‘I Was Going to Starve’: A Story of Trafficking and Escape in Kuwait

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Sally Nyakanyanga

A recent case has shed light on the number of young women being trafficked from Zimbabwe to Kuwait. One woman tells of how, desperate for work, she ended up being sold to a family and trapped in a cycle of exploitation and abuse.

After finishing her secondary education, Hazvinei Garanowako had tried to find a job but with no luck. Instead, she found herself looking for menial tasks to make some money. Then a friend’s mother told Garanowako, now 24, that she could get her a job in Kuwait, with the visa costs and airfare paid for. “It was a relief to hear that the lowest I could be paid was $750 working in a hotel,” says Garanowako.

She left for Kuwait with dreams of finally moving out of the cramped one-room home she shared with her parents and two other siblings. But her hopes were short lived. When Garanowako arrived at the airport in Kuwait, she and some other African women were instructed to wait in a separate line at passport control. Then they were taken to a storeroom where they waited for more than 10 hours, she says. Eventually, a woman came and took Garanowako to a car waiting outside the airport.

“I was told harshly to get in as the woman exchanged money and my travel documents with an Arab man,” she says. She was taken to the man’s house and put to work as a housemaid, along with seven other women from the Philippines, Ghana and India. They worked 23 hours a day, serving the family and cleaning the 15-room house. Garanowako says if she stopped to take a break, the wife would beat her. She was forced to survive on leftovers that she secretly ate in the bathroom. “I had to lie to [the family] that I needed to take a bath so they would switch off the camera in the bathroom for me to eat,” Garanowako says. “If I didn’t do that, I was going to starve.”

A month into her ordeal, Garanowako managed to find a cellphone to call her mother, Evas Mututa. Mututa gave her daughter the address of the Zimbabwean embassy in Kuwait, but to get there, Garanowako first had to steal some clothes to disguise herself as a local. “Luckily, I found a taxi and managed to reach our embassy, which later helped me come back home,” she says.

The plight of young Zimbabwe women trafficked into servitude in Kuwait came to light recently, when Zimbabwe’s ambassador wrote a letter pleading with the government to tackle the issue.

Grey Marongwe, the Zimbabwean ambassador to Kuwait, wrote to Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May, saying that the embassy was getting around 10 calls a day from Zimbabwean maids asking for help to escape their employees. “The maids issue has escalated to unprecedented levels,” said the letter. “From the 15 maids we reported in our first letter [dated October 2015], numbers have swelled to more than a hundred.”

According to Marongwe, unsuspecting job seekers are promised high salaries, free air tickets and free accommodation, only to realize on arrival in Kuwait that they have been sold into servitude. The maids have their passports confiscated and are forced to stay with their employers for at least two years.

After lobbying efforts from the embassy and various civil society organizations, the government has stepped in to help bring home 120 trafficking victims so far. Seven of the traffickers were arrested, and have since been released on bail.

Garanowako knows that, despite her ordeal, she’s one of the lucky ones. According to officials, there are more than 300 Zimbabwean girls who have been trafficked to Kuwait and are still trapped there. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of the region, is struggling to keep its people fed and employed. Severe drought – which the World Food Programme says will leave around 4.1 million Zimbabweans in need of food aid by January 2017 – a liquidity crunch, and high levels of unemployment and poverty have forced many to flee the country in search of jobs.

“Trafficking is a big issue, not only in Africa but globally,” says Lily Sanya, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) chief of mission in Zimbabwe. “It is a clandestine practice which has been made easy by globalization.”

The IOM has said forced labor is a global business worth $150 billion a year, and the International Labour Organization estimates that about 55 percent of trafficked victims are women, while 26 percent are children. Exact figures are hard to come by, but according to the U.S. Department of State 2016 report on trafficking in persons, Zimbabwean women are being lured to South Africa, China and the Middle East, among other countries. The report puts Kuwait on its Tier 2 watch list, meaning the state does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so. It reveals that domestic employees work on average 14 to 16 hours a day while employers retain 80 to 90 percent of the workers’ wages. Some Kuwait employers also monitor and confine the workers, who are often in poor health due to lack of adequate nutrition and healthcare, according to the report.

