By Celestine Okafor (Editor-in-chief)
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing that the law the survivors and danger exist, and still watching the machinery of protection refuse to move.
Ogechi Ikeh, a civil right, women and child protection activist, has lived inside that frustration for years. She has also refused to let it define her.
From the second-floor office of the Citizens Centre for Integrated Development and Social Rights (CCIDESOR) on Wetheral Road, Owerri, and through the Ogechi and Sam Ikeh Foundation (OSAI Foundation), Ogechi has built one of the most consistent civil-society records in Imo State on child rights, gender-based violence, human trafficking and the accountability failures that let all three flourish.
Though, she is not the loudest voice in the room, but she is, more often than not, the one who has read the law, one who knows which committee was never inaugurated, and can tell you exactly which agency that has failed to act.
In a state where children disappear almost daily and baby factories operate in the shadows, that kind of institutional memory is not a luxury but a form of protection. Ogechi has carefully and consistently built Imo’s quiet infrastructure against child trafficking.
In December 2021, Imo State assented to the Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) Law. On paper, it was a breakthrough, but in practice, Ogechi warned in March 2023 that it was becoming another statute destined for the bookshelf.
Through OSAI Foundation, she called on the Imo government to constitute a VAPP implementation committee. She argued that without operational guidelines, protection orders were ineffective and survivors were losing faith in the justice system. “Quite a number of cases have been reported but due to the fact that implementation plan has not commenced, cases are delayed,” she said, adding that, “We would not want to jeopardise the survivors of violence safety seeing that protection order is not effective yet.”
The rights advocate was blunt about the stakes: “We do not want a situation whereby these laws only exist in the bookshelves of the Ministry of Justice, as they could not be implemented after their assent", Ogechi quipped. That intervention was not an isolated press release but was part of a sustained strategy. She has repeatedly used the VAPP Law as a test case for a larger argument, because in Imo State where she is operationally based, the gap between legal text and lived protection is where trafficking, child abuse and domestic violence survive.
In October 2024, after a documentary premiere in Abuja exposed the scale of baby factories and child trafficking in Nigeria, Ogechi Ikeh made a demand that cut through the ceremonial language of the event. She said, the “Laws are not effective until they are fully implemented", adding that, “The government should set up task forces in the 36 states in Nigeria including the FCT. The task forces should comprise the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Women Affairs, NAPTIP, NDLEA, LSCDC — all these stakeholders will come together, including civil society groups, to ensure that laws that have been signed are implemented.”
The new State Coordinating leader of NACTAL however added a line that has struck a cord. “I urge Nigerians to speak up. Whenever you see something that is not defined, try to report because if you are not affected, you could be infected.”
The documentary, Born to Be Sold, was produced by Youth Alive Foundation with support from the Commonwealth Foundation and NAPTIP. OSAI Foundation was part of the partnership, having implemented the Safeguarding Against Violence and Exploitation of Women and Girls (SAVE) project in Imo State. Ogechi’s presence at that premiere was not symbolic but the public face of a network she has spent years assembling.
Her anti-trafficking work does not sit inside a single organisation. It operates through the coalitions that actually move in Imo State.
However, the Network Against Child Trafficking, Abuse and Labour (NACTAL) is the umbrella body of Nigerian civil-society organisations working on trafficking, child abuse and child labour, with member organisations across the 36 states and the FCT. Ikeh’s OSAI Foundation operates within that ecosystem, and her public messaging on child labour is explicit.
OSAI Foundation has described harmful child work as “child labour which is a crime and offence under the Child’s Rights Act,” and has used its platform to insist that “we must shun all forms of violence and promote the total well-being of the girl child.”
Ogechi's connection to Rarduja International, an Owerri-based migration and anti-trafficking organisation founded by Hon. Eddy Duru, is similarly coalitional. Rarduja works on the prevention side of the trafficking chain. It re-educates young Nigerians about the risks of unplanned journeys abroad, running school and campus campaigns, operating a rehabilitation home for returnees, and broadcasting “An Hour with Rarduja” on Owerri radio.
Mrs Ikeh appears alongside Rarduja in the joint public-facing work of the anti-trafficking coalition, including NACTAL and NAPTIP-linked sensitisation efforts in Imo State.
The division of labour is distinct. Rarduja tries to stop the journey before it starts, and Ogechi tries to make the state enforce the laws that are supposed to protect the people who stay, return or survive.
Some of Ogechi Ikeh's most important work never makes the news. As a U.S. Department of State IVLP alumna, she used her 2022 IVLP Impact Award to run a project called Empowering Youth as Agents of Change to Address Violence Against Women and Girls in Imo State.
The numbers are modest on paper with 610 students, teachers and volunteers across two schools. But the design, however, matters. The project created safe spaces for young people to discuss and reassess solutions to gender-based violence, and it established after-school clubs for students facing abuse and violence. Informational materials generated in those discussions were shared with other schools across the region.
This is prevention at the level of norms and peer support. It is the same logic Rarduja applies to migration, classroom and the home. It is also a direct response to a problem Ogechi has named repeatedly, which is that girls in Imo State are often “helpless and almost useless in the face of all sorts of violence and abuse,” including sexual and gender-based violence, physical abuse, economic violence and psychological abuse.
In November 2021, while speaking on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Ogechi Ikeh said something that many Nigerian gender advocates avoid. “Women also carry out female genital mutilation among the girl-child,” she said. They are also "involved in trafficking of girls for sex trade, as well as running baby factory businesses. These they carry out with the assistance of men who are the holders of the tradition.”
She was actually not blaming women. She was refusing the comfortable fiction that violence against girls is always committed by strangers or by men alone. In Imo State’s trafficking economy, aunties, grandmothers and community women can be recruiters, enablers and operators. Ogechi's willingness to say so carefully, publicly, and without letting men off the hook, is part of why her advocacy carries weight beyond the usual civil-society circuit.
The activist's civil rights work has never been confined to trafficking alone. In November 2020, during the judicial panel on police brutality that followed the EndSARS protests, she was one of the few Imo state based civil-society voices willing to explain why victims were not filing petitions. She said that “Most people are scared because they don’t have backups for coming out boldly to make such petitions. That is usually the case here.”
The panel had received only two petitions. Ikeh’s diagnosis ranging from fear, poor publicity and a lack of victim support, was an early articulation of a theme that runs through all her work. Impunity for one form of violence creates the conditions for every other form. This means that a state that cannot protect a citizen from a police officer cannot protect a child from a trafficker.
Ogechi Ikeh’s record is not a story of victories but that of persistent, evidence-based pressure applied at the points where the system is weakest. She has demanded a VAPP implementation committee that still had not been constituted as of her 2023 intervention.
She has called for state-level task forces on child trafficking and baby factories that do not yet exist. Not only that, the activist has trained students, sensitised communities, partnered with NAPTIP, worked inside NACTAL, and stood alongside Rarduja in the broader coalition that refuses to let Imo’s trafficking crisis become background noise.
What she has not done is to pretend that any of this is enough.
The missing piece in Imo State is not civil society but the state itself. The committees, the task forces, the shelters, the operational VAPP framework, and the political will to treat child trafficking as the emergency which it is or has become.
Ogechi Ikeh has done the work of naming that gap, year after year, with the law in one hand and the survivor in the other. The question for Imo’s government is whether it intends to keep making her do it alone. NNL.
