In most countries, working as a housekeeper or nanny is a relatively safe profession.
Yet as we traveled across Kenya and Uganda, from crowded and poor urban neighborhoods to far-flung farming villages, we heard many variations on the same horror story: Young, healthy women set off for domestic jobs in Saudi Arabia, only to return beaten, scarred or in coffins.
At least 274 Kenyans, nearly all of them women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years. At least 55 died just last year, twice as many as the previous year.
Autopsies only raised more questions. The body of a woman from Uganda showed extensive bruising and signs of electrocution, yet her death was labeled “natural.” We found a surprising number of women who fell from roofs, balconies or, in one case, an opening for an air-conditioner.
How could this be? This was hardly some obscure industry with fly-by-night players. East African women are recruited by the thousands and trained by well-established companies, then sent to Saudi Arabia through a process regulated and approved by the Ugandan, Kenyan and Saudi governments.
Worker advocates have long blamed archaic Saudi labor laws. But we wondered it something else was at play. We spent nearly a year trying to figure it out.
Workers are being sold a dream that, often, becomes a nightmare.
We interviewed more than 90 workers and their families, and carefully analyzed employment contracts whenever we could.
We found that women from Kenya and Uganda are lured to Saudi Arabia with promises of better wages and opportunities.
Recruitment agencies and their brokers give misleading information about wages and make workers sign contracts they can’t read.
Some agencies market women as products. Agency websites offer workers “for sale” to Saudi clients. We saw one that had a click-to-collect option.
When women arrive in the kingdom, employers often confiscate their passports and belongings. Kenyan housekeepers in Saudi Arabia work for $250 or so a month. But many women told us that their new bosses shortchanged them or denied them wages, declaring, “I bought you.”
Powerful people are making money off these women.
Using the employment contracts and, whenever we could find them, autopsies, police reports or legal documents, we began looking into companies that profited off these women.
Corporate records and securities filings led us to powerful people, including officials who could be protecting these workers.
High-ranking officials in Kenya and Uganda and their families, we found, own stakes in staffing agencies.
Fabian Kyule Muli, for example, is a member of Kenya’s Parliament and also owns an agency that sends women to Saudi Arabia. He is the vice chairman of a parliamentary labor committee, a job that can pass laws protecting workers. The committee has at times been a champion for sending more people to Saudi Arabia, and has denied that workers are hurt there.
In Saudi Arabia, members of the royal family, including descendants of King Faisal, have been major investors in agencies that supply domestic workers. Senior Saudi officials also hold high-ranking positions with staffing agencies.
Despite years of mounting evidence of abuse, leaders including President William Ruto of Kenya have vowed to send more workers abroad. One of his top advisers owned a staffing company. So does Sedrack Nzaire, whom Ugandan media identifies as the brother of that country’s longtime president, Yoweri Museveni.
Women who are abused have little recourse.
In interviews, women told us through tears that their bosses in Saudi Arabia denied them food, raped them, assaulted them with bleach or stabbed them.
Yet East African governments have ignored calls from activists and human rights groups to negotiate better labor agreements with Saudi Arabia. The employment treaties include only minimal worker safeguards.
The Saudi government says its law enforcement and courts protect workers against abuse and help them seek recourse. But women told us they were unable to access such resources, and police sent them back to abusive employers or government-funded facilities that felt like prisons.
Many abused workers must pay for their own flight home, despite regulations saying that they should not have to do so. Our reporting found that desperate workers often returned home broke, disabled and suicidal.
And in the cases of serious injury or death, families have to navigate a web of red tape, apathy and impunity. In Uganda, Isiko Moses Waiswa told us about learning that his wife had died in Saudi Arabia.
Her employer gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.
“I told him that whether you send me the money or you don’t send me the money, me, I want the body of my wife,” Mr. Waiswa told us.
