Mercy Wanjiru Ndungu speaks from inside her single-room tin shack in Nairobi’s Kasarani neighborhood, her voice tight with emotion. “I feel so much bitterness,” she says, her eyes red and glassy. “When I think about my daughter, I feel like I want to die. But I’m waiting on God for justice.”
Wanjiru’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Beatrice Waruguru, a smart secondary school graduate, traveled to Saudi Arabia for domestic work in 2021. Beatrice had dreamed of university and lifting her family from poverty. But just months after arriving, the family received news that Beatrice was dead.
The Saudi death certificate ruled it a suicide. But when Beatrice’s body was repatriated, her eyes were gouged out, and she had visible marks of torture, including burns. The family believes her Saudi employer murdered her.
“I can’t get that image of her body out of my head,” Wanjiru sobs. “She died in terrible pain. It haunts me every single day.”
Beatrice’s death echoes painfully for families across Kenya. In the past five years, at least 274 Kenyan migrants, predominantly women, have died in Saudi Arabia. At least fifty-five Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year. Saudi officials often rule these deaths as “natural” — or due to “cardiac arrest” and “suicide” — in autopsy reports, despite signs of abuse. Many families, whose daughters left Kenya in perfect health, suspect foul play.
Kenyans have also returned from Saudi Arabia — dead and alive — with suspicious scars suggesting organ harvesting. In several cases, women reported undergoing unexplained medical procedures, only to later discover that a kidney had been removed without their knowledge.
Human rights groups say these deaths reflect a disturbing pattern of abuse against Kenyan workers under the kingdom’s kafala system. This sponsorship-based labor framework ties a migrant worker’s legal status to their employer. This dependency enables widespread abuse: forced labor, confinement, human trafficking, medical neglect, physical and sexual violence, and wage withholding.
Nearly 40 percent of Kenyans — over twenty million people — live below the poverty line. In response to high unemployment, the Kenyan government has encouraged young people to work abroad. Saudi Arabia is now one of Kenya’s largest sources of remittances.
Despite dangers, President William Ruto’s administration aims to send up to half a million workers to Saudi Arabia. Chasing dreams, some women will return to Kenya with traumatic scars. Some won’t come home at all.
Tortured to Death
Wanjiru struggles to speak through her grief. “I feel so much pain,” she says quietly. “They treat our daughters like trash. And our own government doesn’t care.”
Wanjiru had high hopes for Beatrice. She scraped together enough money from collecting plastic to send just one of her four children to school — and she chose Beatrice. “She was very clever and all the teachers loved her,” Wanjiru says, handing me Beatrice’s grade sheet from secondary school, showing high marks in all her subjects.
“She was like our guardian angel,” says twenty-six-year-old Margaret, Beatrice’s twin. “She was honest and hard-working. She loved helping people. Her dream was to get more education and help the poor. It’s still hard to believe she’s dead.”
Wanjiru initially refused Beatrice’s Saudi migration plan. “I heard of many girls who died there,” she tells me. “One girl in my village said she was forced to eat toilet paper. I told her it is better to remain in poverty.” But after Wanjiru was hospitalized for a heart attack, with no money to cover mounting medical bills, Beatrice left quietly — hoping to secure a better future for her family.
Not long after arriving, Beatrice told her boyfriend she had been burned with a hot iron by her employer and feared for her life. Then she went silent. Months later, her body came home in a coffin.
The Saudi autopsy lists her death as “pressure on neck by cord.” Despite noting traumatic injuries — swelling on her forehead and abrasions on her body — Saudi officials ruled it suicide. But her family says the truth is written on her body: gouged eyes, rope marks, signs of starvation and torture. A Kenyan postmortem confirmed Beatrice was tortured to death.
According to Wanjiru, Beatrice traveled with a recruitment firm called Nadesco, reportedly linked to the Association of Skilled Migrant Agencies of Kenya, or Asmak — an umbrella body of licensed employment recruiters. This reporter reached out to Asmak for comment but received no response.
