Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center Demands AI Trafficking Protections for Tanzanian Women
Dodoma | June 2026: The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center today calls on the Government of Tanzania to establish an enforceable legal and policy framework governing the use of artificial intelligence within its territory, with explicit and urgent provisions to protect Tanzanian women from AI-facilitated recruitment into trafficking. The Center further calls on technology companies operating social media and digital messaging platforms in Tanzania to implement proactive detection and disruption of AI-generated fraudulent employment content targeting Tanzanian users, and to cooperate actively with Tanzanian authorities to identify and remove trafficking recruitment infrastructure from their platforms.
The United States Department of State published a formal fact sheet on 17 April 2026, issued alongside its 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report, titled The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Trafficking in Persons. That document confirms that traffickers are increasingly weaponising artificial intelligence to enhance their recruitment operations, using translation tools to craft culturally tailored messages in victims’ own languages and deploying those messages through social media platforms to execute sophisticated deception across different countries and cultures. The State Department further documents that AI systems are being deployed to automate the grooming of potential victims via chatbots employing natural language processing and sentiment analysis, and that such capabilities provide traffickers with an unprecedented capacity to identify individual vulnerabilities and develop tailored exploitation strategies at scale.
The same 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report documents that traffickers increasingly use social media and online technology to recruit Tanzanian nationals through fraudulent job postings and digital advertisements, employing initial payment for travel documents, accommodation, and transportation to bind victims through debt-based coercion abroad. The report identifies Tanzanians from rural areas, including those from the island of Pemba, as particularly vulnerable to these schemes. It further confirms that traffickers increasingly transit Tanzanian women through Zanzibar to the Middle East, including Oman and the United Arab Emirates, where they are subsequently exploited in domestic servitude. The deployment of artificial intelligence in recruitment directly amplifies this documented pipeline: the same tools that generate culturally precise, language-matched fraudulent employment offers accelerate and expand the recruitment of Tanzanian women into these trafficking routes.
Tanzania’s own Parliament acknowledged in May 2025 that no law or policy governing artificial intelligence exists within the country. Fatuma Toufiq, Chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Welfare and Development, stated during a session of the National Assembly in Dodoma that there is no law or policy governing artificial intelligence, no guidance on how it should operate or be supervised, and that the purpose of establishing such a framework must be to protect those vulnerable to its adverse effects. That statement predated the United States government’s formal documentation that artificial intelligence is actively deployed in the recruitment of trafficking victims. The legislative gap it identified has not since been remedied. Tanzania remains without the governance framework required to address an exploitation methodology that the State Department has now confirmed as an operational and growing threat.
Saad Kassis-Mohamed, Chairman of the Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center, stated: “The tools used to recruit trafficking victims are no longer crude. They are AI-generated, culturally calibrated, and linguistically precise. A Tanzanian woman in a rural area receives what appears to be a credible employment offer in her own language, produced by an automated system specifically designed to identify and exploit vulnerability. Tanzania’s Parliament stated in May 2025 that no law and no policy governing artificial intelligence exists in the country. The United States government confirmed six weeks ago, in a formal policy document, that AI is being actively used to recruit trafficking victims. The obligation to act falls upon the Government of Tanzania and upon the technology companies whose platforms carry these messages into Tanzanian homes.”
“Tanzania’s Parliament acknowledged in May 2025 that no law or policy governing artificial intelligence exists within the country. The United States government has since confirmed, in a formal policy document, that AI is being actively deployed to recruit trafficking victims. These two facts define the obligation: Tanzania must act, and the technology companies whose platforms enable this recruitment must act with it. The window for treating this as an emerging risk has already closed.”
The Center calls specifically on the Government of Tanzania to introduce, as a matter of urgency, a legal and policy framework governing the use of artificial intelligence within Tanzania, with explicit protections for vulnerable populations including women at risk of trafficking; to mandate that technology companies operating platforms in Tanzania implement proactive detection and removal of AI-generated trafficking recruitment content; to establish a national reporting mechanism through which Tanzanian citizens may flag suspected AI-generated fraudulent employment content; and to engage the relevant United Nations mechanisms, including the Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, in developing a governance framework adequate to the documented and growing threat.
The Center further calls on technology companies providing social media and messaging platforms operating in Tanzania to implement detection systems capable of identifying AI-generated fraudulent recruitment content directed at Tanzanian users; to commit publicly to proactive cooperation with Tanzanian authorities in the identification and removal of trafficking recruitment material; to publish transparent reporting on the prevalence of AI-generated fraudulent employment content targeting users in Tanzania and comparable markets; and to ensure that their platforms do not function as the primary infrastructure through which trafficking recruiters reach Tanzanian women.
The Saad Kassis-Mohamed Center is an initiative of the WeCare Foundation, Cape Town, active across Africa, South Asia, and the Gulf region. The Center works to protect the human rights of individuals facing unjust detention, denial of medical care, and due process violations, and engages directly with United Nations mechanisms to advocate on their behalf. For more information, visit wcrfoundation.com/human-rights-association.
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