Ugandan Migrants Extended Biography
Ugandan MigrantsExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.In January 2016, the central east African country of Uganda banned its citizens from taking jobs as domestic workers in the Middle East after numerous reports of abuse, enslavement, rape, and suicide began to circulate widely on social media. During the decade leading up to the ban, employment opportunities in the Middle East proved particularly attractive to Ugandan youths who make up roughly 75% of the country’s population and suffer from one of the highest unemployment rates (13.3%) in all of sub-Saharan Africa.1 Without access to formal jobs at home, Ugandans, especially young women, began seeking employment in foreign countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman, and United Arab Emirates that have a high demand for domestic and other menial laborers, and the wealth and resources to offer higher wages than Ugandan employers. This biography follows the lives of two young women—we will call them Aminah and Grace—that left their homes in Uganda to work in the Gulf States as housemaids. Their stories reveal the ways in which various local, national, and international institutions have shaped Uganda’s precarious position in the global economy. Perhaps more importantly, they help us better understand what the “opportunities” and consequences of globalization, particularly in the global south, actually look like on the ground.Though Aminah (23 yrs.) and Grace (25 yrs.) have never met, their stories bear some striking resemblances. Both women grew up in the central province of Uganda, attended universities not far from home, and had high hopes of finding formal jobs in their respective fields after graduation. However, like so many other young adults in Uganda, both women left university only to struggle for several months to find any work at all that paid a living wage. Grace, for instance, landed a job as a kindergarten teacher—a position unrelated to her degree in technological sciences—which only paid $300,000 UGX per month (roughly $80 USD). To make matters worse, her paychecks often arrived two, even three, months late. It was in this context of financial insecurity that Grace began to hear rumors that women could earn up to 1.5 million UGX a month (~$408 USD) working as housemaids in the UAE. Over time, the idea of pursuing foreign employment as a domestic worker became increasingly alluring. Eventually, she turned to a close friend with experience travelling and working in the Middle East to help her navigate the foreign employment process. Aminah, on the other hand, had still not found a job nine months after receiving her degree in Business when she was approached by a concerned uncle. He had heard about a possible job opportunity in the UAE and encouraged Aminah to take the position. Beyond feeling insulted that her uncle wanted her to take a job she considered to be beneath her, Aminah was terrified at the thought of leaving Uganda, moving alone to a place she did not know, and working for a family she had never met. However, like Grace, she had also heard stories of women earning a lot of money abroad in a short period of time, and then returning home with enough savings to buy a small plot of land, build a home, and provide for their families. She can still recall the television commercials that frequently advertised one of the many recruitment agencies that seemed to be popping up everywhere in the capital of Kampala where she lived. Finally, Aminah succumbed to her uncle’s pressure and reluctantly agreed to go meet with his friend to get more information about the job.2After seeking advice from her friend and doing her own research on how to begin work abroad, Grace found a recruiting agency registered under the Uganda Association of External Recruitment Agency (UAREA). She also 1 Irene Among and Michael Mutemi Munavu, “‘We want to be heard’: The voices of Uganda’s young people on youth unemployment,” World Bank Blogs, April 30, 2019 https://blogs.worldbank.org/nasikiliza/we-want-to-be-heard-the-voices-of-ugandas-young-people-on-youth-unemployment.2 In Baganda culture, the maternal uncle, or kojja, is very important figure in the family, with a lot of power to make decisions, particularly regarding financial issues. Historically, the kojja had strong rights to his sister’s children. Thus, his advice carried a lot of weight. Aminah told me that her parents and other relatives were quick to agree with him and began to also pressure her to take the job.
