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Silvia Cirillo
Anuac
Conceptualizing practices of care in women’s lives. A domestic work case study in Ethiopia and Tanzania
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Silvia Cirillo
2023/05/02
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5207
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Università di Urbino, Italy
2239-625X
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Conceptualizing practices of care in women’s lives. A domestic work case study in Ethiopia and Tanzania
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                                                2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 3-28




Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives
A domestic work case study in Ethiopia and Tanzania

Silvia Cirillo
Università di Urbino



Abstract: Drawing from the lived experiences of female domestic workers in Ethiopia
and Tanzania, this article illustrates different ways in which domestic work can be prac-
ticed and defined in both countries. It analyses women’s narratives in the present and
past tense to explore different situations before and after they come into contact with
an NGO that advocates for domestic workers’ rights. Since their childhood, the women
interviewed have worked in various kin and non-kin households, and performed different
types of domestic work (formal and informal, paid and unpaid, live-in and live-out). The
asymmetrical and hierarchical relationships between employees and employers are am-
biguous and often confused with kinship or distant kinship. These ambiguities come to
the fore precisely when projects fostered by labour activists aim at the formalization of
hired care work, that is, skilled employment made up of clearly defined tasks, regulated
by written contracts, rights and responsibilities. In contexts where labor protections are
poorly enforced, proposals to formalize domestic work can provide an essential reference
point for the collective mobilization of women workers. At the same time, proposed solu-
tions favoring the formalization of hired work might clash with local realities and not
necessarily be perceived as appropriate by domestic workers.

Keywords: Domestic work; Worker’s rights; Gender; Ethiopia; Tanzania




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Silvia Cirillo
Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives. A domestic work case study in Ethiopia and Tanzania.
2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 3-28.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5207
4	Silvia Cirillo

Introduction1
   In this paper, I draw from an ethnographic research which I have carried
out in Ethiopia and Tanzania as part of my PhD programme, jointly with an
NGO that supports domestic workers in both countries. The domestic workers
involved in my study are young women who have moved from rural to urban
areas to work in their employers’ households. Their main work activities in-
clude housecleaning, washing clothes, cooking, running errands and taking
care of children and sick people. When I met them, they were primarily live-in
domestic workers, so they resided in the households where they worked.
   Through an analysis of their narratives, I have shed light on the gendered
relations in which women’s lives are embedded, and on the complex inter-
weaving of personal strategies and social constraints regulating such relations.
I have privileged a relational approach (Strathern 2014) to understand what
it means to be a female domestic worker exposed to contemporary forms of
labour exploitation, in contexts based on asymmetric and hierarchical rela-
tionships that include – as I will show – idioms and practices of power and
domination, as well as of protection and care (see Malara, Boylston 2016).
   Most of the studies focusing on domestic work in Ethiopia and Tanzania
adopt a human-rights approach to describe how domestic workers have ex-
perienced exploitation, discrimination and marginalization with regard to
pay, working conditions and legal rights, as well as verbal, physical and sex-
ual abuse (Mulugeta 2012; Matheka et al. 2020). These approaches need to
be integrated with studies having a more nuanced approach, as the scholar-
ship on domestic work has done in other geographical contexts worldwide,
by providing contextual analysis which allows us to observe the multifaceted
portrait of women’s experiences as migrant workers, and how they are able
to carve out spaces for action (see, among others, Hondagneu-sotelo 2000;
Parreñas Salazar 2001; Ribeiro Corossacz 2018). Despite the restrictions on
their time, mobility, behaviour, body, domestic workers enact mobility strate-
gies, manipulating individual and collective resources and personal networks
to achieve their goals. They sometimes might try to emancipate themselves
from traditional roles and obligations, or to renew or even reinforce them.
Their future plans, expectations, ambitions, actions, can be understood only


1. I would like to thank the Anuac editorial team and the three anonymous referees who
   helped improve the structure of this article and enhance its content. I would also like to
   thank them for suggesting bibliographic references that I found stimulating while writing
   the article.


