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The Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) in the Brong Ahafo Region  has taken up new steps to discourage the youth, particularly ladies from migrating to the Gulf states, through sensitisation sessions at the Sunyani Passport Application Centre (PAC). 

The sensitisation follows multiple phone calls placed to the authorities of the GIS in the region where parents and relatives complain about the maltreatment their daughters go through in the Arab countries.

DSI Haruna Alhassan, the Officer In Charge of the PAC, in  an interview with Peacefmonline.com, said he and his team had commenced educating people on  issues of safe migration. He revealed that he had to move from the Migration Information Centre (MIC) to the Passport office to help reduce the trafficking.

"The situation is very bad in the region... Parents have been calling us all the time on how their daughters are being maltreated and asking us to help them, so we had to do this to reduce the number of young ladies who are being trafficked to the Gulf states."

DSI Alhassan said their approach is expected to yield good results, adding that after attempts by the GIS to stop the menace at the Kotoka International Airport, the unregistered travel agents were using unapproved routes to send people out of the country.

The rate at which these ladies are trafficked out of the Brong Ahafo Region to the Gulf states is alarming, according to the Ghana Immigration service.

Berekum,Drobo,Techiman, Sampa and Kokosua are towns with the highest number of ladies who have left the shores of Ghana to either Qatar, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia.

These ladies between the ages of 18 and 30 are recruited through phoney agencies whose adverts are ran on most radio stations in the urban areas of the region.

These agents, who promise these ladies of good jobs and mouthwatering salaries, then ask them to acquire passports and meet them in Accra where they aide them to get visas to these countries where they are sold to individuals to do menial jobs and are given pittance amidst ill-treatment.

Some of the returnees who spoke to Peacefmonline.com at Berekum and Sunyani said they were beaten and starved in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia by their masters over little mistakes.

24 year old Adomah who had returned from Kuwait early this year said she and a friend's passports were seized immediately their agents handed them to their masters in 2015.

She said she could not escape when she was manhandled by her master's 20 year old son when she refused to give in to his sexual advances.  "Our agents did not answer our calls when we needed their help', she revealed.