A growing number of Nigerian women, lured to Iraq with promises of well-paying domestic jobs, are now crying out for help as they face exploitation, abuse, and deplorable working conditions.
Many of these women, who left Nigeria in search of better opportunities, report being mistreated by their employers, trapped in contracts they cannot escape, and cut off from their families.
The women, desperate to return home, have called on the Nigerian government and humanitarian organizations to intervene and rescue them.
Al Jazeera reports that in Nigeria, the women are hired by a ring of local “agents” who sell them a dream of good pay and good conditions abroad.
They get the women to agree, process visas and send them off to recruitment firms in Iraq for a commission of about $500 per woman, according to activists familiar with the system.
Once there, the Iraqi firms ask the women, called “shagalas” (meaning “house worker” in Arabic), to sign two-year contracts and assign them to families or labour-intensive institutions like spas, where they are often expected to work more than 20 hours a day for a monthly pay of $200 to $250.
In many homes, the women are subject to inhumane treatment: They go days without food, are beaten and are not provided living quarters.
Some also face sexual abuse and rape. Several women told Al Jazeera stories of victims who had faced so much abuse and torture that they ended up dead although these cases have not been independently confirmed.
“It’s a form of modern slavery,” said Damilola Adekola, co-founder of Hopes Haven Foundation, a Nigerian NGO that helps track women in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries where abuse of African domestic workers is rife.
“These Iraqi agents and the families [the women work for] often tell them, ‘We’ve bought you, so you have to work.’ The contracts they sign go against any type of international law because there’s no medical care and they have to work obscene hours,” she added.
The article was originally published on Politics Nigeria.