Wanjiru says she reported the case to a local police station, but the officers said they could not investigate an incident in Saudi Arabia. Agents at Nadesco also failed to assist, she says, offering no support or route to justice.
According to the family, this agency continues to advertise jobs in Saudi Arabia. “These recruiters are still sending girls to that country,” Wanjiru says. “Some could even be sent to that same employer. And no one is doing anything about it.”
Her anguish reflects a wider failure to protect Kenyan women working abroad. Despite the rising death toll, Kenyan and Saudi governments have not taken meaningful action to hold recruiters, employers, or state institutions accountable. With many senior government officials reportedly connected to these agencies, there’s little incentive for accountability.
“Treated Like Livestock”
Under the kafala system, “your employer is everything,” says Zaina Kombo, an advocate of the High Court of Kenya and a migration researcher at Amnesty International. “They can decide whether you eat, sleep, or leave. It is systemic control.” This enables forced labor and human rights abuses: passport confiscation, medical care denial, confinement, and exit bans. Workers can easily become trapped.
Tens of thousands of Kenyans — mostly women — travel to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries for work annually. Between 2022 and mid-2023, documented Kenyans in Saudi Arabia more than doubled to an estimated 200,000, with at least 151,000 domestic workers. Without stronger government protection, these migrants enter precarious situations, stripped of legal safeguards and dependent on exploitative sponsors.
“It’s a system that treats women as disposable labor,” Kombo tells me. “And when something goes wrong, no one is held accountable.” Domestic workers often endure grueling sixteen-hour days with no rest. Many are housed in overcrowded, locked dorms by agencies or local labor brokers upon arrival. Wages are delayed or withheld. Escape attempts result in detention, jail, or deportation.
This exploitation, however, often begins at home. Local recruitment brokers target women in rural villages and low-income neighborhoods, offering dreams while concealing the risks. “These are people from the village who are being paid by the recruitment agencies,” explains Naomi Nzilani, communications manager at Global Justice Group (GJG), a legal advocacy and migrant rights organization:
They can be the local chief, village elders, pastors, or even relatives. They tell these women they’ll earn around 30,000 Kenyan shillings [$232] monthly, and since the employer covers all living expenses, they’ll save it all. By the end of the year, they say, you’ll be well-off. And families with five kids and no income believe them — because it’s someone from their own village.
Paul Adhoch, the executive director of Trace Kenya, a human rights and migrant protection organization based in Mombasa, says deception is routine. “The contract is often not handed to [the women] until they reach the airport — or even after arrival in Saudi Arabia,” Adhoch tells me. “By that time, they have no choice but to accept it.”
Those contracts often differ dramatically from initial promises. “The abuse starts there,” Adhoch says. “Before she boards that flight, she’s already gone through deception and exploitation.”
Hannah Ngugi, a mother of three from a small village in central Kenya, was lured to Saudi Arabia in 2021 by a licensed agency with the promise of a cleaning job, regular hours, and one day off a week.
“They said I would earn enough to change my life. I was excited,” the thirty-five-year-old says. “I signed a contract to specifically work as a cleaner.” But upon landing, the agency confiscated her phone and passport, and she was put in a crowded agency dorm with dozens of women. “Not only was my contract a lie, the agency didn’t even have a job for me.”
Ngugi was held in the dorm for two months without work, surviving on a single daily meal of rice and water, and sleeping on a thin mattress. “We were stuck, unable to leave. It was like a prison.”
During her first placement, a week of strenuous work — hauling carpets and wet laundry up three flights of stairs — reopened Ngugi’s C-section wounds. “I was collapsing from the pain,” she recalls. “But they told me I was lazy, pretending. No one believed me.”
Frustrated, the Saudi family returned her to the agency, where she stayed for several more months. Despite her rapidly deteriorating health, the agency refused to send her home. Instead, they assigned her to two other families, who forced her to work without adequate food or rest. “We were treated like livestock. No care, no concern — just expected to work until we collapsed.”
