Sarah Adeyinka

Dr. Sarah Adeyinka is the founder and board chair of CoCreate VZW (Belgium) and Cocreate Humanitarian Aid Foundation (Nigeria). She is also affiliated with Ghent University she earned her PhD in Educational Sciences as a volunteer post-doctoral researcher. She has been active in the field of humanitarian aid for over 16 years, with a focus on people in vulnerable situations including refugees, asylum seekers, people working in the sex industry, and survivors of human trafficking for sexual exploitation. She also worked on board two rescue vessels operated by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) involved in the rescue of migrants at sea on the Central Mediterranean route.

At Ghent University, she was part of the European Research Commission-funded ChildMove Project and conducted research on the impact of transit experiences on the wellbeing on unaccompanied minors. Her part of the project focused on young, female, Nigerians who were trafficked into Italy for sexual exploitation, and were seeing asylum. Alongside her colleague, Sophie Samyn, she conducted this ethnographic study on the wellbeing of Nigerian and Ghanaian women working in prostitution in the Schaerbeek municipality of Brussels which resulted in the book publication by Routledge.