At a policy dialogue hosted by the University of Dar Es Salaam’s College of Social Sciences on Tuesday, 7 October 2025, Dr Gabriel Lubale, Coordinator at the Kenya Institute of Migration Studies, presented a thought-provoking paper titled “Trafficking in Human Beings and Smuggling of Migrants in East and Horn of Africa and Great Lakes Countries: Challenges and Ways Forward in Kenya.” His presentation offered a sobering reflection on how trafficking and smuggling have evolved into defining features of East Africa’s migration landscape, and how, beneath the statistics and rhetoric, they reveal the deeper fault lines of governance across the region.
The East and Horn of Africa sit at the crossroads of movement, of workers, traders, refugees, and students, yet remain burdened by the contradiction of being both deeply mobile and tightly controlled. Kenya embodies this paradox as a source, transit, and destination country. Its experience exposes how weak migration governance, economic inequalities, and inadequate protection systems combine to create the conditions in which exploitation thrives.
Trafficking and smuggling are not isolated crimes, they are mirrors of governance failure, reflecting how inequality, restrictive mobility regimes, and weak coordination create spaces for exploitation to thrive.
Data from the UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons (2024) show that traffickers in Eastern Africa increasingly rely on digital platforms for recruitment and coordination. What begins as a promise of opportunity quickly transforms into coercion through debt, deception, or document confiscation. The IOM’s From Evidence to Action report confirms that almost half of child trafficking cases occur within national borders, challenging the long-held perception that trafficking is primarily international. These findings make clear that criminal networks adapt faster than policy, exploiting digital connectivity and governance blind spots in equal measure.
Kenya’s legal frameworks, notably the Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act (2010), were among the first in the region to codify protection and prosecution standards. Yet, as reflected in the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report (2024),implementation gaps persist. Victim support services remain limited, coordination across agencies inconsistent, and political momentum uneven. The problem is not an absence of commitment but a failure to convert legislative ambition into institutional capacity. The gap between what the law promises and what victims experience is the true measure of progress.
This gap widens when regional coordination is weak. The UNHCR Regional Update (2024) estimates that the East and Horn of Africa host over 26 million forcibly displaced people. Displacement heightens exposure to trafficking, yet national protection systems often stop at the border. Regional frameworks such as the Khartoum Process and the AU Horn of Africa Initiative were designed to bridge this divide, but cooperation remains patchy. Different legal definitions of trafficking, varying enforcement capacities, and competing political priorities make it difficult to sustain shared accountability. As a result, traffickers exploit jurisdictional gaps more effectively than states collaborate to close them.
Gender is another layer of complexity that cannot be treated as a side note. The IOM–UNICEF–Save the Children Joint Statement (2024) warns of the “silent normalisation of exploitation,” where women and girls are trafficked into domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, or forced marriage under the guise of employment or marriage arrangements. Without trauma-informed, survivor-centred responses, including safe shelters and psychosocial support, anti-trafficking efforts risk entrenching gender hierarchies instead of dismantling them.
Environmental stressors deepen these vulnerabilities. The IOM East and Horn of Africa Situation Report links droughts, floods, and declining livelihoods to rising susceptibility to exploitation. As climate change accelerates displacement, trafficking increasingly intersects with environmental insecurity. Families who lose livelihoods are more likely to send members away in search of income, often through irregular routes that expose them to abuse. Thus, prevention cannot rely solely on border policing; it must include investments in climate resilience, education, and social protection that address the structural precursors of exploitation.
Despite this multidimensional reality, the regional response remains disproportionately security-driven. Law enforcement crackdowns, increased border surveillance, and periodic deportations are visible and politically attractive, yet they rarely touch the root of the problem. A narrow focus on criminalisation can even reproduce harm when victims are detained or deported as irregular migrants. A governance-centred approach would start elsewhere — with prevention, data-sharing, and rights protection as equal priorities to enforcement.
Law enforcement can catch traffickers, but only governance can prevent trafficking. Until mobility systems become rights-based and regional in scope, the cycle of exploitation will persist.
The lack of credible, comparable data compounds every other challenge. Without it, policy is reactive and donor interventions scattershot. The UNODC Observatory on Smuggling of Migrants demonstrates how data transparency enables coordinated responses. Think tanks and research institutes such as OLAM Africa can fill this evidence gap by generating grounded, interdisciplinary analyses that connect trafficking patterns to economic governance, digitalisation, and climate pressures. Evidence is political power, it determines whose suffering becomes visible and whose remains undocumented.
Reframing trafficking as a governance challenge shifts the emphasis from charity to accountability. The persistence of exploitation reflects the weakness of systems meant to regulate labour, protect rights, and facilitate safe mobility. When regular migration channels are narrow and economic inequality deepens, the market for smugglers and traffickers expands. Treating trafficking as a humanitarian emergency risks perpetuating short-term rescue operations while leaving intact the structures that make exploitation profitable.
The lesson emerging from Kenya and its neighbours is that the region’s most urgent task is not only to punish traffickers but to govern mobility differently. That means strengthening labour pathways, harmonising legal definitions, ensuring survivor-centred justice, and linking migration management with climate and economic policy. These are governance reforms, not policing strategies.
The real task is not to punish traffickers more harshly but to govern mobility differently, with accountability, regional solidarity, and evidence at the heart of every policy decision.
Ultimately, trafficking and smuggling mirror the broader state of governance in Africa, revealing where protection fails, where opportunity is unequal, and where policy remains reactive. If migration continues to be managed through fear and fragmentation, trafficking will persist in the shadows. But if governments and regional bodies commit to evidence-based, rights-driven cooperation, the same mobility networks that now enable exploitation could become pathways of resilience and connection.
