Republic of South Africa

South Africa is a middle-income, emerging market with an abundant supply of natural resources; well-developed financial, legal, communications, energy, and transport sectors; a stock exchange that is 17th largest in the world; and modern infrastructure supporting an efficient distribution of goods to major urban centers throughout the region. However, unemployment remains high and outdated infrastructure has constrained growth.

Daunting economic problems remain from the apartheid era - especially poverty, lack of economic empowerment among the disadvantaged groups, and a shortage of public transportation. South African economic policy is fiscally conservative but pragmatic, focusing on controlling inflation, maintaining a budget surplus, and using state-owned enterprises to deliver basic services to low-income areas as a means to increase job growth and household income.  [The World Factbook, U.S.C.I.A. 2009]

Human trafficking and Modern day slavery SOUTH AFRICA    [Extracted from U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2009]

South Africa is a source, transit, and destination country for trafficked men, women, and children. Children are largely trafficked within the country from poor rural areas to urban centers like Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, and Bloemfontein – girls trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and domestic servitude; boys trafficked for forced street vending, food service, begging, crime, and agriculture; and both boys and girls trafficked for “muti” (the removal of their organs for traditional medicine). The tradition of “ukuthewala,” the forced marriage of girls as young as 12 to adult men, is still practiced in remote villages in the Eastern Cape. Local criminal rings and street gangs organize child prostitution in a number of South Africa’s cities, which are also common destinations for child sex tourists. In the past, victims had typically been runaways who fell prey to city pimps, but now crime syndicates recruit victims from rural towns. South African women are trafficked to Europe and the Middle East for domestic servitude and sexual exploitation. Nigerian syndicates have reportedly begun moving trafficked women from South Africa to the U.S. as well for African migrant clients there. Women and girls from Thailand, Congo, India, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe are trafficked to South Africa for commercial sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and other forced work in the service sector. Some of these women are trafficked onward to Europe for sexual exploitation. A large number of Thai women are trafficked into South Africa’s illegal brothels, while Eastern European organized crime units force women from Russian and Ukraine into debt-bonded prostitution in exclusive private men's clubs. Traffickers control victims through intimidation and threats, use of force, confiscation of travel documents, demands to pay job "debts," and forced use of drugs and alcohol. Organized traffickers from the PRC bring victims from Lesotho, Mozambique, and Swaziland to Johannesburg for exploitation locally, or to send them on to other cities. Men from PRC and Taiwan are trafficked to mobile sweatshop factories in Chinese urban enclaves in South Africa which evade labor inspectors by moving in and out of neighboring Lesotho and Swaziland to avoid arrest. Young men and boys from Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe voluntarily migrate illegally to South Africa for farm work, sometimes laboring for months in South Africa with little or no pay and under conditions of involuntary servitude before unscrupulous employers have them arrested and deported as illegal immigrants.