Eventually, the agency took Ngugi to a hospital, but refused to show her the medical results. “The doctor just told me I shouldn’t eat dry food,” she says, “but back in the dorm, they gave me nothing but dry, barely cooked, white rice and boiled eggs.”
“I really thought I was going to die there,” she adds, shuddering. Eight months after Ngugi arrived in Saudi Arabia, she posted about her condition on social media. A concerned Kenyan intervened and paid for her ticket home.
She returned to Kenya penniless, in pain, and needing surgery. “I still feel the pain in my lower abdomen,” Ngugi tells me. “My health is not ok. Sometimes I wake up crying, thinking I’m still there.”
Blind Eyes, Missing Organs
Ngugi was lucky to make it out alive. Medical neglect is a pervasive and deadly form of abuse for Kenyan domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. The kafala system makes it nearly impossible for migrant women to seek independent medical help. Serious health conditions are overlooked — especially if women can still work.
Employment conditions — long hours, exhaustion, no rest — often worsen or cause medical issues. But employers, who perceive illnesses as a financial liability, often consider workers expendable once they fall sick.
Racist perceptions in Saudi Arabia also contribute to health care denial, says Kombo, from Amnesty International. “There’s this perception that African people work really hard. They don’t get sick. So they end up not taking them to the hospital.” In extreme cases, women die after employers ignore worsening symptoms.
Adhoch, from Trace Kenya, has tracked such cases closely. Before traveling abroad, Kenyan workers are required to undergo medical checkups, Adhoch explains. “More often than not, when a Kenyan dies, the death certificate just says it was a heart attack or a natural death. But these are young, healthy women. It can’t be that they all just went there and died of heart attacks.”
That was the fate of twenty-seven-year-old Caroline Wanjiru Nyamburu, a mother of two small boys, who traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2023. At first, things seemed to be going well. She sent money home regularly. But soon, her health began to deteriorate.
Despite repeated complaints — and eventually partial blindness — her employer made her keep working. Her mother, Grace Macharia, breaks down as she recalls their last conversations. “She told me she couldn’t read my messages anymore,” fifty-one-year-old Macharia says. “She said one of her eyes had gone completely blind, and I should send voice notes instead.”
Caroline had been suffering from headaches and neck stiffness for weeks, symptoms her employer brushed off with painkillers. “She kept telling me, ‘Mum, I don’t feel okay.’ I told her she would be fine because what else could I say? I was so far away,” Macharia recalls. “Imagine — your daughter loses her eyesight and no one taking it seriously.”
Only when her condition became critical did the employer take her to a hospital. But it was too late. Caroline died just three months after arriving to Saudi Arabia. Authorities ruled her death as “natural.” Later, the family was told she died from meningitis.
“They could have taken her to the hospital sooner,” Macharia says. “They let her suffer too long. They ignored her pain, and now my daughter is gone. She went there to help us, not to die.”
“She was full of life,” she adds. “My daughter didn’t deserve to die like this.”
Even less visible is another disturbing trend: organ exploitation. Saudi Arabia has some of the highest rates of diabetes and hypertension in the world — two leading causes of kidney failure and other organ-related diseases. Yet the country has one of the lowest organ donor rates globally — just three deceased donors per million in 2019.
According to a recent Migrant Rights report, widespread allegations of illegal organ harvesting from migrant workers in Saudi Arabia include coercion for consent to cover return flights, posthumous pressure on families for repatriation costs, and employers listing themselves as next of kin to grant consent for organ removal. Workers have reported receiving unexplained treatments, and the bodies of young individuals have been repatriated to Kenya with suspicious surgical scars.
When forty-nine-year-old Pauline Muthoni Njuguna returned to Kenya from Saudi Arabia after seven years of domestic work, her body was barely recognizable. She was emaciated and could hardly eat or walk.
