I had a conversation with Lisa Mwale from Childline Zambia during a recent trip, and what she shared left me in awe. Childline Zambia was the first child helpline to adopt our Aselo contact center platform in early 2021. She told the story about a group of trafficked young people from Malawi and Mozambique. They had been promised jobs in Zambia, and were loaded up on a truck. By the time they got to Chipata in Zambia, they were in trouble. The traffickers didn’t give them food or water, causing a lot of suffering. They also realized that their destination was South Africa, not Zambia.

One boy was able to run away and managed to call 116: that’s a widely standardized number for national child helplines in Africa. The team at Childline Zambia immediately took action, and soon the local authorities found the truck with the twenty trafficked children. The helpline was able to organize services to nurse them back to health and help repatriate them back to their home countries.

Of course, the background to this story was that our Aselo platform played a small part in helping the team from Childline Zambia to respond to this call and get help for these trafficking victims. Our team is so proud to stand behind front-line services like Childline Zambia, which are doing the critical work of protecting and assisting children in need.