Table 1 provides working definitions for types of migration intermediaries in Ethiopia. These categories were identified during analysis to address the challenges of working with raw data collected in 2 Ethiopian languages. It was not possible to accurately capture in English all the nuanced differences in terms applied to the many types of people who assist migrants; furthermore, even in the same language, terms were not always used consistently. As a result, we have made the decision to use the following definitions systematically throughout the text, including in translation of direct excerpts from interview transcripts.

Table 1 Working definitions of intermediaries of Ethiopian women’s migration into domestic work abroad

Twenty-eight informal facilitators were interviewed, 26 of whom were recruited from Hadiya. Four facilitators were female, all in Hadiya. While facilitators reported knowing that registration was a legal requirement for placing domestic workers into work opportunities abroad, they believed this prerequisite was untenable and unpopular with migrants, their families, and facilitators alike as well as an insufficient means to protect migrants. They also displayed confusion around exact stipulations of the law regarding whether an informal association with registered PEA meant they were operating legally (e.g. if they transferred local migrants to a registered PEA in Addis Ababa).

We identified four main themes demonstrating facilitators’ engagement with or avoidance of Ethiopia’s legal framework for migration. First, rural areas and regional cities were considered to be different from the capital, Addis Ababa, where laws are made and regulations are managed. Outside Addis Ababa, facilitators felt registration to be both difficult to arrange and not prioritised by prospective migrants, disincentivising their compliance. Second, facilitators’ ability to circumvent legal requirements was seen to be an important advantage they offered prospective migrants, who wanted to expedite their departure and reduce costs and bureaucracy. Third, accountability for migrants’ safety was difficult to situate with any given individual when numerous and diverse types of people were sequentially involved in sending a migrant abroad. And finally, facilitators did not believe they could realistically safeguard migrants once they were outside of Ethiopia and assumed that the responsibility for migrants’ safety lay with licensed agencies to which they claimed to link migrants.

Rural needs versus urban policy

At the time of data collection, our study found there were no licensed PEA located at the regional level or zones (one administrative step down from regional government) in either field site. Respondents reported that all registered agencies were in Addis Ababa, despite the fact that both Hadiya and Bahir Dar are known to be major migration “hot spots” in the country. One barrier to obtaining a PEA licence related to administrative difficulties, as described by a female facilitator who had considered the option:

From highest to lowest levels of government there are challenges to get a license to engage in this facilitation process. …They [government] makes the process to get a license complicated and difficult to complete. The bureaucracy is very tedious … and they are not happy to give the license for facilitators in a short period of time [quickly] even though we fulfill the requirements. (Facilitator 2, Hadiya, Female).

Most facilitators described referring rural migrants on to registered recruitment agencies in Addis Ababa, doing this informally because there is no way for them to obtain legal recognition for an intermediary role. These facilitators explained that community members therefore think they are part of the regulated system.

I am in informal facilitator, but people in this community consider me as a formal facilitator (Facilitator 22, Hadiya, male).

My role is supplying women to a certified person in Addis Ababa. … I call a legal person who works in Addis Ababa, he arranges everything including food and a place to stay [prior to flight]. … There should be agencies locally. For example, we don’t have legal agencies in Hosanna. … I can do nothing different. It [operating informally] is a risk [that I take] (Facilitator 3, Hadiya, male).

One facilitator interviewed in Hadiya claimed to be registered, although he did not provide any documentation to this effect, and other facilitators suggested this was unlikely. Later in the interview, he described how he processes migration as far as Addis Ababa, after which a separate agency takes responsibility for sending women abroad and placing them into domestic work; it is possible (but impossible to verify) that this second agency has a license, and thus the local facilitator believes that he is also registered. In reality, it is probably very difficult for either prospective migrants or facilitators to be sure of the legal status of any agency located in Addis Ababa, and they are likely to trust what they are told by the agency staff.

It would be difficult for prospective migrants to seek registered recruiters in Addis Ababa, not only due to the distance and cost of travel, but because they prefer to rely on personal networks and existing relationships of trust within their rural communities. For example, three of the four female informal facilitators who participated in this study reported being returnees themselves. Some remained in contact with former employers abroad, using these families to identify others who required Ethiopian domestic workers. They also relied on word-of-mouth recommendations within their own communities to fill positions with prospective migrants from their own community networks.

Whenever my former employers … asked me to bring domestic workers for them, I tell them that I have got relatives and neighbours that I know and who are in need. They tell me to bring them a housemaid and I will ask them to cover their visa, ticket, and transportation expenses as well as their clothing expense, and they will take them. (Facilitator 4, Hadiya, Female).

One woman referred to an “office” in the (unspecified) destination country with which she is affiliated, and that “friends” there are responsible for picking up newly arrived Ethiopian migrants and taking them to their employers. These staff members also handled any requests for a change in contract/post from either the domestic worker or employer, which is contractually permitted within 3 months before finalising employment. These colleagues are later described to be Arabic-speaking Ethiopian nationals.

My friends are in the office, so when the women arrive, they will pick them up, hire them, change their house if they are not comfortable, and arrange some money [salary payment] with the Arabs and send us some money. (Facilitator 21, Hadiya, female).

