How Kafala system in Arab Gulf states is leading to the death  Of East African Girls

The governments Kenya and Somalia knows that migrant workers in Jordan, Lebanon, and all Arab Gulf states have in place the archaic Kafala system, which ties the legal residency of a migrant worker to their employer for a specific period, During the days of slavery, this was called indentured labour…

Unlike in the West, where migration targets highly educated workers, the Gulf countries target migrants from vulnerable families to work as domestic servants in this Kafala system – where you can only buy your freedom, In the Gulf, the girls sign documents written in Arabic. The handlers then take away the girls’ passports, thus restricting their right to any movement. After that, any escape could only take you to a detention camp.

During slavery in the Caribbean, some enslaved people were set free after paying the masters who had “bought” them the shipping and purchase fee, Today, migrant domestic workers in the Gulf are employed on similar terms. However, they can only earn freedom if they pay their “sponsors” some hefty amount calculated as the agency recruitment fee, visa fee and air ticket.

Blind eye

As the flow of dollars increases, the governments has turned a blind eye to the number of cadavers of young girls that arrive at this Country and continues to watch as agencies send more girls to the death traps of domestic labour, The scandal is that we don’t seem to see it as an indictment of how we treat our poor.

There is a deep history behind this Kafala system. Historians argue that slavery had always been a fixture of the Persian Gulf societies, and the rich had always imported cheap labour from East Africa, which was regarded as a reservoir of slaves destined for the Middle East markets.