2Ugandan Migrants - Extended Biographyvisited the website of the Ministry of Labour, Gender and Social Development, which grants licenses to these agencies. There she found out which travel documents she needed and that the Ministry “only permits [recruitment agencies to] charge Shs50,000 as registration fees.”3 Once she had the money, she visited the recruiting office. “When I reached there,” she explained, “they tried to overcharge. They said it should be Shs80,000. Eh Eh, I showed them the information from Labour and Gender. I had the paper so they could not argue.” However, Grace then learned that she needed more documents than she thought, including at least one “citizenship letter” from a local/district political official (Shs50,000) even though she already had a valid passport, a certificate of good conduct from Interpol (Shs120,000), a yellow fever vaccination card (Shs80,000), and proof that she had undergone a full medical examination (Shs212,500). It ultimately took Grace almost a full year to secure all the various application documents and find the money to pay a total of roughly 4 million Ugandan shillings (about $1,100 USD) for a job that promised to pay between Shs850,000 to Shs1,200,000 (~$230-$325) a month, depending on her final placement. Around the same time, Aminah relied on her uncle’s connections and knowledge of more informal recruiting channels. Aminah recalled that in “[t]hose days, you know, I didn’t know anything, you get me? I was just there. But things were not easy. I was feeling stressed. I could even cry. Then my uncle said we were going to visit his friend who knew those jobs in Dubai and getting a visa. So I said ok let me go and see this one.” According to Aminah, the meeting with the recruiter took place in a nice office who appeared well-dressed and knowledgeable about the process. He said there were many domestic labor jobs that paid 1.5 million UGX in nice homes with nice families. The man had several portraits on his wall of other young women he allegedly helped to find work, and he shared their incredible success stories. He paused and then said, “But, you know, these applications take time. There are many components and I will have to contact many people to get your papers.” In other words, the recruiter was hinting that getting a job abroad would cost Aminah a lot of money. Aminah’s uncle collected money from family members and friends for the fees, and even took out a small bank loan to cover the remainder of the costs. Aminah then felt even more pressure since her family used their savings to help her get the job, and it was assumed that she would make enough to send a portion of her paychecks back home. Though Grace struggled to pay for recruitment services and found many aspects of the recruiting process to be unpleasant and even humiliating (particularly the full medical examination), she ultimately received her work visa and placement papers as promised. She was given a job as a maid at a major hotel, and the stated pay was at the top end of the average migrant maid salary. The recruiting agency coordinated her travel arrangements and provided her with contacts at the hotel as well as the Ugandan Embassy in Dubai. Aminah had a very different, and more costly, experience. She remembers that “something was off. The guy would call me and say you need the injection (yellow fever vaccine) so bring me the money. I would get the money and go there and give it to him, and he gave me that yellow book (proof of vaccination) but no injection.” Another time, Aminah’s family had given the man 300,000 UGX to get her a passport (double the cost one would pay at the embassy), and then he disappeared for three months and would not answer their calls. When they finally reached him, he told them that he had been in Dubai securing Aminah’s job. He then demanded more money because of this service they had not requested or discussed at any point. When Aminah finally received her job placement papers, they were sent as photos over WhatsApp. Despite her concerns, Aminah left for Dubai to work as a maid in a private residence in June of 2015. When I first asked Grace about her experiences working as a maid in Dubai back in 2018, she smiled and said, “I liked it a lot. I’m thinking of going back.” During her 14-month stay in Dubai, she was paid well and on time. Her employers honored the contract they signed, and as a very warm, attractive, and intelligent woman, Grace was even given other work opportunities. She began splitting her time between housekeeping and waitressing at the hotel restaurant and pool. There she learned a lot about the hospitality industry and even earned some tips, which added 3 Henry Lubega, “How Ugandan workers in Middle East are cheated,” Daily Monitor, September 30, 2018 https://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/-Ugandan-workers-Middle-East--cheated-Dubai--Abu-Dhabi/688334-4783650-w11qmg/index.html