When Women & Girls Hub approached the Kuwait embassy in Zimbabwe for comment, we were told there was no one available to speak on the issue.

In March, former Kuwait ambassador to Zimbabwe Ahmed al-Jeeran was implicated as the ring leader in the trafficking syndicate that trapped Garanowako and other girls, accused of advertizing vacancies for non-existent nursing jobs in Kuwait in the local press. Jeeran was allegedly working with his secretary, Brenda Avril May, who is accused of being the contact person, as well as organizing airfare and visa arrangements, for trafficked women. Both Jeeran and May deny any wrongdoing.

Contacted by Women & Girls Hub for comment, May said, “I will not talk on that issue of trafficking,” and referred us to her lawyer. The cases of all those implicated are still pending in court, with possible sentences of up to two years in prison to be issued if they end in convictions.

While Zimbabwe has helped trafficking victims escape their dire situations, the women say support ends almost as soon as they get back home. When Garanowako returned to Zimbabwe, she spoke to a counselor the day she arrived, but has had no follow up since. She and the other women who were repatriated were given $100 and some groceries. Kindness Paradza, chairman of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Foreign Affairs, says the government is working with partners such as the IOM to assist victims of trafficking to start income-generating projects.

But the negative impact of Garanowako’s experience in Kuwait is more complicated than an empty bank account. Her mother, Mututa, says that, ever since her daughter left for Kuwait, the family home has been wracked with distrust and conflict. “When I got news that the girls were trafficked to Kuwait, l was heavily traumatized,” says Mututa. “On the other hand, her father accuses me of leading Hazvinei into trafficking.”

Slow Progress on Ending ‘Legacy of Slavery’ for Domestic Workers

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Jan Powell

As demand for home help increases around the world, the number of countries adopting laws to protect domestic workers continues to grow. But their abuse and exploitation won’t stop without a fundamental change in social attitudes, say advocates.

When Pavitra left her family and four children in Nepal to go to Oman as a domestic worker, she had high hopes that the job would provide the money her family needed for medical bills. Her sisters had gone abroad before and returned safely with a modest income. But Pavitra’s experience was different. “I would wake at six in the morning and I’d go to sleep at 1 or 2 in the morning,” she says, through a translator. “For breakfast, we had bread and tea and then at four in the afternoon we’d get one meal.”

Then one night, the husband came into the room she was cleaning, shut the door and raped her, threatening to shoot her if she told his wife. Pavitra did tell her employer, who refused to believe her and instead took her to the police, accusing her of seducing her husband. Pavitra was locked up for three months, without access to a lawyer, before she was finally sent back to Nepal. She did not go back to her family, fearing blame and stigma. “If my family, especially my husband, finds out, they will abandon me,” she says.

At least 67 million people worldwide are employed in the home – cooking, cleaning, caring for the very young and the very old. The vast majority of these domestic workers are women who, isolated and hidden away in private homes, are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. According to the Geneva-based International Labour Organization (ILO), around 90 percent of domestic workers lack even the most basic protection afforded to most factory or office workers.

It was to try to improve conditions for domestic workers that the ILO’s Convention on Domestic Workers was adopted in 2011, setting global standards and conditions for the employment of home help. Five years on, 70 countries have taken action on Convention 189, as it is known, with 22 ratifying it, 30 adopting it and a number of others upgrading their own national legislation in line with the convention’s recommendations. But have the laws made any difference to the lives of domestic workers on the ground?

According to Claire Hobden, ILO technical specialist on vulnerable workers and domestic work, who was involved in drafting the convention, it has done some good. The convention has raised awareness of the rights of domestic workers, she says, and has encouraged the creation of many more grassroots organizations to fight for those rights and contribute to law and policy development. In 2012, Uruguay became the first country to ratify Convention 189 and now has some of the most advanced legislation in the world to protect its estimated 120,000 domestic workers. This has led to wage rises, compensation for night work, and paid holidays. A government-led, country-wide campaign has also contributed to an increase in social security coverage for domestic workers. “The percentage of domestic workers registered for social security increased very significantly following the interventions of the government,” says Hobden.

