Desperate to escape poverty, many Northern Nigerian women believe a Gulf job could change their lives. Instead, some meet recruiters who allegedly demand sex before processing visas. A three-month investigation shows how the exploitation begins long before they board a plane.
The Ghana-must-go bag sat in the corner of Hauwa Yusuf’s room for three weeks before she finally opened it. Inside was everything she owned: her mother’s savings from selling firewood, money her uncle had scraped together, and a loan from a neighbour who trusted her word.
Twenty-six-year-old Hauwa counted it again, it was N250,000. Enough, she had been told, to buy her freedom from poverty and get her to Saudi Arabia.
“The passport is ready, but first, you must do something for the chairman to help process your visa,” Ado had told her over the phone. She was confused and had no idea what he meant.
Hauwa, one of five children of a widow in Kano’s Dala Local Government Area, had heard of girls from her neighbourhood who went to the Middle East, sent home thousands of naira monthly and built houses. So when her aunt introduced her to Mallam Ado in 2023, she trusted him. She thought she was going to Saudi Arabia to work as a cleaner. When Ado said he had scheduled an appointment with the chairman, she agreed.
Ado came for her around 7pm, she said, telling her the busy chairman wanted to help process her visa because he sympathised with their condition. Grateful, and trusting her aunt’s introduction, she followed him in his car to a small house where she met the chairman.
“The chairman gave me a book and asked me to write my name. But before I finished writing, his hands were already on me, trying to undress me, and I shouted in fear. He showed me the documents and insisted that he wanted to help me, but it seemed I did not want to cooperate.”
Hauwa had wanted to cooperate to escape poverty, but feared committing a sin she had never imagined. “I started crying and begging him to let me go, promising that I did not want the visa anymore. He let me go, and Ado scolded me, but that was how I escaped. I could not tell anyone but my mum and my fiancé, whom I am now married to.”
Hauwa escaped. Others, this investigation found, may not have escaped across Northern Nigeria, informal agents who recruit women for jobs in the Middle East are allegedly turning the visa process itself into a tool of sexual coercion, exploiting debt, family trust and shame to keep their victims silent.
Nigerian migrants’ vulnerability to trafficking, fraudulent recruitment and sexual exploitation is well documented. What is far less documented is how one specific form of it works in Northern Nigeria that informal agents make sex a condition of processing a visa for women seeking work in the Middle East.
Over three months, this reporter interviewed 5 women and 1 former agent, across Kano, Katsina and Kaduna states, alongside a legal practitioner and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Women were identified through community and family contacts. 3 of the 5 women said they were asked for sex in connection with a visa; 1 complied and 2 refused. Some of their accounts were corroborated by close relatives.
Inside the Scheme: How Agents Trap Women
The accounts gathered here followed a similar sequence in 3 of the 5 cases. A trusted introduction, an upfront fee, withheld documents, rising costs, and finally a sexual demand framed as the price of progress.
Hassan, 35, a former agent from Katsina State, now a security guard in Kano, described a script performed countless times. “Almost always, the agent is a man known to the family or recommended by someone the family trusts,” he said. Through a phone call, the agent assures the woman he can secure her a visa to a specific Middle Eastern country, complete with a flight ticket, setting a fee between N250,000 and N800,000, depending on the country.
Once the woman pays, Hassan said, the agent claims extra costs and withholds her documents until they are settled. The debt, he said, can then be “cleared” if she complies with his sexual advances, and some agents threaten to withdraw the visa or keep the money if she refuses.
“Some of the women know that the money being withheld belongs to their parents or is a loan. They cannot put them in a difficult position. So they are left with no option but to agree,” Hassan said.
Zainab, 30, of Kaduna, now a mother, recalled an agent in 2023 who put the visa at N450,000. Her parents had taken out a loan to send her to Kuwait, and she was too embarrassed to tell them what he was asking. “He kept calling me and insisting we could arrange something. I knew what he meant.” She eventually agreed. After seven months in Kuwait, she returned to Nigeria and married, as life there was not as good as she had imagined.
Fatima, 24, a health worker from Kano, met an agent on TikTok in late 2024 while trying to migrate to Saudi Arabia. When he solicited sexual favours at a restaurant meeting, she refused, and he laughed.
