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Today, we mark Word Day Against Trafficking in Persons. Early the week I attended a Conference on the same. The facts and stats on human suffering are sobering. The Kenya Government is definitely doing its best. However, I get a sense that wasted knowledge and young people require pragmatic beyond asking governments to generate jobs.
No wonder then my article today is radical. While there are many reasons for trafficking in persons, I focus on unemployment as a push factor.
In many traditional African communities, survival was a collective enterprise. Households shared what they had until the next harvest, and during lean seasons, relatives walked long distances to fetch food from their kin. Life was sustained by the community, not merely by the isolated household. Today, as unemployment collides with automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, we might be forced to recover that communal ethos.
The time has come to rethink how paid work is distributed and to move towards a three-day workweek, not as a leisure experiment, but as a strategy for sharing limited economic opportunities more equitably. Sounds weird, right? Scholars such as Bertrand Russel have actually ever argued for shorter working time and more for leisure.