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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                          5

if placed within the broader framework of their relationships. Thus, agency
shouldn’t be simply reduced to absolute freedom or individual “free will”, but
rather conceived as a sociocultural product framed within a set of conscious
and unconscious practices (see Ortner 2006) which might even reinforce or
reproduce structural forms of “unfreedom” (Fernandez 2014: 52).
    When discussing domestic work in Africa, it is important to consider that
its nature and content can diverge from one society to another and take new
forms as social and economic change occurs (see Bryceson 2019; Hoerder et al.
2015; Jacquemin, Tisseau 2019). During the colonial rule, in many countries
male domestic servants worked in the colonial homes, while their wives and
mothers were obliged to remain in their home areas bearing double work-
load. This is the case of Tanzania (Bujra 2000), Mozambique (Zamparoni 1999)
and Zambia (Hansen 1990), among others2. Throughout the post-colonial pe-
riod there has been a gradual feminization of domestic service as a form of
employment in towns and cities. However, each context had its different re-
alities and specificities. For example, in colonial Eritrea, domestic work at the
service of Italian colonists was predominantly a female occupation (Barrera
2011: 108). In the mid-1980s Janet Bujra expected to uncover the inside sto-
ry of the “feminisation” of domestic service in Tanzania, but she found that
men in Tanzania were still predominant in the domestic workforce. Thus, “the
challenge to scholarship is not to take these assumptions for granted but to
examine the changing interaction of structural, historical, and cultural factors
involved in producing particular gender conventions in employment” (Han-
sen 1990: 122). Although I have so far mainly mentioned domestic service as
wage-labour, there are multiple forms of domestic work in Africa: “Whether
informal or formal, salaried or freelance, paid in money and/or in kind, full-
time or part-time, residential or non-residential, all-round or specialized, or
even professionally qualified, domestic service forms a complex intertwin-
ing of situations, a wide range of statuses and social relations” (Jacquemin,
Tisseau 2019: III). This aspect recurs in my study, where domestic workers
in both countries perform different typologies of domestic work during their
life course, they work in various kin and non-kin households, and move from
house to house in search of better working conditions.

2. These studies do not refer to domestic labour within the local society with its African
   employers. Indeed, Janet Bujra points out that in Tanzania “when colonial officials made
   estimates of the numbers employed in domestic service they generally counted only those
   employed by fellow Europeans and Asians” (Bujra 2000: 6). Thus, the estimates must be
   viewed with skepticism.


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6	Silvia Cirillo

    In this paper, I analyze women’s narratives in the present and past tense to
explore different situations before and after they come into contact with the
NGO CVM (Comunità Volontari per il Mondo). In the first section, I discuss
the terminology that I use and illustrate Amharic and Swahili terms adopted
to define a domestic worker. In the second section, I produce figures and facts
on domestic work in Ethiopia and Tanzania. The third section briefly presents
my methodology and the contexts of study. The rest of the paper reports the
life stories of Tesfanesh (Ethiopia) and Beatrice (Tanzania), and connects their
experiences to the NGO projects involving them. This is done to shed light
on some ambiguities that stem from the existing multiple forms of domestic
work, and might come to the fore precisely when projects fostered by workers’
organizations and other activists aim at the formalization of hired care work,
that is, skilled employment made up of clearly defined tasks, regulated by
contracts, rights and responsibilities. This point is crucial because in contexts
where labour protections are poorly applied, while proposals to formalize
domestic work can provide an essential reference point for the collective mo-
bilization of female workers, formalization can undermine the power practices
historically and culturally cultivated by women – from the “intimacy” of their
work – to promote their own interests (Castel-Branco 2021: 159).

