According to a recent report by Amnesty International, Kenyan women employed as domestic helpers in Saudi Arabia face harsh, violent, and discriminatory working circumstances that frequently equate to forced labour and human trafficking.
The report emphasizes how employers, sometimes motivated by bigotry, subjected women to terrible exploitation in private homes and how Saudi Arabia’s labour legislation and other modest changes still do not apply to domestic workers. More than 70 women who have served as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia are profiled in the report “Locked in, left out: the hidden lives of Kenyan domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.”
Recruiters in Kenya frequently misled them about the nature of their employment, and once they arrived in Saudi Arabia, they were forced to labour in appalling circumstances, frequently putting in over 16 hours a day, being denied vacation days, and never being allowed to leave the house. In addition, the ladies endured terrible living conditions and cruel treatment, including physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. Usually, employers seized their phones and passports and occasionally refused to pay them.
In an attempt to provide for their families, these women travelled to Saudi Arabia, but instead, they were subjected to horrible cruelty at their employers’ houses. Although Saudi Arabian authorities assert that they have implemented labour rights reforms and the Kenyan government actively promotes labour migration, domestic workers nevertheless experience appalling levels of prejudice, abuse, and exploitation behind closed doors.
The hundreds of women all struggled with extreme overwork, with a typical workday involving at least 16 hours—and sometimes more—of cooking, cleaning, and child care. Since none of them received overtime compensation, their average monthly salary was SAR 900 (USD 240), which, when taking into account working hours, amounted to about USD 0.5 per hour. Additionally, several companies failed to pay the ladies at all or delayed their paychecks. Almost all of the women who were questioned said that they had not had a single day off while they were in Saudi Arabia, some of them for as long as two years.
Many of the women described how their male bosses yelled at them, called them derogatory names, and humiliated them; others described how they were sexually attacked and even raped. Among them was Judy, a single mother of two who fled her violent husband for Saudi Arabia. Many people were too scared to inform the Saudi government or the Kenyan embassy about the abuse, but those who did sometimes faced reprisals or false accusations, such as being wrongfully accused of stealing and losing their jobs.
The report also emphasizes how the exploitation, abuse, and racial discrimination of these workers—especially women, whose gendered vulnerabilities are frequently exacerbated by their status as migrant domestic workers—were sustained by systemic racism ingrained in the kafala sponsorship system and deeply ingrained discriminatory attitudes rooted in the region’s legacy of slavery and British colonialism.
Saudi Arabia has made minimal changes to the kafala sponsorship system, which ties the nation’s 13 million migrant workers to their employers and directly permits forced labour and other grave human rights violations, as part of its “Vision 2030” initiative in recent years.
Even these modest adjustments, though, have mostly only applied to workers protected by Saudi Arabia’s labour legislation, which still does not include domestic workers. Domestic workers still face severe limitations on their freedom of movement today; most of the time, they still need their employer’s consent to change employment or leave the country.
To further control working hours and conditions, the government proposed revised regulations for domestic workers in 2023. However, in reality, these rules are frequently useless in the absence of an efficient monitoring, inspection, and enforcement system. Despite being against Saudi law, many of the alleged acts were carried out with complete impunity.