Cyber-Enabled Wildlife Trade in Central African Countries and Nigeria

By Amy Woolloff, Sone Nkoke, Louisa Musing, Magdalena S. Svensson

A TRAFFIC survey of seventy-two online platforms found a staggering 1,267 CITES*-listed species for sale in Central African countries and Nigeria between March 2018 and January 2021. In delivering these findings to the governments of the countries involved, TRAFFIC seeks to bolster national legislation to regulate these online sales when these do not comply with CITES regulations, which might be jeopardising populations of already threatened species. Threatened African species are facing an increasing peril from an unregulated and illegal cyber-enabled wildlife trade in Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Gabon, and Nigeria. These countries have a higher rate of growth in internet users than the global average, so it is likely that the volumes of online trade in CITES-listed species will increase as internet penetration rates continue to rise.

Cambridge, UK: TRAFFIC, 2022. 54p.