Distribute jobs by working less days a week

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.

Unemployment leading to idleness is deeply rooted in our agrarian foundation. Much of Africa’s livelihood base remains agricultural, yet the sector is poorly serviced and structurally neglected. Agriculture accounted for nearly 60 per cent of youth employment in sub-Saharan Africa in 2021. Weak services, costly inputs, poor storage and fragile markets leave smallholders exposed. In some markets, competition from cheap or subsidized food imports further depresses their returns. Many smallholders are therefore merely surviving from season to season. When rural agriculture cannot sustain livelihoods, pressure on urban job markets becomes overwhelming.

Yet urban economies cannot absorb this pressure. Kenya’s latest employment figures expose the depth of the problem. The Economic Survey 2026 reports that the country generated 822,100 jobs in 2025. However, 716,800 of them, or 87.2 per cent, were in the informal sector; only 105,300 were created in the modern sector. These jobs have no predictable earnings, social protection or enforceable rights.

The continental picture is equally sobering. The International Labour Organization reports that 53 million young people in sub-Saharan Africa were not in employment, education or training in 2023. Nearly three in four workers aged 25–29 were in insecure forms of work, while regular wage-paying jobs protected by labour standards remained the exception. The ILO also estimates that the region’s youth labour force will grow cumulatively by 72.6 million between 2023 and 2050.This is a failure to create enough productive, dignified jobs.

Our universities continue producing graduates for economies unable to absorb their knowledge. In low-income countries, the unemployment rate among young people with advanced education was 21 per cent in 2023. Mega-corruption makes the situation worse, as money that should finance manufacturing, research and public services is diverted into private hands.

Desperation consequently pushes many Africans towards labour migration. A 2025 ILO assessment of the Kenya–Gulf migration corridor identified high recruitment costs, contract substitution, abuse and inadequate regulation of private employment agencies.

Technology now sharpens this dilemma. AI, robotics and automation allow firms to produce more with fewer human labour hours. Under free-market logic, businesses are rewarded for lowering costs and increasing profits not for retaining workers whose tasks a machine can perform more cheaply. Expecting corporations voluntarily to preserve unnecessary positions is therefore is proving a tall order.

If technology reduces the human time required to produce goods and services, its dividend should be shared time, not mass exclusion.

My proposal: create a three-day workweek to distribute available work among more people. Essential services like hospitals, schools, farms and factories would require staggered teams and additional hiring. The objective is the conversion of productivity into more jobs and more humane schedules.

Labour law would have to redefine full-time work, overtime, benefits and social insurance. Wage protection would be indispensable. We cannot simply cut already inadequate monthly wages by forty per cent. This transition must be supported by stronger minimum-income guarantees and taxation that captures part of the productivity gains generated by automation.