Why maids keep dying in Saudi Arabia

On any given day in Kenya, dozens, if not hundreds, of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departures area. They huddle for selfies in matching T-shirts, discussing how they’ll spend the money from their new jobs in Saudi Arabia.

Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children, and save for the future.

While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrivals area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation, and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.

At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year. Autopsy reports describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labelled natural deaths. An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.

There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials such as Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chair of the labour committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.

But Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.”

In Kenya, Uganda and Saudi Arabia, a New York Times investigation found, powerful people have incentives to keep the flow of workers moving, despite widespread abuse. Members of the Saudi royal family are major investors in agencies that place domestic workers. Politicians and their relatives in Uganda and Kenya own staffing agencies, too.

The line between their public and private roles sometimes blurs.

Muli’s labour committee, for example, has become a prominent voice encouraging workers to go overseas. The committee has at times rejected evidence of abuse.

Last month, four Ugandan women in maid uniforms sent a video plea to an aid group, saying they had been detained for six months in Saudi Arabia.

“We are exhausted from being held against our will,” one woman said in the video. The company that sent her abroad is owned by Sedrack Nzaire, an official with Uganda’s governing party who is identified in Ugandan media as the brother of the president, Yoweri Museveni.

Nearly every staffing agency refused to answer questions or ignored repeated requests for comment. That includes Muli, Nzaire and their companies.

Kenya and Uganda are deep in a years-long economic slump, and remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income.

Kenya’s Commission on Administrative Justice declared in 2022 that worker-protection efforts had been hindered by “interference by politicians who use proxies to operate the agencies.”

Undeterred, Kenyan President William Ruto says he wants to send up to a half-million workers to Saudi Arabia in the coming years. One of his top advisers, Moses Kuria, has owned a staffing agency. Kuria’s brother, a county-level politician, still does.

A spokesperson for Ruto, Hussein Mohamed, said labor migration benefited the economy. He said the government was taking steps to protect workers. He said Kuria had no conflict of interest because he does not work on labor issues.

Recruiting companies work closely with Saudi agencies that are similarly well connected. Descendants of King Faisal have been among the largest shareholders in two of the biggest agencies. A director of a Saudi government human rights board serves as vice chair of a major staffing agency. So does a former interior minister, an Investment Ministry official and several government advisers.

Together, these agencies paint a rosy picture of work in Saudi Arabia. But when things go wrong, families say, the workers are often left to fend for themselves.

One young mother jumped from a third-story roof to escape an abusive employer, breaking her back. Another said her boss had raped her and then sent her home pregnant and broke.

Roughly a half-million Kenyan and Ugandan workers are in Saudi Arabia today, the Saudi government says. Most of them are women who cook, clean or care for children. Journalists and rights groups, who have long publicised worker abuse in the kingdom, have often blamed its persistence on archaic Saudi labour laws.

A spokesperson for the human resources ministry in Saudi Arabia said it had taken steps to protect workers. “Any form of exploitation or abuse of domestic workers is entirely unacceptable, and allegations of such behavior are thoroughly investigated,” the spokesperson, Mike Goldstein, wrote in an email.He said the government had raised fines for abuse and made it easier for workers to quit. But Milton Turyasiima, an assistant commissioner with the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, said abuse remained rampant.

Profit for the powerful

Saudi Arabia has a wage hierarchy for foreign workers, with East Africans near the bottom at about $200 to $250 a month. Over the years, some countries have fought for better wages and protections for their workers. The Philippines, for example, negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia in 2012 that raised wages. That sent staffing agencies looking for cheaper labour elsewhere.

Few Ugandan workers arrived in the kingdom in 2017, Ugandan government data shows. Five years later, the number was 85,928.

African governments stood to benefit from remittances. Muli’s committee called on Kenya in 2019 to “embark on a rigorous campaign to market Saudi Arabia as an important destination country for foreign employment.”

The African countries provide a “new and lower-cost services market,” one of Saudi Arabia’s largest staffing agencies, Maharah Human Resources, wrote in 2019.

As migration to Saudi Arabia surged, reports of deaths and injuries spread across East Africa. Bodies began arriving. Each story brought new outrage.

People should not have been surprised. The leaders of Kenya and Uganda had ample warning of abuse, yet they signed agreements with Saudi Arabia that lacked protections that other leaders demanded.

When Uganda cut its agreement with the Saudi government, they did not mention a minimum wage. The issue of worker mistreatment was well discussed at the time.

In 2021, a Kenyan Senate committee found “deteriorating conditions” in Saudi Arabia and an “increase in distress calls by those alleging torture and mistreatment.” The committee recommended suspending worker transfers. When Ruto was elected president in 2022, though, the campaign to send workers abroad intensified. His government reached a new Saudi labour agreement the next year without a wage increase or substantive new protections.

Now, a few times a month, rural Kenyans head to Nairobi to collect a coffin from the airport.