From Illicit Hubs to Exploitation: Organized Crime in Northern Ghana Fuels Trafficking Vulnerability
The Illicit Hub Mapping in West Africa 2025 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) this week validates our choice of Tamale for the pilot program. The city lies in a high-risk corridor where organized crime and illicit economies drive community vulnerability.
Tamale: A Node in the High-Risk Corridor
The report identifies the Burkina Faso–Ghana–Côte d’Ivoire triborder area as a significant illicit ecosystem, classifying it as a ‘high’ Illicit Economies and Instability Monitor (IEIM) hub. While violence levels remain relatively low in certain Ghanaian hubs, this corridor is deemed crucial to the resourcing and financial operations of armed groups, notably Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM).
Crucially, Tamale is explicitly marked within this triborder ecosystem, serving as a key transit point on the map detailing stolen livestock routes and selling points connecting the Sahel to coastal consumption markets. This strategic positioning means that HEP’s operating environment in Tamale is intrinsically linked to crime-conflict dynamics across the region.
Accelerant Markets Erase Livelihoods, Enabling Traffickers
The illicit economies operating in and around Northern Ghana are defined as “accelerant markets” because they fuel instability. By undermining formal economies, they make licit alternatives increasingly scarce. This environment of instability and limited opportunity directly increases socio-economic vulnerability, making populations prime targets for human traffickers.
Human trafficking is one of the most commonly identified illicit economies across the mapped hubs, present in 36% of all hubs assessed in the focus countries of the report. Traffickers exploit pre-existing conditions:
- Victims are targeted due to personal risk factors such as a difficult upbringing, lack of education, and/or lack of economic opportunity.
- Facing a reality of lack of income opportunity, education and familial support, victims are enticed by promises of perceived rich earnings, security, status, glamour, and travel.
Two key illicit economies driving instability in Northern Ghana contribute directly to this vulnerability:
- Cattle Rustling: The report names cattle rustling as a major driver of insecurity that featured in almost a quarter of all illicit hubs. The transportation and sale of livestock, often stolen by JNIM in Mali and Burkina Faso, through key hubs like Tamale, destabilizes the local livestock sector – an “economic lifeline” for millions. This theft erodes community stability and income sources, pushing people toward desperate measures that expose them to exploitation.
- Illicit Gold Trade: The illicit gold trade is identified as a central source of livelihood but also a source of financing and legitimacy for armed groups. While GI-TOC research did not find clear evidence of JNIM resource extraction in the Upper West region of Ghana (adjacent to the Northern Region), the sector remains vulnerable to infiltration. Disruption or co-option of this livelihood further destabilizes communities where alternatives are scarce.
Tamale has a drugs problem
The alarming drug crisis in Tamale, Northern Ghana, characterized by the pervasive abuse of synthetic opioids such as the highly addictive and unlicensed Tafrodol (a combination of tapentadol and carisoprodol) and tramadol, directly reflects the rapid and concerning expansion of the synthetic drug trade identified in the Illicit Hub Mapping in West Africa 2025 report. This illicit market, which the report identifies as the most pervasive illicit economy across the region (prevalent in 44% of all hubs in the report), represents a significant trend exacerbating instability. The local impact in the Tamale Metropolis is severe, with many young people suffering “wasted lives,” mental health problems, and declining academic performance (with 58.4% of student respondents reporting drug abuse according to a 2023 research report )
While the wider regional illicit ecosystem around Tamale (the Burkina Faso–Ghana–Côte d’Ivoire triborder area) is classified as a ‘high’ IEIM hub primarily known for resourcing armed groups and laundering stolen cattle, the proliferation of cheap, illegal synthetic drugs acts as a powerful “accelerator” that further destabilizes the socio-economic environment by destroying youth potential and leaving communities more vulnerable to exploitation, precisely because, according to the GI-TOCreport, licit alternatives are becoming increasingly scarce due to the wider presence of organized crime
Education as a Defence Mechanism
As reported by the GI-TOC report, the presence of organized crime and illicit flows weakens community resilience. HEP’s educational intervention now becomes an even more critical mechanism for self-protection.
Our pilot project in Tamale, which reached 300 Junior High School Students directly and 200 out-of-school girls in early 2025, is designed to address key vulnerabilities exacerbated by this high-risk environment. The curriculum builds resilience in vulnerable communities and engenders advocacy in JHS1 students.
By equipping young people with knowledge about trafficking risks, including the increasing use of digital platforms to recruit vulnerable people, HEP helps to build resilience against the coercion and deception utilized by criminal networks that thrive in areas destabilized by illicit economies. This strategic education is essential to ensuring that young people in Northern Ghana do not fall prey to the instability fueled by organized crime and the accelerating illicit hubs that surround them.
You can read GI-TOC’s Illicit Economies and Instability: Illicit Hub Mapping in West Africa 2025 report here
