This article originally appeared on Gulf Times:

NEPAL doesn’t permit its women to take up employment as housemaids in the GCC states, a top Nepalese embassy official said yesterday.

Giving this information to Gulf Times, the embassy spokesman said it had come to the mission’s notice of late that women from the Himalayan country were being brought illegally for employment to GCC states.

The embassy official said some illegal manpower agents in Nepal and their “contacts” in the GCC states, including Qatar, were behind the illegal recruitment. He said that the Nepalese government, through a recent order, had formally banned the recruitment of Nepalese women as housemaids in the GCC states.
The mission’s official said there had been some instances of women from his country being taken illegally to such countries as Saudi Arabia and Malaysia to be employed as housemaids, which prompted the Himalayan nation’s government to formally announce a ban on such recruitment.

“While we are not against sending our women to be employed in organised sectors such as restaurant waiters, cleaners, saleswomen and security guards in the country’s business establishments, we don’t encourage our women to be employed as housemaids in GCC homes,” the embassy official said.

The spokesman said a woman from Nepal had reached the country some days ago to take up job as a housemaid at a Qatari home. She was held up at the airport as there was none to pick her up from there, he said.

“An embassy official on his routine visit to the airport fortunately met her and brought the lady to the mission,” the official said.

When the mission quizzed her it was found that the woman had flown to Delhi and from there travelled Qatar. “She had used an illegal channel to reach Doha even though she claimed that she had not paid any money to the agent in Kathmandu,” the embassy official said.

The agent involved in the deal was a Delhi-based woman, he said.

Now, efforts are on to send her back and she could travel home in a day or two, the official said.
Asked if Nepalese women were prevented from working as housemaids only in the GCC states and Malaysia, the official said there was no opposition to them being employed in Lebanese homes.

“To my understanding, the rules also permit Nepalese women to be employed in some other countries of the region, but certainly not within the GCC.”