Defining domestic work
   The term “domestic worker” is a broad term that lacks a common definition
across countries regarding its constitution (Hoerder et al. 2015: 4). The Inter-
national Labour Organization (ILO) considers the shift to “worker” as a way
to replace ancient terms that clearly imply subservience, such as “servant”
and “maid” (Blackett 2011: 44). Indeed, some scholars prefer to use the word
“servants” when dealing with a (rather) distant past, and the term “domestic
workers” when speaking about more recent decades (Sarti 2014: 279). The ILO
defines “employment relationship” as a relationship between an employer and
an employee in which the latter performs work in return for remuneration,
and under certain conditions. The household is recognized as a place of work,
which functions also thanks to the care and support provided by its domestic
workers. Studies in East Africa highlight that in the domestic work sector girls
may be recruited “through kinship networks, commonly referred to as Un-
dugu in Swahili” (Kiaga, Kanyoka 2011: 13), literally meaning “brotherhood/
sisterhood”. Since the practice of Undugu reflects cultural values of working
together for the sake of and as part of the larger family, domestic workers



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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                    7

hardly identify themselves as employees, but rather as family members. Thus
the relationship employer-employee may become blurred and sometimes be
confused with a sort of kinship, or distant kinship.
   Historically and until today, in many parts of Africa and elsewhere, children
have been transferred from rural to urban areas to serve as domestic labour-
ers in kin and non-kin related households. In the academic literature, this
child placement is often termed “fosterage” or “child fostering” (see Isiugo-
Abanihe 1985). This practice – usually (but not only) involving poorer rural
and better-off urban households – may provide complementary opportunities
for both hosting households and those who are fostered. It often meets wider
socio-cultural needs within a certain community, being a means to promote
social bonds, a form of long-standing community strategy of labour redistri-
bution, and a strategy for coping with adversity based on family supporting
networks (Kassa, Abebe 2016: 48). Yet studies highlight that the traditional
institution of kin support “has transmogrified in some places towards forced
labour or indeed slavery” (Bryceson 2019: 326). For example, Ina Gankam
Tambo (2014: 17) points out that in Nigeria, in precolonial times, child fos-
tering consisted in community based practices of child relocation regulated
by customary law, contained in specific normative and moral frameworks. Yet,
in contemporary Nigeria children are likely to be “exploited fostered children”
(ibidem: 209), and the difference between employment and fostering can be
blurred (see also Bourdillon 2007: 27; Sommerfelt 2001: 25). These studies
acknowledge the emergence of commercial recruiting agents who obtain pe-
cuniary gain transferring the girls from their natal rural home to a well-off
urban household, and argue that the changing nature of social relations under
conditions of capitalism have contributed to this reality. However, contextual
historical studies on child fostering also demonstrate that “the practice has
always had economically productive underpinnings” (Howard 2011: 7). If we
go beyond the dichotomization between the “good” foster family that displays
“real” parental love, and the “bad” one exploiting children, foster care strat-
egies might also be conceived as sociopolitical relationships between adults
(Bledsoe 1990: 72), aimed at building complex networks of patronage rela-
tionships between biological and foster parents, without any immediate and
direct utility for the children themselves necessarily deriving from these rela-
tionships.
   In light of these considerations, I adopt a broad and inclusive definition
of domestic work which appears in multiple forms: it can be “paid or unpaid,



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8	Silvia Cirillo

forced or free, formal or informal employment” (Hoerder et al. 2015: 2). Sim-
ilarly, I use the term “household” – conventionally understood as a group
of people who live under the same roof or eat “from the same pot” (Declich
2015: 628) – in a broader sense: the people related to the owner and for whom
the labourer works, as well as the place where this group resides. The house-
hold is also a place of maintenance and recreation of people’s wellbeing.
Indeed, domestic work is extended to care work, or more precisely, it is a form
of care work. Care practices themselves can be seen as a starting point for the
analysis of the meaningful relationships of interdependence that character-
ize everyday lives of domestic workers and the people they work for. Just like
domination, care should be released from an overly positive normative frame-
work and seen as a process with an open outcome: it can lead to positive and
conflictual relationships, to stable relationships or to their dissolution. Thus,
it can create, maintain and dissolve meaningful ties (Thelen 2015: 508).
    I shall conclude this section by mentioning the words used in Amharic (in
Ethiopia) and Swahili (in Tanzania) to define a domestic worker.

