Muhammad Omar was a child when he fled with his family from Eritrea. Military service of 18 months is mandatory there for all able-bodied citizens when they turn 18. However, once conscripted, few know when, if ever, they will be discharged. Many Eritreans spend decades in the army, carrying out forced labor and drilling in the desert under a system human rights groups have compared with slavery. When Muhammad was very young, his father was conscripted. The family has never seen him again. 

Six years ago, when Muhammad’s elder brother was up for conscription, the family fled across Eritrea’s southern border into Ethiopia and settled in a camp for Eritrean refugees — tens of thousands of Eritreans have sought refuge in Ethiopia over the past two decades — but life was hard and, after a few months, Muhammad’s brother decided to head for Europe, hoping to earn enough money to support his family. 

He was trafficked by migrant smugglers through Sudan and into Libya, where he was held hostage and beaten mercilessly. The traffickers called Muhammad’s family and sent them videos of his brother being assaulted. They demanded a ransom from the family, then loaded his brother onto a rickety boat. As with so many other such vessels, it sank in the Mediterranean Sea. Muhammad’s brother drowned. 

For Muhammad, the thought of following his brother was once unthinkable. He now lives with his grandmother and six other family members in a cramped apartment in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. The rent is high but, until recently, life was bearable, in large part thanks to the support the family received from Jesuit Refugee Service (J.R.S.): 1,700 Ethiopian birr per month (roughly $12), in addition to rice, cooking oil and other food items. 

That all changed in January, when the United States government announced an immediate pause on all funding for foreign aid programs. European countries, including France and Germany, also cut funding to foreign aid.

J.R.S. Ethiopia, which received most of its funding from the U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, subsequently suspended many programs. Since then, Muhammad and his family have received neither money nor food. 

“I have no assistance; there is no one supporting me,” says Muhammad, a shy teenager with a warbling voice that is beginning to break. “Now I think I need to go abroad — even if I have to go through Libya.

“Not everybody dies on the journey. My brother was unlucky.”

The story of Muhammad and his brother is typical of many young people in the Horn of Africa, a region beset by chronic violence and extreme repression from which many want to escape. In recent years the situation has deteriorated further, especially in Ethiopia, where a civil war broke out in November 2020 as the Ethiopian government, in concert with Eritrea, sought to crush the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the powerful ruling party in Ethiopia’s northernmost region of Tigray. By the time a peace deal was signed two years later, an estimated 600,000 people had been killed. Some estimates suggest 10 percent of women in Tigray were raped as an act of war. 

Nearly three years on, the peace deal has brought little healing. In 2023, another conflict broke out in the Amhara region, south of Tigray, as armed groups dissatisfied with the ceasefire agreement launched an insurgency against the government. A separate insurgency has raged since late 2018 in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region. Thousands of schools and hospitals across the country have been damaged or destroyed. At least 8 million children are not in school as a result, according to UNICEF. 

Rampant instability recently brought the country close to economic collapse. In late 2023, Ethiopia defaulted on its debt. In exchange for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, in July 2024 the country agreed to implement significant economic reforms. The result was an immediate devaluation by more than 50 percent of Ethiopia’s currency, halving the value of ordinary Ethiopians’ wages and savings, reducing their purchasing power and skyrocketing the prices of food, rent and other essentials. 

“There is now a lot of sexual abuse in Ethiopia. It has increased enormously.”

Already in 2022, the United Nations Development Program stated the multidimensional poverty rate in Ethiopia rose to 72 percent, a nearly 5 percent increase from 2019, due to the pandemic and the wars in Tigray and Ukraine. The 2024 currency change is expected to make the situation worse.

“I can’t survive here,” says Muhammad, echoing millions of youth living in Ethiopia. 

The years-long social and economic crisis engulfing Ethiopia has led to a surge in irregular migration that puts the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at the mercy of human traffickers. In 2023, at least 96,670 migrants from the Horn of Africa crossed the Red Sea into Yemen, according to the International Organization for Migration (I.O.M.); 95 percent left Ethiopia trying to reach Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Gulf. Between January and October last year the number of people leaving Ethiopia along the same route almost doubled to 184,701. Both figures represent only the migrants the I.O.M. has been able to track. Several thousand people also head north to Europe through Libya, or south to South Africa each year. Many of these people fall into the hands of human traffickers, whose profits hinge on their ability to monetize cruelty. 

According to a federal prosecutor, who requested anonymity and who works on human trafficking cases in Dire Dawa, a city in eastern Ethiopia that is a hub for irregular migrants, there are “chains of brokers [people smugglers] in all small towns” in Ethiopia. These brokers persuade people to trust them, painting pictures of the wonderful lives they will enjoy in Europe or the Gulf. Often they will cover a migrant hopeful’s travel expenses up to the Ethiopian border, the prosecutor says, where they are handed over to migrant smugglers from Sudan or Somalia. As with Muhammad’s brother, they are detained by the smugglers and subjected to beatings, torture and rape, and videos are sent to their families to extract a ransom. Traveling through some of the world’s most violent and unstable countries — Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen — migrants will often face this torture multiple times at the hands of various armed groups or smuggling gangs, and many die along the way. 

