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\u201cWorkers have multiple ways to report abuse, unpaid wages or contract violations, including hotlines, digital platforms and direct complaint mechanisms,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But Milton Turyasiima, an assistant commissioner with the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, said that abuse remained rampant.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe get complaints on a daily basis,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Selling a Dream<\/h2>\n
Recruiters fan out across East Africa, from impoverished hilltop villages to the cinder block neighborhoods of Nairobi and Kampala, the Ugandan capital.<\/p>\n
They search for people desperate, and ambitious, enough to leave their families for low-paying jobs in a country where they do not know the native language. People like Faridah Nassanga, a slim woman with a warm but detached air.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are really poor,\u201d Ms. Nassanga said, sitting outside her one-room concrete home in Kampala. Meals are cooked on a propane burner in the alley beside a trickling sewage gutter. She shares a triple-decker bunk bed with her mother and children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Ms. Nassanga said a friend introduced her in 2019 to an agent from Marphie International Recruitment Agency, whose co-owner, Henry Tukahirwa, recently retired as one of Uganda\u2019s highest-ranking police officers. Ms. Nassanga agreed to move to Saudi Arabia for a job paying about $200 a month.<\/p>\n
She found her housekeeping job as pleasant as recruiters had promised. She had her own room. The woman she worked for sometimes even helped with chores.<\/p>\n
Then one day, she said, her boss\u2019s husband walked into her room and raped her. Afterward, she said, he kicked and slapped her. He threw her underwear at her as she retreated to the kitchen, Ms. Nassanga said.<\/p>\n
When she became pregnant, Ms. Nassanga\u2019s boss accused her of sleeping with the husband. The Saudi family put her on a plane back to Uganda, said Abdallah Kayonde, who runs a legal-aid group that is trying to get compensation for her.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Ms. Nassanga knows her employer\u2019s name but not her phone number. The only records she has are from the recruiting agency.<\/p>\n
Ruth Karungi, who owns the agency with her husband, the retired police official, said that when Ms. Nassanga showed up at the office with an infant, the company contacted the Saudi partner agency, which did not respond.<\/p>\n
The company then notified the Saudi Embassy. \u201cWe trusted that they would address the case through the proper diplomatic channels,\u201d Ms. Karungi said by email.<\/p>\n
She said she did not know if anyone had followed up.<\/p>\n
Now, Ms. Nassanga is back sharing a one-room home with her mother, her two older children and her toddler \u2014 a boy with a notably different complexion and hair from his siblings.<\/p>\n
\u2018An Important Destination Country\u2019<\/h2>\n
Saudi Arabia has a wage hierarchy for foreign workers, with East Africans near the bottom at about $200 to $250 a month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Over the years, some countries have fought for better wages and protections for their workers. The Philippines, for example, negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia in 2012 that raised wages.<\/p>\n
That sent staffing agencies looking for cheaper labor elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Few Ugandan workers arrived in the kingdom in 2017, Ugandan government data show. Five years later, the number was 85,928.<\/p>\n
African governments stood to benefit from remittances. Mr. Muli\u2019s committee called on Kenya in 2019 to \u201cembark on a rigorous campaign to market Saudi Arabia as an important destination country for foreign employment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe current notion that foreign workers in Saudi Arabia go through suffering\u201d needed \u201cto be corrected,\u201d the committee added.<\/p>\n