By Rogers Tulyahabwe
Refugee Week 2026, which closed this past Sunday, carried the theme of courage. Its organizers meant it as an act of recognition and acknowledgment of the bravery it takes to flee persecution, cross unknown borders, learn foreign languages, and rebuild a life from the wreckage of what forced departure leaves behind.
The intention is generous, but courage, as a frame for how the world talks about refugees and displaced migrants, asks us to admire endurance while barely interrogating the conditions that make such endurance necessary.
This year’s Refugee Week also marked the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention – the foundational legal instrument affirming that those forced to flee deserve protection, dignity, and the right not to be returned to places where their lives are at risk.
The Convention’s anniversary deserves genuine acknowledgment as it has, in concrete terms, saved lives. But 75 years is also time enough to notice what the Convention did not prevent. At the end of 2024, more than 120 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, and human rights violations.
The protection framework designed to respond to this reality has never faced such a scale of demand, and the criminal networks that prey on displaced people have not been idle in this struggle.
The connection between forced displacement and human trafficking is structural. When a person flees, whether across an international border into formal refugee status or as an internally displaced person navigating their own country’s disorder, they are typically severed from the social and legal networks that protect most people from exploitation.
They often lack documentation, may not speak the language of the country or region where they arrive, often economically destitute, dependent on whatever work presents itself, and may be travelling without family or community support especially children and young women.
These are precisely the vulnerability factors that trafficking networks identify and exploit. According to the International Labour Organization, international migrants constitute 15 per cent of all adults in forced labour exploitation, and migrant workers are more than three times more likely to be in forced labour than non-migrant workers.
That disproportion does not reflect anything about migrants’ character or judgment, but the legal and social conditions into which displacement deposits them.
The scale of the exploitation is not incidental to global economics; it is embedded in them. There were 27.6 million people engaged in forced labour on any given day in 2021, generating illegal profits of US$236 billion annually, a figure that rose 37 per cent since 2014.
These profits are not generated by chance encounters between vulnerable people and opportunistic criminals, they are generated by organized systems that track displacement crises, identify staging points along migration routes, and insert fraudulent job offers, false promises of resettlement assistance, and debt bondage arrangements precisely where desperate people are most likely to encounter them.
The UNODC’s 2024 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons recorded a 25 per cent increase in detected trafficking victims in 2022 compared to pre-pandemic 2019 figures, with child trafficking, forced labour, and forced criminality all rising as poverty, conflict, and climate change continue to produce the conditions of exposure.
For East Africa, a region that holds some of the world’s largest concentrations of displaced people and functions simultaneously as a source, transit, and destination zone for trafficking, the convergence of these two crises is not a theoretical concern. Uganda hosts one of the largest refugee populations on the continent, drawing primarily from South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Burundi.
The same porous borders and overstretched humanitarian infrastructure that complicate refugee registration and protection also complicate the identification and recovery of trafficking victims.
The Gulf labour migration corridor, which draws Ugandan workers with promises of domestic and service employment abroad, produces a documented and recurring pattern of abuse.
Trafficking networks operating along that corridor have specifically targeted young women from economically marginalised communities, especially communities that overlap heavily with refugee and internally displaced populations.
The courage those women are asked to embody exists because the systems designed to protect them do not.
What the courage narrative gets right is that something real is being acknowledged: survival under conditions of forced displacement demands extraordinary psychological and physical resource. What it gets wrong is the implicit suggestion that courage should be the appropriate response to those conditions.
Courage is what a person reaches for when institutions have failed them, not a substitute for those institutions functioning.
The 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention is a reasonable moment to ask not how admirable refugees are for enduring what they endure, but how durable the systems designed to protect them actually are in the face of criminal networks that have spent decades exploiting the gaps.
In Uganda’s case, the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development administers a licensing regime for recruitment agencies that has demonstrably failed to prevent workers, including refugees seeking labour migration as an economic lifeline, from being channeled into exploitative employment abroad.
The Employment Amendment Act 2025 introduced new protections for migrant workers, but protections on paper has always unusually constituted protection in practice when inspection capacity is weak, when delicensed agencies continue to operate informally, and when bilateral agreements with destination countries still lack enforceable worker protection clauses.
The Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act and the institutional mandate of COPTIP created a prosecution framework, but shelter infrastructure for survivors remains critically underfunded and systematic identification of trafficking victims within refugee settlement sites remains inconsistent.
The call from this week, then, should not be a general appeal to welcome and solidarity but a specific demand to fully resource the implementation of the Employment Amendment Act 2025, conduct transparent public audits of licensed and recently delicensed recruitment agencies operating on Gulf migration corridors, and allocate dedicated trafficking identification and referral capacity within refugee settlement sites where the overlap between displacement vulnerability and trafficking exposure is high. Refugee Week celebrates courage, but what displaced people actually need is a functional system that makes courage unnecessary because the institutions are doing their job.
The writer Rogers Tulyahabwe is an anti-trafficking and safe migration advocate. He is reachable at +256 754 145375
