From the remote northern Albanian town of Puka to the cultural heartland of southern Albania, Gjirokastra, USAID’s anti-trafficking project, CAAHT, has cast a wide net in its quest to prevent girls and young women from falling prey to traffickers and their deceitful tactics.

The project has galvanized the efforts of local NGOs to raise awareness and provide life-changing opportunities to those at risk of being trafficked. Through the support of CAAHT, local NGOs are taking practical steps to combat trafficking in their towns and villages. Through awareness raising campaigns and alliances among health, education, and various governmental levels, the threats of human trafficking in Albanian society are now more fully understood.

Puka and Gjirokastra are just two of nearly two dozen communities that have received assistance through the project, but its impact has been recognized nationally.

Since its launch in 2004, USAID has funded 22 NGOs that have received more than $2 million through the CAAHT project.

One of these NGOs is In Help of the Northern Women of Puka, founded by a former school teacher and librarian, Bukurie Imeri. The organization is the only group in the district that provides vocational and other assistance for marginalized and vulnerable women.

With a population of nearly 14,000, the district of Puka and its surrounding villages are reachable only through winding and narrow mountain roads. Many families survive on farming small plots of land; job and education opportunities for its youth are limited. Isolated, Puka’s girls and young women have little access to information about the risks of trafficking.

By most accounts, traffickers, use similar tactics to prey on girls and young women who tend to be marginalized, unemployed, have limited educations and trouble at home. Many are enticed into going to another town in Albania or abroad with a young man who promises to marry them or get them a job. These girls and women discover belatedly that they have been lured into lives as prostitutes.

Thanks to the efforts of CAAHT grantee partners, Albanians living in Puka are becoming increasingly familiarized with the threats of human trafficking.

Bardha and Marion live with their parents and three other sisters 20-minutes from the village center off Puka’s main road. The family home is reached through a rocky path. A small courtyard near the family’s watering well is furnished with two benches. Standing under a canopy of grapevines full of lush purple grapes is the girls’ mother, Dila, who on this day wears a traditional black headscarf, dress and apron.

The scene is reminiscent of another era but one that is ever-present in Albania--a place caught between tradition and the pulls of modernity. Her daughters wear T-shirts and jeans.

“Marion had dropped out,” Dila said. “We had some problems in the neighborhood and decided not to send her to school. I was worried because she is very pretty. Bukurie [Imeri] came and talked to us. We agreed to send her back to school and to send Bardha to Bukurie’s center to take [tailoring] classes. Until Bukurie came, my husband and I did not believe these things were possible.”

With CAAHT’s assistance, In Help of Northern Women of Puka has provided 41 young women with vocational courses in basic computer literacy and tailoring. Eight beneficiaries from these vocational classes now work in a factory including four who moved to Tirana to work in a fabric factory and two who provide tailoring services at home. The program has also sponsored three television debates and a play on the risks of trafficking.

“All of this was accomplished with the project’s help” Imeri said. “Members of the community have approached me and said the televised debates were a good thing because they have daughters and this information is important.”

With more than 40,000 inhabitants, the town of Gjirokastra lies in southeast Albania near the border with Greece, making it an easy transit point for traffickers. With USAID support, the Gjirokastra Community Center (GCC) established the area’s only transit shelter for trafficked victims. Until the GCC opened the Life & Hope Reception Center, trafficked victims placed in the custody of the town’s anti-trafficking police were simply brought to the station.

Often traumatized, victims usually had already spent several days in various police facilities before their arrival in Gjirokastra. For the most part, they had been unable to shower, eat a proper meal and get clean clothes. Until GCC opened its transit shelter, the Gjirokastra police unit was only a slight improvement compared to the border police holding cells.

“The GCC transit shelter opened in March 2006, before this we had nowhere to send these girls. We could not provide the right kind of help for them at the station,” said Armand Lelaj, Gjirokastra chief of anti-trafficking police. “To feed them, officers would buy cookies or bring food from the canteen that they paid for with their own money. In most cases, we could not even complete our interrogations because the victims were not calm.”

Access to the GCC’s transit shelter is one of the most significant benefits of the project’s assistance, Lelaj says.

CAAHT’s coordination efforts in Gjirokastra have also led to the GCC’s signing an agreement with the education department permitting them to conduct awareness raising sessions in schools. An agreement with the employment office has helped the center find jobs for young women trained in its vocational classes.

Olga, 23, is a success story of prevention efforts. She attended GCC’s embroidering course and now makes tablecloths, curtains and sheets that are sold in Greece. Olga left school after the 8 th grade, because family could not pay for her high school education. When Idrizi, GCC’s director, found Olga at her family home, she was unemployed and with no prospects for the future and vulnerable to be coaxed abroad by traffickers.

“If this opportunity had not come along, I would have thought of going somewhere else to look for a job. I thought of going to Greece,” Olga said, seated at a sewing machine and making a tablecloth in GCC’s classroom for training tailoring and embroidering skills.

Through CAAHT, GCC has provided 135 young at-risk women with vocational courses in embroidery, tailoring and hair dressing. Its prevention efforts in local schools have reached 2,800 students.