Dakar - Trafficking of women from West Africa to Europe for sexual exploitation is thriving amid inaction from African governments, experts at a regional conference on the issue in Senegal have said.

"The trafficking of women is difficult to identify, but it is a phenomenon that is not on the decline. It is growing in volume," Babacar Ndiaye, a specialist consultant with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said yesterday.

"The trafficking of women is less visible, more difficult to identify," he said on the sidelines of the three-day Dakar forum looking at ways at tackling human trafficking.

Specialists at the conference, gathering representatives from 12 west and central African countries and from international and national non-governmental bodies, estimated that thousands of African women were forced into prostitution rings abroad every year.

In January, Italian police smashed several human-trafficking rings involving African and eastern European females and netted about 800 suspects.

Nigeria was the worst culprit in human trafficking, with "pedlars working quietly and in the open", unfazed by law enforcement agents, said Ndiaye.

The treatment of women "has not been seriously taken into account by (African) authorities", he said.

Outside Nigeria, other main sources of females for prostitution were Cameroon, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Togo.

A French police expert, Philippe Barbancon, said the trafficking of women and African prostitution networks had become complex in recent years because "the roles are superimposed and some prostitutes are also pimps".

"Once they pay back the traffickers the money they owe them (for fares and relocating expenses), the victims are transformed into pimps," said Barbancon.

"It becomes very difficult to identify the traffickers when everyone is prostituting."

Before they graduate into "mamas" - a moniker for pimps - each victim has to reimburse around $50 000 (about R350 000) to the pedlars, he said. After that, they can buy their own women at between $7 000 and $10 000 each.

Philippe Thelen, co-ordinator of a French non-governmental organisation, ALC, a support group for victims of trafficking in southern France, estimated that about 25% of prostitutes in France were Africans.

Trafficking for the regional market in Africa was also not uncommon.

Bernadette Ouedraogo, who heads a Burkinabe NGO, said the majority of prostitutes in Burkina Faso come from the sub-region.

She said girls were lured with fraudulent offers of jobs in Europe, only to end up being violently forced into prostitution.