Header photo: Recruits in the Amhara regional city of Woldia, Ethiopia attend a pre-departure training session for migrant domestic workers. The Ethiopian government says by mid April - less than two months into a recruitment campaign - 36,000 women had registered for a program that sees women sent to Saudi Arabia for domestic work. TITLE: Facebook ads for Ethiopian workers enable forced labour in Saudi Arabia, critics say Human rights researchers condemn domestic worker program, citing exploitation and rampant abuse. Zecharias Zelalem. On a hidden cellphone from her place of detention, Ethiopian domestic worker Fikirte recounts her harrowing ordeal. Flown from Ethiopia to Saudi Arabia, she toiled for weeks for a married Saudi couple, cleaning floors and evading the man’s advances, until she fainted from hunger and exhaustion. Her employers sent her back, unpaid, to a recruitment agency in Riyadh, complaining that she was too weak for the job. The agency confined her in a locked room with other foreign workers and confiscated their passports and cellphones as it awaited new assignments for them. Fikirte, a 31-year-old from northern Ethiopia with an infant son, had placed her trust in a government advertisement that she saw on Facebook this year, enticing women to Saudi Arabia under a scheme to export 500,000 Ethiopian women for domestic work in the oil-rich kingdom.
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