How Tanzanian domestic workers in Muscat suffer horrid brutalities under Oman’s Kafala system

There are a number of Tanzanian ladies suffering serious exploitation and abuse in Oman.

The Human Rights Association (HRA) has just released a statement calling on the Government of Oman to take immediate and enforceable action to end the systematic exploitation of Tanzanian domestic workers.

The Tanzanian workers, mostly ladies, have reportedly been suffering horrible treatment on Omani territory.

In their statement, the Human Rights Association (HRA) now wants Muscat to dismantle the kafala visa-sponsorship arrangements that enable employers and recruitment agents to hold Tanzanian women in conditions of forced labor.

Oman is also required to investigate, prosecute, and hold accountable those responsible for the physical abuse, sexual violence, wage theft, and document confiscation to which Tanzanian women are subjected in Omani households and detention facilities.

“The exploitation of Tanzanian domestic workers in Oman is not incidental …”

“… It is structural, documented, and enabled by Omani law and Omani institutions,” stated Saad Kassis-Mohamed, the chairperson of Human Rights Association (HRA), calling on Oman to end the exploitation and Prosecute those Responsible.

Scale of Exploitation

More Than Half of Tanzanian Domestic Workers Experience Trafficking Abroad.

According to HRA, the United States Department of State’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report identifies Oman as a destination country for Tanzanian women trafficked into domestic servitude.

The report confirms that Zanzibar is increasingly used as a transit point to move Tanzanian women to Oman, where they are subsequently exploited in domestic servitude.

A research study published in January 2024 found that more than half of Tanzanian domestic workers experienced trafficking during their employment abroad.

Oman is among the primary destinations documented in that research.

“The documented abuses are systematic rather than exceptional,” HRA maintains.

Tanzanian women employed as domestic workers in Oman report working between fifteen and twenty-one hours per day with no rest day and no day off.

Employers routinely confiscate passports and identity documents on arrival, making independent departure structurally impossible.

Women who attempt to leave abusive employers are classified by Omani authorities as having absconded under the kafala system and are returned to those employers by police, detained, or compelled to forfeit their unpaid wages in exchange for permission to leave the country.

In documented cases, workers who sought assistance from the Omani Ministry of Manpower reported that officials did not believe their accounts and sided with the employer.

The legal and institutional framework of Oman does not protect these women. It protects the employers who exploit them.

Documented Cases

Amina and Amina and Fatuma: Two Accounts from Muscat

Among the accounts reviewed by the HRA is that of Amina, a 29-year-old woman from Zanzibar who was recruited through an agent promising a domestic position in Muscat at a salary of three hundred US dollars per month.

On arrival, her passport was confiscated by her employer.

She was required to be on call from before five in the morning until after midnight, cleaning, cooking, and caring for four children with no weekly rest.

When she asked for her salary after two months, her employer told her the recruitment fee had not yet been cleared and that she owed money before she could be paid.

She was not paid for four months

When she attempted to contact the Tanzanian embassy, her telephone was taken.

A second account concerns Fatuma, a 34-year-old woman from Dar es Salaam who was employed in a household in Muscat where she was subjected to regular physical violence by her employer’s wife, including beatings with household objects.

She was housed in a storage room with no window, given food once a day, and denied contact with anyone outside the household.

After seven months she escaped on foot to a police station.

She was held for three weeks in a deportation facility before being returned to Tanzania without her wages, without her personal belongings, and without any legal recourse against those who had held her.

These accounts are consistent with the structural pattern documented across dozens of cases: fraudulent recruitment, document confiscation, excessive working hours, unpaid wages, physical abuse, and the use of Omani immigration enforcement as the instrument of last resort to return workers to their exploiters or remove them from the country without remedy.

The Kafala System

How Omani Law Enables and Protects Exploitation

Oman’s kafala visa-sponsorship system is the structural mechanism through which this exploitation is sustained.

Under kafala, a domestic worker’s legal status in Oman is tied entirely to her employer. She cannot change employers, leave the country, or seek alternative accommodation without her employer’s consent.

If she leaves without permission, she is classified as having absconded, a status that exposes her to arrest, detention, and deportation.

The system makes the worker entirely dependent on the goodwill of the employer and entirely without recourse when that goodwill is absent.

The domestic workers there are explicitly excluded from the protections of Oman’s Labour Law.

They have no statutory right to a maximum working day, no right to a weekly rest day, no right to sick leave, and no right to annual leave equivalent to that available to workers in other sectors.

The contracts signed by Tanzanian domestic workers before departure carry no legal standing in Oman.

Employers who breach those contracts face no enforceable sanction. The HRA calls on Oman to extend full labor law protections to domestic workers without exception, and to abolish the kafala provisions that prevent domestic workers from leaving abusive employment situations.

HRA wants steps taken

Prosecution, Protection, and Structural Reform

The HRA calls on Oman to take immediate action to investigate and prosecute the recruitment agents and employers responsible for the physical abuse, sexual violence, document confiscation, and wage theft documented in this release and in the broader body of evidence on this subject.

The impunity with which Omani employers and agents have operated is not an accident.

It is the product of an enforcement environment in which complaints by domestic workers are systematically disbelieved, in which the immigration system is weaponized against those who report abuse, and in which no employer has faced meaningful criminal accountability for what has been done to Tanzanian women in their households.

The HRA calls on Oman to establish an independent and accessible complaint mechanism for domestic workers that does not expose complainants to immigration enforcement, to guarantee the right of all domestic workers to retain their own identity documents, to ensure that all workers who have been denied wages are able to recover those wages before departure

regardless of their immigration status, and to guarantee that Tanzanian women who have been subjected to violence in Oman have access to medical care, legal assistance, and safe shelter.