Hobden says the convention has also prompted some countries to modify their own laws to raise standards. Morocco – which voted to adopt the convention but hasn’t yet ratified it – is one of the latest countries to bring in new legislation to protect domestic workers, setting 18 as the minimum age for employment, requiring a contract of work and a minimum of one day off each week, and imposing financial penalties on employers who break the law.

But there are still many countries – particularly in regions such as the Middle East, the Far East and parts of Asia – where domestic work is largely excluded from national laws. And even where relevant legislation does exist, such as anti-trafficking laws, it is often poorly enforced.

In what Marzena Zukowska, spokeswoman for the U.S.-based National Domestic Workers Alliance, describes as a “two-fold care crisis,” shifting employment patterns, with more mothers choosing to go to work, and an aging population mean the demand for domestic services is increasing worldwide. Many domestic workers live in abysmal, humiliating conditions. Frequently dependent on their employers for food and housing, domestic workers’ meals can consist of leftovers and their living quarters limited to cramped rooms at the back of the house.

Migrants, who make up around 17 percent of domestic workers, are particularly vulnerable. In some areas – including the United States, the Middle East and parts of Europe – migrant workers who have complained about their living conditions have lost their jobs, had their visas withdrawn and ended up in prison for being in the country illegally, according to Hobden. “I remember one woman in the U.S. who had her passport and her shoes taken away from her to prevent her leaving the house – this can happen almost anywhere,” she says.

Abuse, too, is common, with domestic workers describing a range of psychological and physical violence – from verbal abuse to beatings, sexual harassment and rape – usually happening behind closed doors and rarely reported.

While strong, effective legislation is an essential tool for change, improving the lives of domestic workers requires a fundamental evolution in the attitudes of those who employ them, say activists. “Too many people don’t see ‘housework’ as real work. They believe that providing food and accommodation is adequate payment,” says Hobden.

Work in the home traditionally goes unpaid in many cultures, or in return for food and lodging. This “master-servant” relationship, which activists say is just a modern version of slavery, is widely accepted in countries where the notion of an employment relationship with labor rights is relatively new.

“You hear about the murders, the scalding by boiling water, the severe beatings, but that sets a very low bar,” says Hobden. “Other employers may think, ‘I’m a good employer because I don’t beat my help.’ But that’s not enough.” For Convention 189 to do its job properly, activists, rights groups and governments need to focus on changing the way both employers and workers think about domestic work. “We need to raise the bar,” says Hobden. “We need to change that social norm.”

Kudos and a Curse: Meet the Savior of Girls in Samburu

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Hannah McNeish

Josephine Kulea has saved over 1,000 girls in Kenya from forced marriage and the female genital mutilation that usually precedes it. Her work has earned praise from Barack Obama, but she says politicians back home won't support her work in case it loses them votes.

NAIROBI, Kenya – Her face has been plastered across billboards in New York and London and she was lauded by U.S. President Barack Obama on his visit to Kenya. But Josephine Kulea sees herself as still very much a grassroots activist. She works with communities in the area where she grew up, saving girls as young as seven from forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and either being pulled out of school or never getting the chance to go. Despite national laws banning child marriage and FGM, in Samburu culture, girls can be matched to men old enough to be their grandparents, and polygamy is common.

Once cursed to death by her family for breaking up a marriage between her uncle and a seven-year-old cousin, Kulea, 30, now runs the charity The Samburu Girls Foundation, which, to date, has stopped over 1,000 girls across four counties from marrying young and missing their education. Women & Girls Hub spoke to her about how it all started with her mother and why she became the target of a death curse.

Women & Girls Hub: How did you start helping girls?

Josephine Kulea: I was following in my mom’s footsteps. My mom also fights for girls to go to school within my community because she was taken out of high school to become my dad’s third wife.

Women & Girls Hub: What about your childhood?