“When I asked him why he would solicit that, and threatened to report it, he told me to go to NAPTIP. He said no one would believe me because it was my fault for coming to him in the first place. I left my N200,000 deposit and blocked his number.” She feared reporting to the police or NAPTIP because she had ignored her parents’ caution.
Shame, particularly in conservative communities, silences many women, compounded by the family’s financial investment.
This reporter attempted to put the specific allegations to Ado by phone and WhatsApp on three occasions, however the person picking the calls is a woman who claims she is not Ado, indicating possibility that the sim card might have been resold after months of inactivity. Meanwhile, the “chairman” could also not be identified or reached beyond the description given by Hauwa.
Where the Authorities Stand
An effort through WhatsApp messages and calls put forward to Mr. Vincent Adekoye, the spokesperson of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking In Person (NAPTIP) on whether the agency had received complaints of migration agents demanding sexual favors proved abortive with no response.
Meanwhile, the accountability gap is visible in the record. The U.S. State Department’s 2023 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report says the National Agency for the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) registered 1,634 victims in 2022: 841 sex trafficking, 543 labour trafficking and 250 unspecified, a 75 percent rise on the 935 recorded the previous year. It recorded 698 investigations in 2023, including 333 for sex trafficking, but only 24 convictions.
The 2024 TIP Report cites corruption, particularly among NAPTIP and judiciary officials, as a major impediment to prosecution, including soliciting and accepting bribes from traffickers and illegally releasing victims. For many women, there is thus no formal mechanism to complain, particularly since most Nigerian migrants leave for the Middle East through unregistered routes and agents. The NBS 2023 Nigeria migration survey found that 86 percent of respondents were unaware a government Migrants Resource Centre existed, up from 68 percent the year before. Many therefore turn to informal, unregulated agents within their communities.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) called the exploitation of women seeking work abroad a serious migrant-protection and human-rights concern. It did not confirm the specific pattern described here but acknowledged that recruitment-related exploitation and trafficking are well-documented risks due to economic vulnerability, gender inequality and weak recruitment governance. “Many women rely on informal agents, social media contacts and family networks, making it difficult to verify job offers, contracts, fees and employers,” it said.
IOM, which works with the Nigerian government on labour migration reforms and the Nigeria-Saudi Arabia arrangement, stressed that awareness alone is not enough and called for stronger oversight of recruiters, accessible reporting and protection systems, and accountability for exploitative recruitment.
The Law and Its Gap
Under the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act 2015 (TIPPEA), recruiting people through force or deception for sexual exploitation is a felony punishable by at least two years’ imprisonment and a N250,000 fine, according to the 2025 State Department TIP Report. The Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act also criminalises sexual exploitation through financial coercion. Yet women who speak out often get no justice for lack of institutional support.
Aisha Garba Yakasai, a legal practitioner and former lower court judge with over 17 years’ experience, said a demand for sex in exchange for a visa is serious and may be a criminal offence, but does not automatically establish trafficking. Section 13(2) of the TIPPEA, she said, covers anyone who recruits another person through fraud, deception, coercion or abuse of a position of vulnerability for the purpose of exploitation. “If an agent deliberately takes advantage of that vulnerability and tells the woman that she must have sex before he will process her visa or secure her employment, that conduct could form part of a trafficking scheme,” she said.
Sections 15 and 18, she noted, deal with procuring a person for sexual exploitation and with organising foreign travel that promotes exploitation. But where the evidence shows only a personal demand for sex as a visa condition, without recruitment or transportation tied to exploitation, calling it trafficking may be too broad; it may instead be sexual exploitation.
While Hauwa walked out of that small house, not every woman does. Hauwa lamented that until recruiters are held accountable and survivors can speak without shame, the road to the Gulf will remain one paved with silence.
This story was supported through the Reporting Labour Migration (RELAM) Programme implemented by StoryMi Academy, funded by GIZ Nigeria, and delivered in partnership with Diaspora Africa and Tell That Story
Writer: Usman Bello Balarabe
Editors: Chimee Adịọha, Todah Opeyemi
Art: Diaspora Africa
