The International Justice Mission (IJM) Country Director, Anita Budu says her outfit has learnt some lessons from the mistakes associated with their recently organised rescue operation.

The rescue mission in the Northern region of Ghana rather seems to be a camouflage operation to cover child trafficking activities, where children are reportedly taken away from their parents, a recent BBC documentary revealed.

According to IJM’s objectives, the organisation seeks to protect children from abuse by rescuing victims and returning survivors to their families.

But their recent operation has raised eyebrows after a girl revealed in the BBC documentary that she was taken from her family while her mother was held at gunpoint.

Reacting to this, Madam Budu explained that it is a fact that their recent operation did not go perfectly as planned but the organisation has taken note and hopes to improve on subsequent ones.

“What we really pride ourselves on is building good relationship with our government partners, and that includes having dialogue as to what can work better moving forward. So with this, yes of course things did not go 100% to plan but there are lessons to be learnt and would move forward with that. We always look to learn, we always look to grow,” she said on JoyNews’ Newsfile.

Responding to the question of whether or not something actually went wrong in their operation, the country director insisted that they followed due process and that the negative narratives on their operation may be driven by the “human face given to the situation in terms of feelings, emotions and sentiments.”

“We had no wrongdoing in terms of the processes and steps,” she added.

Meanwhile, Madam Budu contended that portions of the BBC documentary have factual and material inaccuracies about their institution's operations.

According to her, the situations covered by BBC Africa Eye’s documentary are more nuanced than they are presented.

“I continue to say that there are factual and material inaccuracies in the documentary that was presented. IJM’s main approach, in seeing the issue of child trafficking and exploitation, I should highlight in Ghana and in other abuses across the world, is to support and strengthen our public justice system in being able to deal with this issue, and this cuts across a broad range of areas,” she explained.

She added that the work of the IJM is in direct tangent with Ghana’s Children’s Act and Human Trafficking Act, thus the impression created by the BBC’s Africa Eye of the organisation being purely target driven at the peril of children and poor families is wrong.

According to her, the agency adhered to the directives of the Social Welfare Department in their operations.