   Amharic and Swahili terms
   In Ethiopia, the Amharic term yebet serategna (የቤት ሠራተኛ) literally means
“domestic worker”. The women interviewed, the NGO staff, Trade Unions and
other workers’ organizations in Ethiopia adopted this Amharic term and the
English “domestic worker” when speaking in English. In the Ethiopian litera-
ture, scholars point out that after the Ethiopian revolution in 1974, the Derg
regime listed domestic servants as oppressed and banned terms used in a pe-
jorative way, such as ashker (አሽከር, for male servants) and gered (ገረድ, female
servant/slave) which was gradually replaced by the term yebet serategna (Be-
lete 2014: 193). Yet the term gered is still widely used, and many Ethiopian
domestic workers I interviewed reported that employers and other people ad-
dressed them using this word as an insult.
   Regarding Tanzania, in my study the women interviewed, the NGO staff,
Trade Unions and other workers’ organization, tended to use the Swahili ex-
pression mfanyakazi wa nyumbani or mfanyakazi wa ndani (indoor worker) and
the English term “domestic worker”. Domestic workers are also referred to as
dada wa kazi which literally translates into “work-sister”, the latter reflecting
the idea of the domestic worker as a family member. Lastly, the colonial term
“houseboy/housegirl” is still widely used. This leads to the question of how
colonial legacies shape the way contemporary patterns of domestic service are



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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                    9

defined, performed and conceived (Higman B.W. 2015: 19). Overall, in my study
the English term “domestic worker” was widely adopted in both countries and
defined as the most inclusive term, often associated with a “proper” type of
employment that should guarantee domestic workers’ rights. But I take into
consideration that many research participants knew the NGO, its projects and
terminology adopted by the ILO. These aspects, as well as my own presence in
the field, certainly influenced the choice of research participants to use a term
rather than another. Before illustrating the study contexts, my methodology
and research results, I shall discuss figures on domestic work in Ethiopia and
Tanzania and the legal instruments that are relevant in both countries.

Sparce figures and facts
   As ILO itself acknowledges, determining the number of domestic workers
is a challenge especially in contexts where the majority of female and male
domestic workers are members of the extended family (ILO 2021: 41). In 2013,
the ILO report on domestic work across the world still refers to a 2005 es-
timation in its description of the domestic work sector in Ethiopia: 248,600
people employed as domestic workers in private households in urban areas,
with a female share of 91 per cent (ILO 2013: 34). Between 2015 and 2016, the
Population Council undertook a study of migrant out-of-school girls in six
Ethiopian regions. Overall, 4,540 out-of-school female migrants were inter-
viewed: while 1,094 were employed in domestic work at the time of the survey,
67 percent of migrant girls entered domestic work as their first working expe-
rience (see Erulkar et al. 2017).
   As for Tanzania, a situation analysis of domestic workers conducted by the
ILO in 2016 estimates at least 883,779 domestic workers in mainland Tan-
zania, and 203,622 in Zanzibar. However, if we consider people performing
domestic tasks who are involved in very informal arrangements, this number
increases to at least 1,728,228 (75 percent women) (ILO 2016: 98). Further
surveys suggest that about 53 per cent (5,009,076) of all households in Tanza-
nia were employing a domestic worker (ibidem: 109).
   Overall, the instruments for estimating the number of domestic workers
are currently inadequate and the international definition of domestic workers
proposed by the ILO “is still insufficient for capturing the plurality of forms of
domesticity […] in Africa” (Jacquemin, Tisseau 2019: X).
   Recent decades have seen increasing concern over domestic workers’ labour
rights globally. One of the most important landmarks in this area was ILO



