African workers in Lebanon are stuck and unpaid by an exploitative labor system worsened by Covid

The future for Yemi, a Nigerian former student, was laid out in a contract written in Arabic which she signed in an office in Lagos in June 2019 to enable a recruitment agency bring her to work in Lebanon.

She couldn’t understand anything in the contract but decided to take a leap of faith and leave Nigeria for a domestic job looking after a family in Lebanon. Yemi, who is 30, was leaving behind a sick mother had few funds to help her after struggling to find a decent paid job in Nigeria.

But once in Lebanon, she kept on being forced to change employment after a short while—as many as three times. The first family she worked for physically assaulted her, she says. There were regular beatings. In the next job one member of the family tried to sexually abuse her so she escaped. Instead of protecting her, the recruitment agency reassigned her to a third family.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.