“She was slim, very skinny,” her sister, fifty-four-year-old Eunice Waceke remembers. “Her belly . . . it was swollen. Her joints weakened, she had no strength. When she ate, she couldn’t even swallow . . . we used to give her food in a paste form.”
According to her family, Pauline fell seriously ill in Saudi Arabia while working for an employer who mistreated her and denied her proper care after she became sick. Pauline fled the household without her passport to seek treatment.
In a Saudi hospital, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer and underwent a gastrectomy and chemotherapy under a false name, fearing forced return to her employer. But without support, she couldn’t sustain treatment. Her condition worsened.
“She thought she would never see Kenya again,” Waceke says. Eventually, in 2021, she secured an emergency travel document due to her deteriorating health and returned home.
Doctors at Kenyatta University Hospital discovered she was missing a kidney. “She didn’t even know,” Waceke says. The family was never informed of any procedure that would have resulted in organ removal.
Pauline died a few months later.
“Big Money”
Cases of women returning from Saudi Arabia with missing organs are not uncommon, says Adhoch. Trace Kenya knows of several cases where repatriated bodies have arrived with organs removed.
According to Migrant Rights, the lack of credible postmortems, both in the Gulf countries and in home countries, “seems almost like a deliberate attempt to diminish accusations of unethical harvesting of organs.”
Adhoch says Kenyan families rarely request second autopsies, deterred by the cost and the belief that, even if foul play is confirmed, justice is unattainable. Therefore, this phenomenon “might be more widespread than we know,” he says. “Most families simply bury their relatives. And the complaints or suspicions they have usually just go unanswered.”
When families do push for answers, they face impossible obstacles. In Saudi Arabia, bodies are traditionally buried quickly and morgue facilities are limited. “Bodies are usually just put in a cold room,” explains Adhoch. “When the body is repatriated, it is not embalmed. So by the time a second autopsy is attempted in Kenya, it’s nearly impossible to retrieve conclusive evidence.”
Even when postmortems show abuse or murder — like in Beatrice’s case — justice remains a distant dream. “With two jurisdictions, legal complexities are overwhelming,” Adhoch concedes. “Getting justice has been the hardest part.” Employers and recruiters are seldom held to account.
Saudi Arabia’s 2021 Labour Reform Initiative (LRI) excluded domestic workers from core protections. Amnesty International notes that while some reforms have been introduced, they remain limited in scope and continue to expose migrant women to exploitation, movement restrictions, and systemic abuse.
In 2022, amid increasing Kenyan migration to Saudi Arabia, the two governments signed a new bilateral labor agreement. The details were not made public.
Following public outrage over disturbing abuses during the COVID-19 pandemic — including reports of a Kenyan woman being chained to a wall while being held by a recruitment agency in Saudi Arabia — the Kenyan government introduced reforms in 2021. These included stricter oversight of recruitment agencies, requiring formal registration through the National Employment Authority (NEA), and suspending noncompliant firms.
But implementation is weak. “Policies exist, but enforcement is another issue,” Adhoch says. “There’s no proper follow-up, and many agencies still operate in the shadows.”
While more women are now migrating through registered agencies, most still travel via unregistered ones, he says. But as Nzilani of GJG points out, there is often little difference in the level of abuse. The only difference is that it’s easier to pursue accountability with a registered company. Ultimately, Adhoch says, “it’s the kafala system itself that makes women vulnerable to these abuses and breaches.”
More troubling still, some recruitment agencies are connected to senior Kenyan officials — including members of parliament and presidential advisers — who profit directly from exporting domestic workers. A recent New York Timesinvestigation revealed Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of Kenya’s National Assembly labor committee, owns an agency that sent women to abusive employers. One of President Ruto’s top advisers, Moses Kuria, and his brother, a county politician, have also been implicated.
On the Saudi side, the system is backed by powerful actors. Saudi royal family members and high-ranking officials have significant investments in major staffing agencies. Descendants of King Faisal are named shareholders in two of the largest.
