Does Anyone Care? —The Prevalence of Forced Labor Among Kenyan Migrant Workers and the Glaring Need for Better Labor Conditions in GCC Countries

Author: Zhang, Sheldon; Compernolle, Nell; Vincent, Kyle; Lord, Sarah & Kysia, Kareem

Abstract: Much media coverage in recent years has identified the abuses of migrant workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (e.g. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates [UAE], and Saudi Arabia), an increasingly popular migrant destination for Kenyan workers. Due to their unique geo-political and economic profiles, these countries with widespread human rights violations have remained non-responsive primarily to pressure from the international community. Importantly, these factors mask another critical gap in human trafficking research: the lack of reliable data and how best to collect it threatens the effectiveness of existing and proposed interventions in the GCC. To address this gap, this team sought to measure the prevalence of forced labor among recently returned Kenyan migrant workers from GCC countries currently residing in the Nairobi Metro area. Using rigorous estimation strategies in our data collection and analysis, we found that forced labor was pervasive among this population. Practically every Kenyan migrant worker who worked in GCC countries during the studied period could be considered a victim of forced labor. Most striking was the consistency in the high rates of violations across all measures, regardless of which set of indicators we applied in our analysis. Although abuses among migrant workers are not uncommon in wealthy nations, such high rates of forced labor violations in GCC countries are truly rare, if not unprecedented in current prevalence estimation research, and call for massive systemic efforts to address the situation.

Keywords: forced labor, human trafficking, Gulf Cooperation Council, prevalence estimation, migrant labor