Caroline Wanjiru, a young Kenyan woman who sought a better life in Saudi Arabia, dreamt of building her mother, GM*, a house.
To fund the dream, the 27‑year‑old secured employment through a recruitment agency and departed for Saudi Arabia on January 17, 2023, arriving safely to take up a position as a domestic worker in Absa.
To navigate the deep anxieties her mother held regarding employment in the Gulf, Wanjiru initially concealed her plans, knowing GM would object.
“In fact, I knew she was going when the ticket came,” GM recalled, “like three days before.”
Upon arrival, she was placed with a family consisting of a mother, daughter and husband who maintained three wives, working specifically in the household of one of the spouses.
Initial communications were frequent and reassuring. Wanjiru spoke with her mother and her two children, then aged six and five, almost every evening.
By early March 2023, Wanjiru had managed to send her first salary home to support her two boys, but by the middle of the month, she began reporting debilitating physical symptoms, including severe headaches.
GM prayed for her, telling her to believe in God and she would be well.
“After one week, she was feeling worse,” her mother said.
Wanjiru was taken to the hospital but received only painkillers and was sent home.
The situation deteriorated swiftly. By her birthday on April 5, she told her mother that one of her eyes was no longer seeing, while the other had become weak.
GM immediately raised the alarm, first with the agency and then with a friend who was working nearby.
Soon, Wanjiru could no longer sustain a conversation, relying on recorded audio messages to communicate her worsening state.
The friend alerted GM of the severity of the situation, revealing the employer’s growing reluctance to provide adequate medical attention.
It was later confirmed that Wanjiru had contracted meningitis, a condition that had progressed significantly by the time she was admitted for a proposed treatment cycle.
Doctors said she would be discharged after a course of 14 days of medication, after which she would be repatriated.
“We didn’t have any other choice but to wait.”
Tragically, the communication lines went silent and on April 20, 2023, Wanjiru succumbed to her illness.
The aftermath of her death exposed the often indifferent bureaucracy facing the families of deceased migrants.
News of her passing reached the family via convoluted channels, involving an agency contact and communication between the other migrant worker and Wanjiru’s boyfriend.
When GM and her relatives confronted the recruitment agent in Kenya, they were met with evasion and outright hostility.
“The agent ran away. He did not answer our calls. We could not get him in the office.”
GM recounted the immense difficulty in repatriating her daughter’s body, spending two months shuttling between the agency’s premises and the Foreign Affairs office–a process that was also fraught with financial disputes.
The employer initially refused to cover the hospital bills or the cost of the flight, claiming Wanjiru was still within her probationary period.
Left to navigate the Ministry of Foreign Affairs independently while nursing severe emotional distress, GM was repeatedly told to simply return home and wait.
The body was only returned after an unnamed official intervened directly, though the family still had to absorb a massive budgetary burden for the final funeral arrangements
“What I can say is that both failed me,” GM said, referring to the Kenyan government and the recruitment agency that sent her daughter abroad.
Wanjiru’s case is not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of exploitation documented by advocates at the Global Justice Centre.
The organisation describes a “systematic chain of trafficking” that begins long before a worker sets foot in the Gulf.
Recruits are often coerced or deceived by individuals close to them, such as friends or family members, who paint a false picture of the working conditions abroad.
Vulnerable individuals, particularly single parents or victims of gender-based violence trying to escape, are frequently subjected to debt bondage.
This occurs when recruiters charge exorbitant fees—ranging from Sh80,000 to Sh150,000—or facilitate the travel on the condition that the worker pays back the sum from their future earnings.
In many instances, employers in destination countries like Iraq or Saudi Arabia effectively “buy” the workers by paying a ransom to the agency, subsequently telling the employees they cannot leave until the debt is settled.
Advocates at the Global Justice Centre say many workers are misinformed and those who are informed of their rights are seldom told the full truth during their mandatory pre-departure training in Kenya
“They are not educated on their rights. The only thing they are warned about is that you shouldn’t say no to your employer. You should always be submissive.”
The violations extend to the total stripping of autonomy. It is a common, though illegal, practice for employers to confiscate the passports and contracts of domestic workers immediately upon their arrival at the airport.
Contracts are frequently altered or presented only at airport check-in, leaving migrants completely unaware of their precise working conditions until they land.
In the most severe cases, workers endure extensive physical and sexual assault, returning home with catastrophic injuries, dislocated spinal discs from forced hard labour, or permanent disabilities.
“Most of them face [sexual and gender‑based violence]. Especially in the hands of households where there are male figures in the houses, they are going to work for – sexual abuses, sexual assaults, harassment, beatings, physical assaults, even physical harm to them.”
In response to this crisis, the centre has implemented a comprehensive reintegration programme designed to address the traumatic experiences of returning migrants.
The programme focuses on both medical recovery and social support, recognising that mental health is a prerequisite for successful reintegration into society.
Current national policies are structurally ineffective because Kenyan domestic workers are frequently excluded from standard national labour protections, a gap that severely undercuts the state’s capacity to protect them abroad.
The centre engages with government entities, such as the State Department for Labour and Skills Development and the State Department of Diaspora Affairs, during national stakeholder consultations.
These forums seek to transition government focus away from merely tracking remittance inflows and placing workers abroad, and toward establishing a structured, end-to-end framework.
This framework addresses psychosocial support, case management and legal redress upon return.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the centre’s work is its commitment to survivor-led advocacy.
The organisation has begun hiring survivors to assist in programme design, ensuring that the help provided is grounded in lived experience.
In a recent cohort, 12 survivors were trained and certified as facilitators, allowing them to return to their own communities to deliver healing and education programmes to others.
This peer-to-peer model aims to break the cycle of deceptive recruitment by providing potential migrants with realistic information about the risks involved.
For families like GM’s, the scars remain deep.
“Losing a child cannot be compared to anything else. I had not planned for that. It is not easy for me,” she observed.
Now a live-in caregiver for another family herself, GM struggles to provide for Wanjiru’s two sons on a domestic worker’s wage, while managing her own high blood pressure brought on by the trauma of her daughter’s death.
She called for targeted mechanisms to help distressed families of migrant workers who return from the Gulf as shadows of their former selves.
“The government should have somewhere for us to go and get even something of help or a job or something.”
She remains in a state of constant prayer for her other children, who have also migrated to the Gulf for work, driven by the lack of local employment options at home.
“But I will not stay in fear, expecting bad news. I always pray for their safety.”
