Generation Aware!

Youth and Trafficking in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda
With 58% of Kenyans and Tanzanians earning less than $2 per day, and 82% of Ugandans earning less than $1 per day, East Africans are amongst the poorest in the world. The poverty that so many East Africans are faced with makes access to education, health care, and decent work opportunities a luxury that most cannot afford. The absence of these basic services creates an environment dangerously conducive to the trafficking of youth. Unfortunately, there is very little information provided to young people on how to protect themselves against human trafficking.

Young people in our selected target regions are particularly vulnerable due to recent conflicts, extreme poverty, and the effects of HIV/AIDS on the family structure. Many young women do not attend school because they must work to support their families. They are easy targets to traffickers who offer them employment and a seemingly easy way out of poverty for themselves and their families. HIV/AIDS affects over 25% of all families in the target regions, so many families are now single-parent households, and many young people have been orphaned. They lack the family networks to support them or help them make positive life decisions. Many migrate and are eventually forced into prostitution when other job opportunities do not materialize. While there is little current statistical data about the trafficking of young people from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, it is clear that young people are at risk.

Traffickers prey on young people’s lack of knowledge about modern day slavery. Young people, desperate for new opportunities, are easily recruited by false job offers of waiting tables, hosting, or cleaning in seaside resorts or wealthy homes, where they are actually forced into sexual slavery or domestic servitude.

Generation Aware Empowers Youth to Combat Human Trafficking
Generation Aware! , a project of FAIR Fund, aims to empower youth educators in select towns in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to lead awareness campaigns and engage their friends and families in activism against human trafficking. Generation Aware! focuses on drawing from the actual experiences and feelings of young people towards working abroad, migration, and their dreams for a better future to create a campaign that is both evidence-based and community centered.

In Summer 2005, youth advocates and FAIR Fund staff interviewed 65 youth and women’s organizations in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to determine if they believe young people in their communities are being trafficked and how they are assisting these young people. The majority of these organizations, who inevitably were coming into contact with potential and actual trafficking victims, reported that they did not feel adequately prepared to identify trafficking victims.

Moving Forward
To address this problem, Generation Aware! intends on providing such organizations with the necessary training to identify and assist anyone who has been trafficked, or is at-risk for being trafficked. Additionally the project will train other community leaders, such as nurses, lawyers, and teachers, to create a powerful referral network available to anyone in need of assistance.

Most importantly, like all of FAIR Fund’s programs, Generation Aware! firmly believes that those who are most affected by the perils of trafficking are the very ones who should have the strongest voice in fighting it. Each phase of our project is structured so that it adheres to the experiences, ideas, and aspirations of the young people living in our target communities. Creating youth ownership of the project is an instrumental way to ensure that future generations are empowered to address any of the injustices that face them and their communities.

This spring, FAIR Fund and young women advocates from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda will interview 300 young people living in major cities to determine their attitudes and risks toward human trafficking. In order to truly capture youth experiences, we will interview youth living on the streets, working in families, attending school or university, or living in shelters. This information will provide the platform for creating a young women-led campaign to prevent the trafficking of youth.