The Solidarity Center and its partners in Kenya are fighting child trafficking and forced labor on agricultural plantations, in the fishing industry, and in domestic work.

A girl on a coffee plantation reaches for a ripe berry. © R. Romano, Stolen Childhoods

Poverty is the driving force behind child labor in Kenya, where more than half of all Kenyans earn $17 to $36 per month—below the poverty line. In some households, parents or guardians coerce children into leaving school and going to work in order to put food on the family table. Other households are headed by children who have lost their parents to AIDS; these children must work to survive. Altogether, nearly 2 million children in Kenya, some as young as five years old, are workers.

An estimated 30 to 40 percent of Kenyan agricultural workers are children. Some fall prey to traffickers. They end up on coffee, tea, sugarcane, and sisal plantations, working long hours in extreme weather conditions, at risk of serious injury from dangerous machinery, insect and snake bites, and the long-term effects of the chemical products they handle.

Children also are trafficked to work in the fishing industry. They may carry bags of ice from trucks to the water’s edge where the fish is packed and stored. Sometimes they are hired to help out crew members. Sometimes they stand on the pier and hawk other products.

Many Kenyan children leave their homes to live with relatives who promise them a better life and an opportunity for a good education. Instead, they are forced into domestic work, laboring from sunup to sundown for only the promise of meager wages.

Through programs supported by organizations such as the Solidarity Center and the International Labor Organization – International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor, child labor and trafficking on unionized plantations — where owners are members of the Federation of Kenyan Employers and where a negotiated collective bargaining agreement is in place — have almost been eliminated. In the latest alarming trend, however, employers subcontract to other firms that then hire child laborers or traffic children from other locations for work.

The Solidarity Center has undertaken an ambitious program to stop child trafficking in Kenya. In partnership with the Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union and the Kenya Sugar Plantation Workers Union, as well as community organizations, local governments, and employer associations, the Solidarity Center aims to raise awareness about child trafficking, create incentives for parents to keep children in school, develop a cadre of shop stewards as peer educators and monitors, and help ensure that workplace policies do not enable or condone child trafficking.