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In early March, Hirut* was playing with her toddler at her home in Addis Ababa’s Mekanisa district, when she got a call from an unknown number asking if she wanted to work in the Middle East.
It came as a shock for the 27-year-old, who spent six years as a domestic worker in Kuwait before returning to Ethiopia in 2020.
“I was afraid because I thought they might be human traffickers and wondered how they found my name and number,” she told Al Jazeera.
The callers told Hirut that they were state employees, who had obtained her file from a government database for returnee migrants from…
