Kenya has placed officers at airports to verify migrant workers' documents and check that sending companies are registered. At the Freedom from Slavery Global Forum in Nairobi, Jackline Mwende of Free the Slaves argued the policy could produce exactly the profile traffickers hunt: undocumented, broke, and carrying an expired permit.

Key takeaways

Kenya's stated position is one of increased vigilance. In Mwende's account, officers have been posted at the airport alongside the National Employment Authority. When a traveller says they are going abroad to work, officials check whether the relevant papers are in order and whether the company sending them is registered and visible on government systems.

Mwende does not dispute this is happening. She disputes what it achieves. Her argument begins with a concession: government made a mistake, it hurt people, but officials came back, engaged, and told people to go and register.

And that, in her telling, is precisely the danger.

Her reasoning is about how traffickers select targets. In her account, a trafficker wants a person who is vulnerable, who lacks documents, who lacks money, and who lacks a valid permit. That person, she argues, is the ideal target.

Now apply a rule that says an undocumented person can regularise their status by returning to their country of origin. That person becomes someone whose presence is illegal, whose status is negotiable, and whose dealings with officials require a favour. She describes officials telling people that if they want their documents released, they should go back, and do this or that.

Mwende draws a direct line from that arrangement to harm. She refers to South Africa, saying something similar happened there, and argues that actions of this kind damage migrants, because receiving migrants and leaving them vulnerable to trafficking is the outcome that follows.

The sharpest part of her account concerns time. She describes a person who travels on a three-month permit. By the fourth month, that person is now in violation in that country, and anything can happen to them: detention related to employment, detention related to immigration, and in the worst cases, removal of organs.

She closes that sequence bluntly. If you are not registered and you are not recognised by the government, you are very vulnerable.

A permit, in this telling, is not a protection with an expiry date attached. It is a countdown that converts a documented worker into an undocumented one, and an undocumented person into someone whose exploitation carries lower risk for whoever exploits them. She returns to the point several times, and at one stage simply says there is no end to it.

Asked what the remedy is, Mwende moves away from victims entirely and towards recruitment. Her argument is that the root problem is not the failure to extract someone from a situation, but the question of why that person went there in the first place, and what route they took. If more people are rescued each year while the same pipeline keeps producing new cases, the response is missing something.

She describes what that pipeline looks like from the inside. Communities do not receive information. A person is told there is work in another country, and there is a checklist of what to expect and what to ask. In Kenya, she says, people largely receive a single message on WhatsApp telling them there is a job in Dubai. They are asked questions. Someone looks for their passport. They travel, or they do not even know what work they will be doing when they arrive, only that they are going.

They land, and they are somewhere else. Saudi Arabia, another country, Europe. Doing different work than the one they were promised, or not knowing what it is at all.

Mwende's conclusion is about coordination rather than enforcement. No single organisation can do this, she argues, government cannot do it alone, and civil society cannot do it alone. This requires people to work together.

She names the constituencies in the room: government, partners, people who were formerly trafficked, prosecutors, media, and many others. She describes the forum itself as a convening, a place where people discuss the way forward, and where decision makers are present.

On country responsibility, she makes a point that sits awkwardly with a national framing. Kenya has to engage the countries where its own people end up, because the problem is not only Kenya's to answer. She names the UN agencies present, including the International Organization for Migration, and the work they do on rescue.

She closes on two positives. Government has genuinely become more vigilant, she says, and survivors have been brought in, with a survivors' organisation registered under the Ministry of Labour that officials consult rather than merely inform. Kenya recently joined the international coalition Alliance 8.7, in her account.

What is Kenya's airport check? In Mwende's account, officers working with the National Employment Authority check the documents of travellers saying they are going abroad to work, and verify that the company sending them is registered and listed on government systems.

Why does she consider the check harmful? She argues that telling an undocumented person to return to their country in exchange for documents leaves them in an irregular position, and that this is the profile traffickers look for: no papers, no money, no valid permit.

What happens after a permit expires? Someone travelling on a three-month permit becomes vulnerable once that period lapses. Mwende describes detention for employment or immigration offences, and organ removal, as outcomes she is concerned about.

What is her proposed solution? Prevention at the point of recruitment. She wants communities informed, and travellers able to check what they have been given and what they have been told before they go.

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