Women arrested during a raid at Nyali Police Station in Mombasa in 2023. They were allegedly part of an international human trafficking syndicate.
India and Thailand are emerging as significant hubs for trafficking, presenting a growing challenge for authorities.
These regions are now central to illicit networks, raising concerns about the scale and complexity of the operations involved, the government said.
Director Welfare and Rights division Emma Gicheha at the State Department of Diaspora Affairs acknowledged the pressing nature of this issue, describing it as a “headache” that demands immediate and comprehensive intervention.
“Thailand is one of the headaches as a government now,” she said. “The other destination that I noted in my report includes human trafficking in India. We are helping a number who are being trafficked to India.”
“Many of our people are stuck there,” Ms Gicheha said, adding that she has been able to observe an increase in the trend of human trafficking in those nations.
At the same time, the government noted that a lack of adequate information was leading to the skyrocketing number of victims in these nations.
Rescue missions in Myanmar have to be calculated, she explained, because it could turn deadly if anything goes wrong.
“The mention of Myanmar should make your heart shake,” she said.
As for India, she said, “Please tell your relatives there are no jobs in India. If you find yourself in India, you really end up doing prostitution work. Not in your will, but [out of] coercion. On a daily basis, we are helping people arriving from India. They travel on tourist visas [and] have been promised jobs but once they arrive there.”
She was speaking Friday during the launch of Network Against Human Trafficking and Smuggling of Migrants (Nahusom-Kenya), an umbrella network of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) working towards the eradication of trafficking in persons and the smuggling of migrants.
This comes at a time the government is venturing in a vast labour mobility initiative. The government is in an overdrive of exporting labour overseas.
President William Ruto has always touted jobs abroad, in Germany and most recently, the government recruited for jobs in Riyadh.
The Executive Director and founder of Candle of Hope Foundation Nimo Ali said the consortium of CSOs said this is the beginning “for us to really have a collective voice in terms of eradicating human trafficking in Kenya where everyone is feeling free.”
Nahusom Ambassador and founder of Centre for Domestic Training and Development Edith Murogo said the consortium is born out of the need for civil society organisations that work on trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants to come together and work as a collective so that we can be able to serve victims of trafficking and other crimes against humanity, including smuggling of migrants.
“This is an attempt for us all to come together and to be able to offer components of services to survivors of these heinous crimes. In the long term, we hope to achieve a really well-coordinated mechanism of providing urgent services to victims because that is what is working,” Ms Murogo said.