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10	Silvia Cirillo

Convention No. 189 Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers (C189),
which was promulgated in Geneva in 2011 and came into force in 2013. The
Convention requires that ratifying countries ensure equal treatment between
domestic workers and workers from other sectors, for example, in relation to
working time, minimum wages, paid leave, and beyond. Recent studies are
questioning in which ways C189 and the global campaign for its ratification
have been incorporated, fuelled or resisted, from a social movement perspec-
tive, in different local contexts (Cherubini et al. 2018: 719).
   Like most other countries, neither Tanzania nor Ethiopia have ratified the
2011 ILO convention. In the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation No.1156/2019
domestic work is defined as “employment of private service” and excluded
from the coverage of the Labour Proclamation [Articles 2 (16) cum 3 (2) (c)].
   Domestic workers under Tanzanian laws are considered jointly with other
employees. Their rights are provided for under the Employment and Labour
Relations Act, 2004 and Regulation of Wages and Terms of Employment Or-
der, 2010, yet no specific provision strictly applies to domestic workers alone.
Both in Ethiopia and Tanzania, the NGO CVM promotes and facilitates coordi-
nation between institutions and trade unions as regards the implementation
of actions and policies that protect domestic workers and recognize them as
a professional category. In particular, since 2011 the NGO has established
Domestic Workers’ Associations, facilitating the organization of meetings,
workshops and social exchange tables involving various representatives of in-
stitutions at National, Regional and Local level in both countries.

Study contexts and methodology
   I carried out fieldwork for seven months in Ethiopia and five months in
Tanzania in 2018 and 2019, mainly in two cities where CVM has premises:
Debre Markos (Ethiopia) and Morogoro (Tanzania). Debre Markos is in the
Amhara region and has an estimated population of 133,810. Morogoro, with
a population of 305,840, is in the Morogoro region. They are urban centres of
attraction for young people from rural areas who want to work in the city. Both
cities are recently witnessing a rapid urbanisation process, with investments
in the construction of new infrastructure and roads connecting them to im-
portant commercial centres. The two cities are strategically located and often
perceived by young migrants as “transit cities”, where they can gain the nec-
essary work experience before moving and finding a better job in larger cities.
For example, many domestic workers I interviewed in Debre Markos aspired to



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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                   11

migrate to Bahir Dar (capital of the Amhara region) or Addis Ababa. Similar-
ly, Morogoro’s central location links the city to Dar-es-Salaam, the country’s
largest commercial centre, and to Dodoma, the national capital. Several wom-
en I met in both countries had already gained work experience in other towns
and cities, but having failed in their migration project and therefore in im-
proving their condition, they had returned to Debre Markos and Morogoro to
acquire more experience, as well as to expand their personal network, so they
could leave again and find a better job elsewhere. The notion of transit is not
only understood in geographical terms, but in its temporal and existential di-
mension that is part of migratory and biographical paths (Massa 2021: 124).
On the one hand, domestic workers felt “stuck” in urban contexts that exposed
them to risks and exploitative working conditions from which it was difficult
to escape; on the other hand, they perceived their condition as a transitional
phase and lived in “active waiting” for a better future (see Brun 2015).
    Debre Markos and Morogoro are also the main bases of CVM, which works
with projects supporting domestic workers and their associations. During their
meetings, members of the associations share their life and work experiences and
develop strategies for mutual support, as well as ways to engage new potential
members and strengthen the associations. CVM organises combined train-
ing courses in labour law, domestic worker’s rights, reproductive health, time
management in the workplace, communication and professional skills, among
others. All these activities are facilitated by the NGO in close collaboration with
local leaders and community representatives in both countries. The aim of my
research was also to understand the point of view of female workers regarding
the training courses organized by the NGO, as well as the impact of these activi-
ties on their lives. Furthermore, I practically collaborated in some organizational
and planning aspects of these activities. But above all, I was asked to collect
relevant information on female working conditions, and then to discuss and
reflect together – with the NGO staff and with the women workers themselves
– on possible activities that CVM could organise in the future to meet the needs
of these women, elaborating as a team possible solutions to their problems. I
gathered information by collecting semi-structured interviews, focus group dis-
cussion (FGDs), individual in-depth interviews and life stories. While the FGDs
and semi-structured interviews were collected by working in team with the
CVM staff during different activities organised by the NGO, I collected in-depth
interviews and life stories – with a female interpreter – in secluded places where
these women could talk more at ease (such as quiet courtyards and uncrowded



