A young girl, almost as soon as she is old enough to walk, goes out to work in the fields with her mother and sibling. It is unrelentingly hot and the work is grindingly monotonous. In tilling and hoeing a small patch of unforgiving land, the family expend more calories than they will ever gain back from any produce they manage to grow. There is nothing left over to sell. A few years later, the two girls are teenagers. A man turns up in a people carrier. He offers them a free ride to Europe. Not ­surprisingly, they go.

This happens every day in Edo State in southern Nigeria. The youngsters end up in London or other cities in Europe and the Middle East.