Credits: "Enate" created by the Ethiopian-Eritrean American Artist Mygenet Tesfaye Harris
By: Bethlehem Wolde
The exploitation of Ethiopian women in the migrant labour industry represents a sustained violation of international human rights. Despite years of policy interventions, hundreds of thousands of women continue to migrate to the Middle East each year under conditions that leave them vulnerable to abuse. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), approximately 400,000 Ethiopian women currently work in the region, predominantly as domestic workers.
The Ethiopian government has attempted to deter this exploitative labour industry, vastly focusing on making the legal process to work abroad more difficult. It employed, in particular, policies like the Overseas Employment Proclamation as a solution. However, these approaches negate the intersectional domestic conditions faced by Ethiopian women that push them towards migrant labour and limit their ability to develop their capabilities. Despite the adoption of the United Nations International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, Ethiopia’s failure to ratify it has left rural Ethiopian women vulnerable to an industry that values their profitability as migrant labourers over their personhood.
Ethiopia’s policies and proclamations have failed to adequately safeguard these women because of the consistent utilisation of top-down approaches that overlook the root causes driving women to seek employment abroad. Rather than treating the illness, the Ethiopian government has only been treating symptoms.
With restricted access to education, scarce domestic employment opportunities, and gender-based familial responsibilities, migrant work presents itself as the only path forward. To effectively support these women, this piece argues that the Ethiopian government must shift from reactive policy interventions to a bottom-up capabilities approach. The Ethiopian government must recognise that the problem is not that these women are not able to make the right employment choices; the problem is that they do not have enough choices at home.
Current human rights discourse on how to put a stop to exploitative migrant labour industries centres solely on condemning host countries like Saudi Arabia’s kafala system. Though legitimate, this method treats only the symptoms, not the source of the problem. What is missing is a human rights agenda rooted in women’s lived realities and capabilities. Such a human rights-based approach offers sustainable solutions, ones that focus on empowering Ethiopian women to build dignified lives at home rather than endure exploitation abroad. A capabilities approach would prioritise the livelihoods of these women before migration begins and they are succumbed by this domestic migrant labour industry.
Contextualising the Issue: Structural Barriers and Human Rights Violations
Under Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Article 6 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), every individual has the right to work in conditions of dignity and security. For rural Ethiopian women, this right is systematically denied long before migration begins.
A recent Anti-Trafficking Review study reveals how economic deprivation and gendered expectations drive women toward the domestic labour market abroad. The researchers of this study conducted 100 interviews with women across rural regions, showing that limited access to education, familial dependence on remittances, and social norms around caregiving combine to narrow their choices. 55% dropout rates among rural girls, combined with inadequate national exam support and domestic responsibilities, reinforce this inequality.
The conditions these women endure deny them their fundamental right to education, as protected by Article 26 of the UDHR, and directly contravene the gender equality commitments established by CEDAW. Without access to education or having specialised technical skills, domestic work abroad appears to be one of the few reliable ways to secure an immediate income capable of supporting both these women’s families and themselves. Thus, labour migration arises as a choice moulded by systemic inequality and structural coercion.
Assessing Existing Policy Frameworks: Why Top-Down Solutions Fail
Efforts to uplift and develop the capabilities of lower-income Ethiopian women have existed for decades, yet hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian women still seek work overseas. To dissect this, we must go back to the 1990s. Advised by the United Nations Women’s Watch, Ethiopia’s National Policy on Ethiopian Women (1993, revised 2022) increased the political and legal recognition of Ethiopian women, aligning with global commitments such as CEDAW. As a state party to CEDAW, Ethiopia has the responsibility to fulfil the requirements of Article 14, which requires states to ensure equal access to economic, educational, social, and organizing opportunities for rural women. This responsibility was further reassured in the A National Report on Progress made in the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action put forth by Ethiopia’s Prime Minister's Office and Women's Affairs Sub Sector in 2004. In this report, Ethiopia reiterated that it would commit to “Facilitating the necessary conditions whereby rural women can have access to basic social services and to ways and means of lightening their work load”. Since then, organisations such as the Mulu Tesfa Domestic Workers Association (MTDWA) and the Organization for Women in Self Employment (WISE) in Addis Ababa have supported women’s economic independence.
Despite all these efforts, it may be said that still nothing truly changed. This raises the question as to why? Well, these initiatives fall short because they remain focused on women in urban communities and overlook the experiences of rural, low-income women.
Additionally, migrant labour recruitment agencies often operate outside formal protections, limiting the scope of what unions can achieve. Even within the IOM framework on Labour Mobility and Social Inclusion of Migrants, proposed workshops and training programmes remain vague and poorly implemented.
This failure constitutes a broader violation of Ethiopia’s duty to uphold the human rights of Ethiopian women living in rural communities. By neglecting to create domestic conditions that allow women to achieve dignified livelihoods, the state indirectly perpetuates the cycle of exploitation that characterises the migrant labour system.
Rethinking Human Rights Through a Capabilities Lens
To move beyond reactionary and fragmented policy, this piece argues that Ethiopia must adopt a capabilities approach rooted in the work of Martha Nussbaum, one that prioritises expanding women’s real freedoms and choices. Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is a framework that emphasizes human dignity and the autonomous expression of choice. With its focus on feminist social justice, prioritizing capability-building means ensuring women’s access to a full range of opportunities, free from social, economic, or political constraints.
A capabilities approach would operationalise Ethiopia’s obligations under Articles 11 and 14 CEDAW, which call for equal employment opportunities and the advancement of rural women. Moreover, this approach would align with the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goals 5 and 8.
This framework would apply an intersectional lens that considers how poverty, education gaps, and gender norms shape women’s migration decisions. For meaningful change, the Ethiopian government, international bodies, and humanitarian organisations must redirect their focus toward capacity building before migration. This includes funding and loan programmes that make higher education accessible, as well as tutoring and training initiatives that help women pass national qualifying exams. Similar to India’s Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ethiopia should expand funded programmes that create sustainable, women-centred employment and leadership opportunities in rural areas.
Ethiopia’s policy development and funding allocation need to ensure livelihood protections through increased wages, unionisation rights, and equitable rural employment. International humanitarian aid must support these community-based investments while enforcing accountability and strict regulations on recruitment agencies that exploit young women seeking work abroad.
Conclusion: Building Dignity at Home
International human rights law obliges states not only to protect citizens abroad but to enable them to thrive at home. While Ethiopia continues forming agreements with Middle Eastern countries to regulate migrant labour, such efforts overlook the heart of the issue. Weak enforcement and unlicensed agencies allow abuses to persist. These are urgent human rights concerns demanding intervention centred on Ethiopian reform.
Rather than focusing on making passage abroad harder, progress depends on Ethiopia addressing its own structural failures to protect and empower its women. This bottom-up, capabilities-focused approach not only strengthens women’s economic autonomy but also addresses the root causes that make migrant domestic labour appear as their only option.
Bio:
Bethlehem Wolde is a Graduate Student at the American University School of International Service and a Research Fellow at the Futures of Democracy, Tech, and Human Rights Lab.