In situations in which the facilitator has direct contacts in the destination country, rural migrants can avoid liaising with PEA in Addis Ababa altogether, and prioritise the facilitator’s personal connection over assurances offered by agents whom they do not know or necessarily trust. Furthermore, before a migrant travels to Addis Ababa airport, the main tasks need to be completed at the local level by informal facilitators, including obtaining ID from the local kebele office (village civil authority), applying for a passport, and arranging transportation and accommodation in district towns or regional capitals, as noted by one facilitator:

The most significant assistance I provide to migrants is for obtaining a kebele identification card and passport (Facilitator 1, Hadiya, male).

Circumventing regulations as unique selling point

In addition to offering personal contacts and familiarity with local systems, informal facilitators provide services outside the parameters of the Overseas Employment Proclamation. Respondents explained how migrants wanted to leave Ethiopia as soon as possible once they decide to seek employment abroad, often without even knowing to which country they would go. Many seek to keep their costs as low as possible.

Some migrants travel overland from Ethiopia into Sudan or Djibouti and continue by boat, via Yemen, a route recognised to be especially dangerous [47]. From Yemen, migrants continue on foot or by vehicle. The overland route is less common for female migrants seeking domestic work, but may have increased due to COVID-19 travel restrictions that limited international air travel options. The illegality of overland labour migration has been well-publicised throughout Ethiopia, and thus anyone seeking this option must rely on informal facilitators with good connections.

I have colleagues [government officials] who work with me by getting involved in different activities. For example, I deal with police officials who assisted during border crossing to easily pass the migrants (Facilitator 23, Hadiya, male).

Collaboration with authorities is particularly important for overland travel, as borders remain heavily monitored.

We are working very closely with the police force and local administrators. You know, if you don’t have a very close person in the local and lower administrative hierarchy you cannot travel an inch with 20 migrants in your hands, aiming to cross borders. Likewise, friends in Sudan have their own close contacts to make travel fast and support migrants to reach their destination countries (Facilitator 27, Bahir Dar, male).

However, most women depart from Addis Ababa airport, where paperwork is more likely to be checked. Facilitators explained that prospective migrants view meeting eligibility criteria, completing pre-departure medical checks, undergoing pre-departure vocational training, and obtaining the Certificate of Competence (CoC) as barriers to overcome rather than important safeguards. As a result, informal facilitators’ unregulated status was perceived as an advantage over licensed PEA, something facilitators could capitalise on by advertising their ability to eschew regulations.

I know formally registered agencies need several documents such as CoC, certified educational documents and training documents. When travelling through informal means there is no need for such kind of certificates. They [migrants] need only money. Therefore, using informal facilitators is faster than the formal facilitators (Facilitator 28, Bahir Dar, male).

In fact, some requirements had changed between 2016 and 2020, including proof of having completed 8th grade. Awareness of efforts to streamline the migration process had largely not filtered down to community level at the time of this study, making the use of informal facilitators appear very advantageous.

Another way that facilitators can hasten the migration process is to forge required documents. Respondents described how training certificates, proof of educational attainment, and medical checks could be provided by facilitators. In addition to meeting migrants’ desire for speed, forging documents provided facilitators with an additional source of income.

If she wants to train and earn the CoC she pays 2500 birr, but if she doesn’t want to do so, we will prepare a CoC and she pays 3500 birr (Facilitator 20, Hadiya, male).

Although obtaining false documents is clearly a breach of the law, it makes it possible for the migrant to then be passed on to a registered PEA and migrate via the regular systems. Without any documents, migrants need to rely on a local facilitator to place them into employment abroad, as described by female facilitators from Hadiya who used their personal connections from their previous domestic work abroad. Once an informal facilitator has helped a prospective migrant procure her ID, passport, CoC and health certificate – whether legitimately or illicitly – she can enter the migration pathway set forth in the Proclamation if she then migrates using a PEA that does not scrutinise the authenticity of her documents or how she got them.

Recruitment chains are long and tangled

We identified a complex web of social and professional networks engaged in moving women from their local communities to their eventual destination. The informal facilitators are, as already described, often the first point of contact. They may be sought by a prospective migrant or members of her family, although some facilitators proactively sought local women who might be interested in enlisting their services.

We directly approach them [potential migrants] based on information from different sources. We get information from her friends, families or others, for example that a particular woman has a passport and is searching for a facilitator to help her (Facilitator 8, Hadiya, male).

Once a woman has found an “entry point” into the migration process, she will then be passed on to other facilitators who take on different roles as she progresses. While local facilitators may help her obtain the kebele ID and direct her to a passport office, they may then hand her over to someone who works more regionally and organises transport to Addis Ababa, or in the case of Bahir Dar, over the land border to travel via Sudan.

They come to Hossana [from rural villages] and I will send them to Addis in a public bus. I will send the car’s plate number and their name list via the [social media platform] telegram to the facilitator in Addis Ababa (Facilitator 5, Hadiya, male).

