Allan Olingo
Last Tuesday, marked the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. In recent years, progress has been made in combating human trafficking — according to the 2022 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the number of victims of trafficking detected at the global level decreased by 11 percent.
But Edith Murogo, who was honored last month by the U.S. State Department with the 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report Heroes Award, says that under the surface, poverty, conflict and the effects of climate change are in fact making even more women and girls vulnerable to traffickers in East Africa.
Murogo, whose Nairobi-based nonprofit Centre for Domestic Training and Development is credited with transforming Kenya’s approach to combating human trafficking of women, spoke to The Fuller Project about how the fight in Africa is becoming more complicated as the increasing sophistication of modern technology becomes a “double-edged sword”.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You have been at the center of the fight against trafficking in women and girls in Kenya and East Africa for more than two decades. How have trends in trafficking changed during this time?
Previously, the profile of trafficked women in East Africa was those from within refugee communities and from countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Ethiopia and South Sudan. They were trafficked within East Africa for forced labor and sexual exploitation.
But this is changing. Because of economic hardship in all the countries, every woman is at risk. The evolution of labor trafficking from simple exploitation to debt bondage, as seen in the plight of domestic workers in the [Persian] Gulf, shows how the trafficking trend has changed and become more complex.
We have also seen an increased use of technology and social networks to recruit and traffic these women. They are identified and lured through closed groups, as opposed to the previous approach of physically targeting the vulnerable.
Governments across East Africa have stepped in to stop the trafficking of people, especially workers, under the guise of labor migration. Are they doing enough?
They can do better.
Firstly, we need countries to sign labor pacts with Middle Eastern partners so that they can formalize this labor migration. This will put systems in place to ensure that women are not trafficked under the guise of exporting labor.
Secondly, we need to see a push from them on the problematic Kafala systems under which [many people] are brought to work in the Gulf. As it is, most, if not all, migrant workers must be sponsored by their in-country employer to obtain a visa and legal status. In most cases, they end up in a form of forced labor or are trafficked elsewhere under the debt bondage system.
We have been saying for years that this system is open to abuse.
Are there other countries outside the Gulf that are becoming a concern for trafficking?
Indeed, we have seen that Thailand, Myanmar and Egypt are increasingly becoming destination countries for trafficked women from the East African region. Their rise has largely been driven by the negative reputation of the Gulf countries, particularly in terms of the treatment of African workers.
But it’s also [spurred] by the stringent measures that some state actors, such as Kenya, have put in place before approving the export of labor. This has led to a shift of agents to countries that don’t have labor pacts with East Africa.
We have also seen the rise of cyber criminals who lure women from East Africa to countries like Thailand for domestic and tourism work, only to send them to Myanmar to commit cyber fraud in cyber slavery camps.
You say technology is becoming “a double-edged sword”?
Technology is a double-edged sword because it provides the fertile ground where traffickers can ensnare their victims, while also affording authorities and activists tools and systems to track criminals.
Over the years, we have seen traffickers in East Africa develop different schemes to exploit individuals using digital tools to groom, deceive, control and exploit victims. When analyzing victims’ accounts, we find that most perpetrators use social media, online advertisements, websites, dating apps and gaming platforms to hide their identity through fake accounts and profiles to coerce, groom and maintain their targets.
For us, the opacity of new online tools, including anonymization tools or software, is one of the main challenges that has made it increasingly difficult to act quickly enough to effectively combat technology-facilitated trafficking.
Finally, there seems to be increasing cases of Asian women and girls being trafficked to Africa. Do you have a case you have handled recently of reverse trafficking that stands out?
Yes we do. In 2022, we sent back home a young dentist from India who had been lured into Kenya under the pretext of an arranged marriage, only to fall into the infamous trap of the Mujra Bollywood-style dance bars in Kenya.
We worked closely with authorities in rescuing her, putting her in a safe house and eventually sending her back home.
