INNOVETH: Innovative Health Intervention for Migrant Ethiopian Domestic Workers in the Middle East

Every year, approximately 200,000 Ethiopian women and young girls migrate legally and illegally to the Middle East. Economic crisis, a rising unemployment and civil war contribute to this massive migration. To curb the illegal aspect of migration, governments have signed bilateral agreements. This requires rigorous pre-emigration medical check-up for MDWs.

Nevertheless, MDWs are subject to overwork, mental health challenges, and limited healthcare access.

MDWs’ limited awareness of their legal and medical entitlements and the nature of their work deemed them hard-to-reach.

However, MDWs maintain their pre-emigration social connections with agencies and peers through telephone calls or social media. These can be utilised to provide health intervention tailored to their needs.

We propose leveraging big data generated as part of the emigration process, social networks and innovative technology to provide healthcare support to these women.

We aim 1) to use epidemiological and data science methods to understand key health problems of MDWs; 2) develop simple models for risk-stratification on mental, sexual, and reproductive health; 3) design a risk-differentiated and transdisciplinary intervention aimed at empowerment of MDWs and strengthening of their resilience and social networks; 4) implement and evaluate the impact and cost-effectiveness of the intervention through a clustered randomised control trial.