Prostitution in Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) is legal, but associated activities, such as soliciting, pandering or running brothels, are illegal.
[9][10] Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, a form of institutional prostitution known as abrakree was prominent among the Southwest Akan of the Gold and Ivory Coasts.
[18] Aggressive public outreach campaigns and education interventions targeted key high-risk populations, such as sex workers, which brought the infection rate down to 40% in 1998.
[18] Continued campaigns, education, condom distribution and access to better health care brought the HIV prevalence amongst sex workers down to 26.6% in 2011,[19] and 11% in 2016.
[20] Ivory Coast is a source, transit, and destination country for women and children subjected to sex trafficking.
Ivorian women and girls are primarily subjected to forced labor in domestic service and restaurants in Côte d'Ivoire but are also exploited in sex trafficking.
A lack of comprehensive data on trafficking in Côte d'Ivoire renders the full scope of the problem unknown.