The Desert Children: Over 500 Stateless Toddlers Trapped in Saudi Orphanages

RIYADH/NAIROBI – They have Kenyan blood but no Kenyan papers. They speak Arabic before they speak Swahili or Luhya or Kikuyu. They are the children born to Kenyan domestic workers in Saudi Arabia – and right now more than 500 of them are growing up in government orphanages because neither Riyadh nor Nairobi seems willing to claim them.

Senator Esther Okenyuri’s voice broke in the Senate on Tuesday as she held up blown-up photographs of toddlers with names like Fatma Amina from Vihiga, Abdullah Kipchoge from Eldoret, and Noor Nasra from Mombasa. “These are Kenyan children by blood,” she said. “Yet when their mothers were deported for the crime of falling pregnant, Kenya washed its hands and said ‘not our problem.’”

The story follows a grim pattern. A Kenyan woman arrives on a two-year kafala contract. She is confined to the employer’s home, her passport confiscated. Some enter consensual relationships with other migrant workers; others are assaulted by employers or their sons. When pregnancy is discovered, sponsors terminate the contract and hand the woman to police. Saudi law does not grant automatic citizenship to children born on its soil unless the father acknowledges paternity – something almost never done.

Mothers are deported within weeks, often still bleeding from emergency caesareans. The newborns are placed in state orphanages. To bring the child home, the mother needs a DNA test (cost: Sh150,000–Sh300,000), a Saudi birth certificate, a Kenyan passport, and an exit visa – a bureaucratic mountain most cannot climb.

One mother, 29-year-old Mercy Anyango from Siaya, speaks to her two-year-old daughter Habiba only through 30-second videos sent by a Filipino orphanage worker. “She calls the worker ‘mama’,” Mercy told VCDigest, sobbing. “I just want to hold her once before she forgets my face.”

Haki Africa has documented 528 cases since 2020. The real number is likely higher. Some children have already been adopted by Saudi families under Islamic law, vanishing forever from Kenyan records. Diaspora Kenyans in the U.S. and UK have raised Sh41 million in the past month for DNA tests and legal fees, but the Saudi Ministry of Human Resources insists each case must go through the courts – a process that can take years.

Labour PS Peter Tum promised a rescue mission before Christmas, but privately admits Kenya has no bilateral child-welfare agreement with Riyadh. For now, hundreds of toddlers fall asleep under fluorescent lights in Riyadh and Jeddah, clutching teddy bears donated by strangers, waiting for mothers who may never be allowed to return.