African “baby factories” and the crisis of fraudulent adoption

In the age of humanitarian branding, African children have become a transferable resource. Beneath the language of rescue and charity, international adoption has evolved into a transnational market in which children are extracted, processed, and redistributed to families in the United States and Europe. What is presented as benevolence often conceals criminal networks that traffic infants and young children across borders with forged documents, false identities, and institutional complicity.

This is not a rupture from history but its continuation. Where slave ships once anchored off African coasts to seize free people, today airplanes depart carrying children legally stripped of their names, kinship, and histories. The violence is quieter but no less severe. It targets the continent’s most vulnerable, reproducing a centuries-old logic of forced removal that has shaped African lives in the Americas and Europe since the seventeenth century. The crime persists; only its vocabulary has changed.

Over the past two decades, international adoption has expanded rapidly, creating conditions ripe for abuse. African children now make up a disproportionate share of those adopted or placed in foster care abroad, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Many are exposed to lasting harm: the erasure of identity, permanent separation from family, sexual exploitation, resale to other households, or abandonment without legal protection.

One of the most recent cases surfaced in July 2025, when British authorities uncovered a scheme involving a nurse of Nigerian origin who smuggled a baby girl into the United Kingdom while falsely claiming to be her biological mother. DNA tests later proved no familial link. British media described such operations as “baby factories in Nigeria,” pointing to organized networks that procure newborns under the guise of adoption and resell them to families in the UK for exorbitant sums.

Investigators found that the woman had claimed pregnancy despite medical evidence to the contrary, traveled to Nigeria in mid-2024, and later returned with a baby. She submitted forged hospital letters, fabricated IVF records, and staged photographs purporting to show her in a maternity ward. All documents were later exposed as falsified, and authorities concluded that the infant had likely been obtained through illegal “baby farms.”

This was not an isolated case. Earlier, a couple from Oxford were convicted of attempting to falsify documents to bring a Nigerian child into the UK by claiming he was biologically theirs. After spending months in Nigeria, they approached the British High Commission in Lagos seeking a passport for the child. Officials became suspicious, and DNA tests confirmed the deception. The couple received suspended sentences and community service orders.

Evidence suggests that northeastern Nigeria has seen widespread child disappearances linked to trafficking. Children are often taken from extremely poor families under false promises of education, social assistance, or employment abroad. Illegal adoptions frequently involve foreign families paying intermediaries to accelerate fraudulent procedures, with children transferred mainly to the United States and the United Kingdom.

In October 2025, Ghanaian authorities dismantled a trafficking network operating under the cover of international adoption in the Ashaiman community of Greater Accra. Three Nigerians were arrested for luring victims through emotional manipulation and forcing them into cybercrime, including romance scams, while subjecting them to physical and psychological abuse. This case emerged amid broader efforts by Ghana to combat trafficking, which recently led to the rescue of dozens of victims, many trafficked for sexual exploitation and cyber fraud.

Fraudulent adoption networks extend far beyond Nigeria and Ghana. Research presented by Benjamin Dawit Mezmur, chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, documents risks linked to cross-border adoption affecting children from Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and beyond.

Ethiopia stands out as a major hub. Investigative reporting shows that international adoption became a thriving industry there, accounting for nearly one-fifth of all foreign adoptions to the United States. An estimated 5,000 Ethiopian children were adopted abroad annually, with adoption costs ranging from $25,000 to $30,000 per child. High-profile cases, including celebrity adoptions, like the case of Angelina Jolie and her daughter Zahara, helped normalize the practice while obscuring the systemic abuses beneath it.

Similar patterns emerged in Uganda, where investigations revealed families bribed, deceived, or coerced into surrendering children who were falsely labeled as orphans. Birth records were manipulated, and adoption became a lucrative enterprise involving lawyers, brokers, and agencies. Hundreds of Ugandan children, 201 to be specific, were adopted by American citizens in 2013 and 2014 alone, placing the country among Africa’s leading exporters of children at the time.

In Egypt, where adoption is legally prohibited, trafficking rings operate through closed social media groups. Brokers offer mothers modest sums, often not more than $600, in exchange for pledges never to reclaim their children, then forge documents to place the child with another family. These operations remain deeply clandestine due to legal restrictions that permit only tightly regulated foster care in the country.

Evidence indicates that many children are kidnapped or sold through adoption agencies operating under humanitarian or religious cover, often with local intermediaries. Families are promised education and safety for their children, only to discover later that they have been permanently severed from them. This pattern has been documented by Kathryn Joyce in The Child Catchers, which traces how international adoption follows boom-and-bust cycles, shifting from one country to another as regulations tighten.

As Joyce notes, when Guatemala closed its adoption system, agencies moved en masse to Ethiopia. During such booms, entire economies emerge around adoption, generating profits for intermediaries and supporting hotels, guesthouses, and legal services catering to foreign adoptive parents.

Not all adoptive families are complicit. In many cases, they are misled by agencies, only learning the truth when children speak of biological parents left behind. Some families have returned adopted children after discovering they were not orphans, as in the case of the American writer who discovered that the Ugandan girl she had adopted was not an orphan, but had a family living in her home country. The revelation led her to return the child to her biological mother, exposing the extent of deception that can accompany international adoption.

A similar experience was endured by a Christian couple who fell victim to an adoption agency run by an Ethiopian woman living in the United States named Agitu Wodajo. The agency’s director presented them with a four-year-old girl described as an orphan. After the child began speaking about her dream of one day reuniting with her biological mother, the family grew suspicious and investigated further. It later emerged that the girl had been taken from her original family in Ethiopia and was not an orphan, as claimed.

For the children themselves, the consequences are devastating. Many seek independence upon reaching adulthood, while others embark on legal battles to hold accountable those who deprived them of their families and committed multiple crimes against them. Among the cases documented by U.S. media is one in which an American same-sex couple was sentenced to 100 years in prison for raping their two adopted sons, with the court imposing sentences without the possibility of parole.

Also, in April, an American judge issued a protective order for a child named Jonah Bevin, who had been adopted by former Kentucky governor Matt Bevin and his former wife, Jena. Jonah Bevin, then 18 years old, provided investigators with detailed accounts of abuse and exploitation he said he suffered after being adopted from Ethiopia. At the time, he told investigators that the Bevin family had used him to enhance the former governor’s political image, before abandoning him at a juvenile detention center in Jamaica last year when he was no longer useful.

According to the founder of From Fear to Love, an organization focused on trauma-informed parenting and family support, this experience reflects the reality faced by many Black children brought to the United States.

These individual cases point to a broader pattern. U.S. data show that a significant share of child sex trafficking victims previously passed through the child welfare system. The city of Sacramento has also recorded a widespread incidence of this phenomenon. A study indicates that more than 13,000 potential victims were identified between 2015 and 2020, with the majority exposed to crimes including commercial sexual exploitation.

In response, several African countries have imposed restrictions or bans on international adoption. Ethiopia outlawed the practice in 2018. Kenya followed in 2019. South Africa introduced strict monitoring frameworks after lifting an earlier ban, while Zambia now requires multi-agency oversight for all adoptions.

Yet human rights activists argue these measures remain inadequate. Adoption agencies continue to circumvent laws, smuggling children abroad through forged documents and informal networks. Activists call for stronger coordination among child protection authorities, police, courts, and social services, tighter oversight of care homes, expanded support for victims, and deeper international cooperation. Without such measures, practices masquerading as humanitarian rescue will continue to inflict long-term damage on African children and the societies that claim to save them.