In 2022, Kenya’s Commission on Administrative Justice warned that efforts to regulate recruitment were undermined by “interference by politicians who use proxies to operate the agencies.”
Adhoch says these connections often shield agencies from scrutiny. “This continues to be a big problem,” he says. “When you look into these recruitment agencies, you find directors who are ministers, presidential advisors, or maybe a county governor. There are even prominent women leaders you wouldn’t expect to be involved.”
According to Nzilani, politically connected individuals sometimes go further —harassing victims, obstructing the judicial process, or threatening families. “There is big money in this overseas recruitment business,” Adhoch adds. “That’s why everyone wants a share.”
But Kenyan women who have faced abuse are beginning to fight back. In 2023, the legal organization Kituo Cha Sheria and the rights group Hakijamii assisted thirteen former domestic workers to file a landmark lawsuit against multiple state institutions — including the NEA and the attorney general — accusing them of negligence in safeguarding migrant domestic workers’ rights.
“This is more than just a case,” says John Mwariri, the director of Kituo Cha Sheria. “It’s a call for justice — for dignity — for recognition that these women were abandoned by the very government that should have protected them.”
The lawsuit outlines harrowing violations: rape, contract substitution, trafficking, and forced suicide. It also details systemic failures, including weak bilateral labor agreements, lack of reintegration support, and poor embassy presence. The petition also calls for an immediate halt to labor migration to the Gulf until Kenya can guarantee minimum protections.
“The government cannot just pretend it is not involved in any of this,” Mwariri tells me. Kenyan courts have agreed, issuing a ruling last year that recognized the state’s responsibility to regulate recruitment agencies and protect the fundamental rights of Kenyan workers overseas.
Driven by Necessity
Despite the horror stories, many Kenyan women are still making the journey. Desperation is too deep and opportunities at home too few.
Eunice Njenga, forty-seven, endured over two years of mistreatment in Saudi Arabia starting in 2019 — working for eight families, surviving on a poor diet, often without sleep. “Every single family member is your boss, even the children,” she recalls. “They don’t look at you like a human being. You are like an object.”
When she returned to Kenya, she still couldn’t afford school fees or build the home she had promised her children. So, in 2022, she went back. Four months later, her teenage son took his own life.
Njenga begged her employer to let her return home for the burial, but her exit was blocked — reportedly by her former sponsor, who accused her of “absconding,” a criminal offense under Saudi law that refers to leaving an employer without permission. She was thrown into a deportation center — a massive hall packed with hundreds of other African women.
“There were so many of us we had to rotate sleeping — some would sleep during the day, others at night,” she says. “There was barely any food, and if you got sick, no one cared.” Njenga told her family not to bury her son until she could return. “The bill at the morgue kept rising, and I really thought I would lose my mind,” she tells me.
Njenga was eventually deported three months later, returning to Kenya with nothing — no savings and no hope. “I don’t like being around people anymore,” she says. “I just want to stay alone.”
But she understands why women continue to go. “Here in Kenya, there’s no work. We want our children educated and to have a good life. Women will keep going because we don’t have opportunities.”
Njenga sometimes still thinks of returning — fearful for her other children’s futures — but says she couldn’t survive if tragedy struck again. “It’s better to just be poor — but be with your children.”
Back in Kasarani, in the family’s one-room shack, Wanjiru grips a worn flyer the family printed when Beatrice first went missing. Her daughter’s smile beams from the page beneath the word “Missing.” Years later, the family is still searching for answers.
“How do you go to work cleaning someone’s house and then end up dead? Can someone explain to me how that works?” Wanjiru’s grief overwhelms her. Her face contorts with pain, her hands tremble, and she releases a deep, guttural cry — as if her daughter’s absence is crushing her from within.
“She went to work so she could help us,” she says. “But when she needed help, no one was there.”
“She had so many dreams and that man took all of them from her.”