Fighting Human Trafficking in Kenya
Prevention Education, Survivor Protection, and Policy Influence
Sr. Jackline Mwikali Mwongela CJ directs Religious Against Human Trafficking (RAHT), employing sisters and lay community health workers across four Kenyan dioceses in high-trafficking regions.
Sisters personally design and deliver evidence-based prevention curricula in secondary schools, reaching approximately 8,000 girls annually through interactive trafficking-awareness workshops addressing recruitment tactics, safe migration pathways, and economic alternatives.
The project workers conduct intensive home visits in high-risk communities, identifying vulnerable families, assessing trafficking exposure, and referring at-risk girls to education scholarships, economic empowerment schemes, and safe-migration information programmes—personally maintaining follow-up contact with 400+ girls monthly.
Sr. Jackline also coordinates Palermo Protocol implementation (prevention, protection, prosecution pillars), ensuring staff members understand their legal obligations, maintain confidentiality protocols, and document trafficking cases for police referral and prosecution support.
Furthermore, the sisters in Kenya operate two safe houses providing temporary shelter, medical assessment, psychological first aid, and survivor-centred counselling for trafficking survivors—with survivor-advocates themselves often becoming peer counsellors within RAHT teams, creating survivor-informed service models.
Through the broader ARISE church initiative active in nineteen diocesan regions, diocesan lay workers and community health volunteers can be trained, creating cascading and sustainable prevention networks across 190 parishes.
The CJ in Kenya conducts rights-awareness training with women’s savings groups and informal economic associations, teaching negotiation skills, safe employment practices, and collective advocacy strategies. Sr. Jackline personally represents RAHT at government coordination forums, presenting trafficking evidence to inform district-level policy priorities and government resource allocation toward prevention infrastructure. The integrated service model, combining school-based prevention, community outreach, survivor protection, and policy advocacy, positions RAHT as a survivor-centred, evidence-driven, prevention-focused intervention across Kenya’s trafficking hotspots.
We recognise trafficking as interconnected with systemic poverty, gender inequality, inadequate education access, and discriminatory migration policies.
As Mary Ward women, we aim to further Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC) in a specific Mary Ward way – that is, in accordance with the charism of the Just Soul and its defining virtues of freedom, justice, sincerity and felicity which speak so powerfully to issues of JPIC and their integral nature in all aspects of mission and ministry.
We are working in different areas and projects – not out of ourselves, but because we allow ourselves to be sent by God. We form our sisters to be mobile and available, willing to go wherever they are sent. We expect them to strive, like Mary Ward, to have that inner freedom to respond to the call to leave all and follow Christ with passion and compassion.