We send migrants mainly through Metema [to Sudan] and Afar [to Djibouti] then to Yemen and then to other Arab countries. First, we collect migrants from different [rural] areas through networking with other facilitators. After collecting migrants from these agents, we directly send them to another agent in Metema, then another agent from Sudan or Djibouti receives them and sends through water transportation to another Arab country (Facilitator 27, Bahir Dar, male).

As suggested above, migration facilitation, especially overland travel, can involve a very loosely connected network of numerous actors, most of whom are not official. The local informal facilitators are often the only individuals with whom migrants have direct contact. Their subsequent links are to facilitators with whom they communicate by phone or online through platforms such as Facebook. Facilitators taking an intermediary role higher up the “chain” reported wanting to avoid detection and thus operated “behind the scenes,” relying on local brokers to make the initial introduction.

Most of the time migrant women can’t find me face to face. . most of the time our contact is by phone. . because police officials may follow us to arrest or jail us (Facilitator 24, Hadiya, male).

Both community members and facilitators themselves are unaware of how many people are in the “chain” that eventually gets migrants abroad. As a result, women value their first point of contact most, and put their trust in them, without much thought about who will take ultimate responsibility for their travel and placement.

They put their trust in the beginning with … a relative or a family or a friend, that’s how trust is built, with a person that connects migrants to a broker or agency. (Facilitator 11, Hadiya, male).

The facilitators interviewed for this study represented different links in these long facilitation chains. They described networks of facilitators that included cooperation with local authorities who support their practice and share financial benefits. For example, facilitators cooperated with religious leaders, health extension workers, all the way up the system to employees of government and business offices.

There is a strong chain of migration: officers in government offices like the immigration office, embassies, airlines, police, foreign minister and other offices violate rules and work with informal facilitators. (Facilitator 5, Hadiya, male).

For those migrants who do not go overland, eventually the prospective migrant reaches an agent in Addis Ababa, through at least two and often many more steps, many of which brought them in contact with a diverse mix of regular and irregular actors (or, indeed, regular actors operating outside the legal framework). The length and density of migration “chains” mean that migrants and their families are entirely unaware of how migration is being arranged, thus making it impossible to hold any particular individual accountable for subsequent difficulties. Facilitators themselves did not always appear to know their exact position in a “chain” nor how many links there might be.

Duty of care not realistic

According to informal facilitators based in Hadiya Zone and Bahir Dar, migrants’ safety was ensured by using legally registered recruitment agencies for the final step of the journey, i.e., sending women out of the country. Overall, community-based facilitators who referred prospective migrants to someone in Addis Ababa said that these facilitators would protect migrants at destination because they believed the agencies operated according to legal requirements.

I hand them to the licensed person. . I do believe they will [protect migrants] because I work with a licensed facilitator (Facilitator 18, Hadiya, male).

Agencies that are registered are better for everything. They take responsibility to keep the migrants safe and to return them in case of accident or danger (Facilitator 3, Hadiya, male).

Whether facilitators genuinely believe (or know) that they are referring migrants to licensed agencies is impossible to verify. Only one facilitator described going through a process of verification about the status of the recruitment agency to which he sends local migrants:

My role is to go and check that agency, I see in which office it is based, if it’s real, I check if it is legal … if it is licensed by the government and if it has no problems, otherwise I wouldn’t recommend our sisters to a random agent, just for the sake of money. (Facilitator 11, Hadiya, male).

Beyond assuming that sending agents will protect migrants, the facilitators interviewed in this study did not consider themselves to be responsible for securing the safety of migrants once they had been passed further up the “chain” towards departure.

My responsibility will end after migrants reach another facilitator. ... Frankly speaking almost all informal agents do not think about responsible recruitment. Rather they are focusing on making money (Facilitator 28, Bahir Dar, male).

Furthermore, community-based facilitators did not believe they could assist migrants abroad. This was primarily for practical reasons, as most of the interviewed facilitators worked at local level, and either had no links in destination countries or were not able to exert any influence over them. Facilitators were unable to identify ways that they would be able to access a migrant who experienced difficulties in another country, as several explained:

It depends on her luck, and if we meet a good person, we will help, but we don’t have the confidence and the ability to take her out of the situation (Facilitator 16, Hadiya, male).

Yes, [I can protect them] until they reach Sudan, I can deliver any protection but sometimes there are uncertain situations especially from security personnel. But to speak honestly, I am afraid I cannot deliver any protection once they are out of Ethiopia. You know things are out of our control and it depends upon the strength of our colleagues working in Sudan and Saudi Arabia [Facilitator 27, Bahir Dar, male).

Moreover, facilitators know that they are operating illegally, and fear being arrested, so are therefore unwilling to draw attention to themselves by trying to intervene or alert the authorities.

Leave alone protecting the migrants, I am not able to protect myself as I am in an illegal line of business. Only the migrants themselves are responsible for protecting themselves. (Facilitator 5, Hadiya, male).

As noted above, facilitators are unlikely to assist migrants because of their limited reach beyond Ethiopia’s borders and because of the risk of making themselves known to others involved in an irregular migration process.