Kulea: I finished school but every holiday when I came home there was a new [potential] husband who wanted to marry me. My uncles wanted to marry me off because my dad passed away when I was young. Everyone was over 45 or in their 50s. I was 12, 13, 14, 15. But my mom fought for me.

After I finished school I went to nursing college and came back to work in my village. The first two girls I rescued were my own cousins. The first was a 10-year-old who was supposed to be getting married. Then two days later I got a call to say the same man, my uncle, was going to marry the youngest girl in the family who was just seven years old. She had to go through FGM on the day of the wedding. She got married and two days later we went to get her and arrest my uncle, and that became history in my village. They even had a big meeting to curse me [to death] because it was considered a very bad thing to do.

Women & Girls Hub: How did you feel when you heard about the curse?

Kulea: I knew I was not in the wrong because I was just protecting child rights. I continued getting calls from women from the same village to rescue more girls. I paid their fees with my nursing salary. It was less than $200 a month. I spent almost everything [on the girls’ education] because you have to buy uniforms and books and pens.

Women & Girls Hub: How did the Samburu Girls Foundation come about?

Kulea: In 2012 we started the organization, registering it and making it official like an NGO, so now we can ask people for money. We are now reaching out to four counties – Samburu, Marsabit, Isiolo and Laikipia. The community has donated 15 acres of land. That’s where our girls stay, we have a dormitory and dining room. Safaricom [Kenya’s largest mobile phone company] is coming to build us classrooms soon and we hope to eventually have a fully fledged school because we’re spending a lot of money on taking these girls to schools across the country.

Women & Girls Hub: How many girls have you helped?

Kulea: We’ve rescued over 1,000 girls. We have 300 girls who are directly under our organizational support. When we rescue these girls, the families normally are bitter because they are missing out on the dowry. It is sometimes up to one year until the girls are accepted back [by their families]. We talk to the parents and counsel them and the girls. Eventually we reunite them. Some parents lie to us. They really want to marry them off again, so we tell the girls that they can always come back to us, they can call us and also they become our eyes in the village and they make sure their own sisters, cousins and neighbors are not going through the same thing.

Women & Girls Hub: Is there any sign parents are starting to value educating girls?

Kulea: The problem we have is the villages in these areas have been marginalized for so long. The illiteracy levels are so high: In Samburu county it’s 80 percent. Such communities have yet to understand the value of educating girls.

Women & Girls Hub: The culture of ‘beading’ – when men give young girls beads to “book” them for sex – is this changing?

Kulea: It is dying out around the cities because more people there have embraced education. But there are a few other areas where it is still very common and as much as we try to spread awareness that it’s wrong, people feel it’s still part of our culture. Some girls feel it makes them beautiful because someone has given them these beads.

Women & Girls Hub: What was it like getting mentioned by Obama?

Kulea: It was awesome! It felt nice because sometimes you work so hard, do a lot of work and you think you’re hidden in the bush and no one notices. We are yet to get those shout-outs from the local or county government.

This Teen Is Using Modeling to Change the Lives of Refugees

Activist and model Avery McCall has been a fierce champion for human rights since reading Half the Sky at age 12. Through partnering with various organizations, working to support refugees and displaced person and raise awareness of their plight, and using her modeling career and global platform to amplify her message even further; McCall has been much more than a fresh face: She's a fresh voice calling for social awareness, courage, compassion and change.

McCall wrote an article for Teen Vogue discussing her work helping vulnerable people--both displaced persons and refugees--as well as how many people are faced with such a challenge worldwide. As she works as a human rights activist and encourages others to do the same, she says the biggest effect on her has been the personal time spent with refugees.

Click through to read the rest of McCall's article, and visit RefugeeOne and the Girl Up to learn more about the organizations she mentions.

teenvogue.com - What is the one item you would grab if your house went up in flames? Would it be your dog? A sentimental photograph? Your favorite T-shirt? Or would you fear so greatly for your life that you would just run? These may seem like hypothetical questions, but if you’re one of the more than 60 million people who have fled their homes due to war, natural disasters, or persecution, you may have already answered them.

