Low-skilled Migrant Workers and Private Recruitment Agencies in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Analysis of Exploitation and Regulatory Gaps

This article discusses the role of private recruitment agencies in the exploitation and regulatory non-compliance in low-skilled labour migration in Sub-Saharan Africa, with specific reference to Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia, and the main routes to the labour markets of the Gulf Cooperation Council. We consider exploitation to be an abuse at the recruitment stage (lures and false advertisement, high-priced recruitment, contract replacement and debt-based coercion) and downstream employment harms (wage theft). We triangulate using a mixed-method design: (a) harmonised microdata ( n = 5,000) from the World Bank Migration and Remittances Survey on the level of forced labour and wage theft on social media; (b) 50 semi-structured interviews with returnee migrants; (c) 10,000 posts on social media analysed using natural language processing and identifying themes of digital recruitment deception and complaints. The results of the logistic regression show that agency fees exceeding $500 (OR = 2.1) and verbal contracts (OR = 1.5) significantly increase the probability of wage theft. Female migrant workers were three times more likely to report wage theft compared to male migrant workers (OR = 3.0, 95% CI = 2.3 to 3.8, p < .001), after controlling for other covariates in the model. A Random Forest model finds that the strongest signal of trafficking risk (AUC = 0.89) is a fake job ad, supported by interview accounts of online fraud and hidden fees. To illustrate the existence of regulatory gaps, we map pertinent international standards (International Labour Organization [ILO] Convention No. 181; the 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labour Convention; ILO Fair Recruitment guidance; International Organization for Migration/International Recruitment Integrity System (IRIS) and the Montreal Recommendations; and Global Compact for Migration Objective 6) and demonstrate how the practices that have been observed indicate a verifiable failure in compliance and gaps in enforcement. Some of the policy suggestions involve an authorised Fair Recruitment Ledger to verify licences, job orders, fee schedules and contract hashes, and to address privacy and decadence threats while addressing privacy, data-governance and implementation risks through regulator-centred governance.