3Ugandan Migrants - Extended Biographyto her income. Her only complaint was that, “the sun was too much! It was too, too hot in that place. When I had to work outside by the pool, I felt weak.” Overall, though, becoming a migrant worker in the UAE provided a good, if temporary, solution to her employment problem in Uganda. When she returned she had enough savings to build a small house on her family’s compound, and to return to school to pursue another degree in hospitality management. Aminah was not as lucky. She, like so many other young women in her position, was essentially sold into human-trafficking. It is at this point in her story that Aminah begins to speak in shorter sentences and struggles to remain emotionally detached from what happened to her. She does not like to talk about it but did tell me that when she arrived in Dubai, her passport, travel, and work documents were taken. No one told her what was going on or what would happen next but she remembers driving for a long time and believed that she had reached the home in a suburb on the far outskirts of Dubai. In fact, she had been taken to Oman where she often worked 20-hour days cooking, cleaning, and caring for children at a private residence. She was never allowed to leave the home by herself. She was physically and sexually abused on a number of occasions and remembers that she was always hungry. “The food was little,” she said, “I thought I was going to die, and sometimes I just asked God to kill me.” She also was never compensated for her labor. The man she worked for said that her pay was her room and board. Aminah’s story sounds eerily similar to those of female migrant domestic laborers in Oman. In an interview with a Bangladeshi domestic worker in Oman conducted by Human Rights Watch in May 2015, the woman explained that:“I would start working at 4:30 a.m. and finish at 1 a.m. For the entire day they wouldn’t let me sit. I used to be exhausted. There were 20 rooms and over 2 floors. He wouldn’t give me food. When I said I want to leave, he said, ‘I bought you for 1,560 rials (US$4,052) from Dubai. Give it back to me and then you can go.”4As of 2015, there were at least 130,000 female domestic migrant laborers in Oman, and many of them found themselves in similar situations. According to Human Rights Watch, there is a lot of trafficking of these women back and forth between the UAE and Oman, and few legal protections in place. In Oman:The country’s immigration system prohibits migrant workers from leaving their employers or working for new employers without their initial employers’ consent and punishes them if they do. Oman’s labor law excludes domestic workers from its protections, and those who flee abuse have little avenue for redress.5Around 2015, global human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and the UN Human Rights Council began investigating the working conditions for domestic migrant workers across the Gulf States and putting more pressure on these countries to extend more legal protections to migrants laborers, who in the case of Oman, make up half the country’s population of 4.4 million. Then in 2016, the horrific circumstances many Ugandan migrant laborers in the Middle East made headlines and began to circulate widely on social media. Perhaps because of this transnational attention and pressure, Aminah was eventually taken back to Dubai (though she still is unclear about why this happened) and was eventually able to make it back to Uganda, though she had no money to show for it. After the temporary ban on Ugandan migrant labor in the Middle East in 2016, Uganda re-entered negotiations with the Gulf States to lift the ban in return for more labor protections for Ugandan workers abroad. In the summer of 2019, Janet Mukwaya, Uganda’s minister of Gender, Labour, and Social Development, announced that Uganda and the UAE had signed a new labor externalization agreement, in which Uganda promised “to supply 80,000 workers in the next 12 years.”6 She added that “Uganda has already signed two bilateral agreements on recruitment 4 Rothna Begum, “‘I Was Sold’ Abuse and Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers in Oman,” Human Rights Watch, July 13, 2016 https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/13/i-was-sold/abuse-and-exploitation-migrant-domestic-workers-oman5 Rothna Begum, “‘I Was Sold’ Abuse and Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers in Oman,” Human Rights Watch, July 13, 2016 https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/13/i-was-sold/abuse-and-exploitation-migrant-domestic-workers-oman6 Mu Xuequan, “Uganda, UAE reach agreement on labor externalization,” Xinhua Net, July 13, 2019 http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-07/13/c_138222074.htm
4Ugandan Migrants - Extended Biographyand employment of Ugandan migrant workers with Jordan and Saudi Arabia.” While Mukwaya claimed that the Ugandan government and Middle Eastern governments are working hard to better protect migrant workers, she also acknowledged that the “protection of migrant workers and their welfare has not been very easy,” and that “unregulated business had given room to illegal recruitment, trafficking and exploitation” in both Uganda and the Middle East.7 What she did not mention, however, is that Middle Eastern countries that rely heavily on migrant workers to perform domestic and other menial labor pay big money to foreign governments, particularly in the global south, to supply their demand. Thus, it is in the financial interest of politicians like Mukwaya to keep signing contracts with Middle Eastern countries even when she knows the working and living conditions are unsafe. Aminah and Grace’s experiences becoming migrant laborers in the Middle East paint a complicated picture of the opportunities of globalization. For women like Grace, for recruiting agents, and for politicians like Janet Mukwaya, globalization has created new and lucrative employment opportunities that have allowed them to survive a domestic economic and unemployment crisis. For Aminah, and the tens of thousands of other Ugandan migrant laborers that lost on their investment, globalization has only created more opportunities for wealthy, natural resource-rich nations, to exploit poor countries and deny the basic human rights of people from the global south. 7 Mu Xuequan, “Uganda, UAE reach agreement on labor externalization,” Xinhua Net, July 13, 2019 http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-07/13/c_138222074.htm