with the men. She did not understand why the children were being taken away. Two of the children’s uncles were also taken. Sana feared she would never see her relatives again.
In the eyes of Mogyigna’s villagers, a violent kidnapping had taken place.
But this was not a kidnapping.
Officially, it was a rescue operation carried out by Ghanaian police officers, under Ghana’s Human Trafficking Act. The children were transferred into the care of social services.
The operation was instigated by a US-based charity, International Justice Mission (IJM).
With around $100m (£78m) in funding annually over the past two years, IJM is one of the world’s leading anti-trafficking organisations.
In the UK, IJM says it can count on the support of nearly 300 churches, and more than £220,000 ($280,000) was raised last year from churches and other donors by IJM UK to support activities in Ghana.
But according to an investigation by BBC Africa Eye, IJM has removed some children from their families in cases where there was scarce-to-no evidence of trafficking.
According to our reporting, this aggressive approach may have been fuelled by a target-driven culture inside IJM.
We found two documented cases of rescue operations in which children were forcibly, traumatically and unjustly removed and the children’s relatives prosecuted as child traffickers. One of the cases was Fatima’s.
In Ghana, IJM focuses on rescuing children who have been trafficked to work as slave labourers on Lake Volta, one of the world’s largest man-made lakes.