Refugees and internally displaced persons are among the most vulnerable in the world. Whether they have crossed international borders (and are considered refugees) or have been forced to relocate within their homeland (and are considered displaced), they may have witnessed or experienced torture, rape, mass murder, and the destruction of their homes. The Syrian refugee crisis that has dominated headlines and political discourse is one example of how millions of individuals can be forced to flee for their lives due to an ongoing armed struggle. But ordinary citizens in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan have been ravaged as well in the wake of varying conflicts verging on genocide.

Read more

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Woman President Shows Malawi the Way

Malawi’s President Joyce Banda took office during a difficult time economically and politically, in addition to being first woman to be head of state in southern Africa. She is a true leader, for her country as well as for women: Banda has appointed women to key positions since taking power, and even before taking office she spearheaded efforts such as founding National Association for Business Women.

She sat down with IPS News to discuss the link between women's empowerment and sustainable development, health care and education for women and girls, upcoming legislation that will empower and protect women, and much more.

ipsnews.net - Malawi’s President Joyce Banda knows a thing or two about women’s empowerment. After all she is the first female southern African head of state.

But she has not had it easy. Banda had a tough job fixing a sputtering economy after taking over from her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika who died in office on April 5, 2012. In 2011 the country witnessed nationwide protests against Mutharika and the failing economy. The United Kingdom, Malawi’s largest donor, had suspended $550 million in aid after Mutharika expelled its ambassador for calling him an autocrat.

But she did succeed. Since taking office she has implemented of a number of austerity measures, which included selling the country’s presidential jet for $15 million and taking a 30 percent cut in her salary. She also embarked on a range of reforms that not everyone has agreed with. The most controversial has been cultivating closer ties with international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, which is known for its heavy-handed austerity plans.

But in June, the World Bank said the country’s economy was recovering, with manufacturing expected to grow 6 percent and agriculture 5.7 percent.

In September 2012, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute reported that since Mutharika’s increasingly autocratic rule ended, respect for democracy and human rights has returned to the country under Banda’s presidency.

Read more, including excerpts from the interview, here.

UN: Empowering Women Helps the World

The Women’s Empowerment Principles, a joint initiative of the UN Global Compact and UN Women, are a set of standards aiming to set a foundation of equality and to advocate for workplace rights for women. In this post by the UN Global Compact, learn more about the principles and how empowering women to participate fully—both economically and professionally—helps raise the standard for business and society.

Article by UN Global Compact

In collaboration with UN Women, the UN Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with 10 universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labor, environment and anti-corruption. By doing so, business, as a primary driver of globalization, can help ensure that markets, commerce, technology and finance advance in ways that benefit economies and societies everywhere.

A key component to achieving several initiatives for 2015 is the empowerment of women in communities and in the workplace.

UN: Empowering Women Helps the World

Women's Empowerment Principles are a set of principles for business offering guidance on how to empower women in the workplace, marketplace and community. They are the result of a collaboration between the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) and the United Nations Global Compact.

The Women's Empowerment Principles are: 1. Leadership promotes gender equality 2. Equal opportunity, inclusion and nondiscrimination 3. Health, safety and freedom from violence 4. Education and training 5. Enterprise development, supply chain and marketing practices 6. Community leadership and engagement 7. Transparency, measuring and reporting

The Women's Empowerment Principles—Equality Means Business is a joint initiative of UN Women and the UN Global Compact. The Principles outline seven steps for business on how to empower women in the workplace, marketplace and community. The Principles highlight that empowering women to participate fully in economic life across all sectors and throughout all levels of economic activity is essential to build strong economies; establish more stable and just societies; achieve internationally agreed goals for development, sustainability and human rights; improve quality of life for women, men, families and communities; and propel business' operations and goals. Learn more at the WEP’s Website. For a full list of companies that have signed the CEO Statement of Support for the WEP’s click here: WEPs Company Database

This year, a number of global milestones—the twentieth anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action (PfA), the Post-2015 Development Agenda and anticipated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—provide a unique opportunity to ensure that the business community commits, contributes and is a key partner to achieving gender equality.