Humanitarian and church-based groups have been working to alleviate this suffering by assisting those at risk of being trafficked. However, as countries in the West have slashed aid budgets, these organizations are now struggling. 

For instance, J.R.S. used to run workshops and training sessions for young refugees about the dangers of irregular migration and the brutality of human traffickers. It also provided vocational skills training in information technology, languages and music to help them find employment and discourage them from migrating. However, those programs have been suspended, says Solomon Brahane, J.R.S.’s country director for Ethiopia.

J.R.S. Ethiopia previously received much of its funding from the U.S. Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration and the UNHCR; the former was completely cut off, while the latter was reduced. As a result, J.R.S. has laid off many staff, including half of the child protection officers responsible for identifying refugee children who may be at risk of trafficking and in need of emergency support, and has redirected all its resources toward emergency assistance for only the most vulnerable families.

Over the past two months, Mr. Brahane says, many refugees who benefited from J.R.S.’s programs have left Ethiopia. Some of them will doubtless have been exposed to human traffickers, he says.

“I can’t survive here,” says Muhammad, echoing millions of youth living in Ethiopia.

The Comboni Missionary Sisters in Ethiopia have managed to continue their work mostly unimpeded because they receive all their funding from private donors, says Sister Yamileth Bolaños. 

As members of Talitha Kum, a global network of religious women committed to fighting human trafficking, a considerable part of their mission is helping women who have been trafficked or sexually abused. 

“There is now a lot of sexual abuse in Ethiopia. It has increased enormously,” says Sister Yamileth. She works at her community’s convent, a cottage in the Haya Hulet neighborhood in Addis Ababa, where female survivors of sexual violence and human trafficking find a haven. “And some of these girls are very, very young. We are talking about 10 or 11 years old.” 

In recent years, thousands of women have left for Saudi Arabia and Dubai, where there is a high demand for maids, cooks and other domestic workers. In many cases these women experience heinous exploitation that amounts to human trafficking, says Sister Yamileth. 

While often these women travel abroad legally, upon their arrival, employers confiscate their passports and force them to work without pay and with severe restrictions on their movement. Sister Yamileth recounts one story of a young woman whose employer kept her locked in a tiny kitchen, except when she had to clean the house. One day as she was cooking, a fire broke out in the kitchen where she was trapped. She suffered burns to 95 percent of her body and spent two years in the hospital. 

Eventually, the Ethiopian government intervened and repatriated her to Ethiopia, where she came into the care of the Comboni Sisters. 

The sisters work with a local shelter, run by Comunità Voluntari per il Mondo, a charity that works with the Ethiopian government to take temporary care of women who have been victims of human trafficking or sexual abuse. The sisters will then welcome these women to their convent and provide psychological support   and vocational training, such as baking or cosmetology. Once the women are ready to reintegrate into society, the sisters help them with finding work and housing and give them rent support for three months. 

While the sisters have been effective in helping survivors, they have not been able to stem the tide of thousands who are leaving Ethiopia and being trafficked daily.

In Adigrat, a city that suffered terribly during the 2020-2022 war, young people are migrating in huge numbers. Many fall victim to the cruelty of human traffickers, and even if they are lucky enough to survive, the effects on their families are devastating. 

“They sell a house, they sell a cow, they sell their chickens [to pay the ransom],” says Abune Tesfasellassie Medhin, bishop of the Eparchy of Adigrat. In this way, he adds, human trafficking is “accelerating poverty.” 

Preventing this catastrophe requires finding ways to help people lead “productive lives,” he says, giving them a reason not to lose hope and risk everything, including their life, on a perilous journey abroad. The Catholic community in Adigrat, which he shepherds, has been involved in various initiatives to this effect. 

Women have traveled to Addis Ababa and benefited from the work of the Comboni Sisters. Alongside the efforts of Talitha Kum, the eparchy organizes training sessions and workshops for young people at risk of irregular migration, as well as vocational training to increase their skills and employability so they may remain and earn a living in Ethiopia.

Yet many of these initiatives have been hampered by foreign aid cuts. In a world of declining foreign funding, Bishop Tesfasellassie says funds must be used more efficiently, which means giving a greater share of the available resources to local actors, who are close to the reality on the ground, with deep links to the community, rather than to big nongovernmental organizations. 

“All these bureaucracies and matrices are tricks that only the fittest can survive,” he says. “To move the money among the powerful ones, they use these tricks.”

In that maze of bureaucracy, “only the highest-paid professionals can prepare ‘project proposals,’ not ordinary people who are working on the ground with huge cost-effectiveness,” the bishop says, explaining the requirements of funding that are often too complicated and time-consuming to complete for those working in the field.

“We have big gratitude toward all people of goodwill and generosity,” he says. “But these processes need simplification, because the resources are not reaching us in time or helping us in solving problems.”

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