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12	Silvia Cirillo

coffeehouses). My study is mainly based on the analysis of these 30 life-stories
gathered in Ethiopia and 25 in Tanzania which were subsequently transcribed
from Amharic (Ethiopia) or Swahili (Tanzania) into English, thanks to the work
of local interpreters. I changed the names of these women in order not to dis-
close their identities. Most of the interviewed domestic workers were between
twenty and twenty-five years of age. During my fieldwork, I would have liked to
“follow” (Epstein 1969: 112) the women in several situations along urban paths,
through observation and active participation in community life. But domestic
workers are barely reachable and have little time available. They usually start
their work very early in the morning and end late in the evening after the last
meal. Overall, their freedom of movement often depends on the will of other
household members. This condition is reinforced by the overlapping of living
and working spaces and times, typical of a job where the employee “inhabits
workplaces” (see Sanò, Piro 2018). Thus, I followed the migratory trajectories
and the experiences of female workers mainly through the analysis of their per-
sonal narratives. Clearly, the latter are given from a specific point in place and
time, they are about “how the passage of personal time is remembered and re-
counted” (Brettell 2002: S45). But they are also a space in which women imagine
and plan their futures; they are about the process of construction of the self
and, simultaneously, “provide a vital entry point in the interaction between the
individual and society” (Personal Narratives Group 1986: 6).
   I interviewed several times the women with whom I was able to establish a
stronger relationship during my fieldwork. Points of view of employers, inter-
mediaries for recruitment process, relatives and friends, the NGO staff, as well
as other social actors, were also gathered. Daily conversations, observation and
participation in the daily life of the community, markets, community gather-
ings and ceremonies, as well as visits of girls at the workplace (the household)
were highly valuable opportunities. Further information was gleaned from
representatives of various organizations, institutions, local and internation-
al NGOs working on internal migration-related issues and workers’ rights in
both countries. Finally, the exchange of ideas with interpreters regarding the
methodological approach and the analysis of the research results was vital
throughout the entire research process.

Being a domestic worker
   In Debre Markos and Morogoro, as in many other cities in the two coun-
tries and abroad, the working conditions of female domestic workers vary



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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                   13

from situations where they are exposed to severe forms of exploitation (un-
paid wages, physical and verbal abuse, lack of free time, strong control over
women’s mobility) to others where women workers are able to negotiate
better conditions, for example a salary (albeit limited) that allows them to
accumulate small savings. The factors influencing the position of domestic
workers are multiple and concern aspects such as women’s background, age,
economic situation, social relations that they turn to to protect themselves
from abuse and to negotiate better working conditions. The majority of wom-
en I interviewed came from families economically dependent on agriculture,
and generally moved into middle-class households in urban areas that were
in some way connected to their rural households: either a kin tie, even a ten-
uous or distant one; or a common village or ethnic group; or a dependency
relationship of some form between the rural and urban households. Most of
them were between the ages of twelve and seventeen when they first left their
villages. For many poor families in rural areas, sending their daughters off
as domestic workers in urban wealthier households was a useful strategy to
earn money, combined with the hope that the city would offer their daughters
better life opportunities. Many domestic workers hoped they might be able to
attend school in the city, or a training course that would enable them to find
a more qualified job. One of their ambitions was to set aside savings to start
a small business in the future (e.g. a coffeeshop), or to marry a wealthy man,
thus improving their lifestyle and that of their rural families. Therefore, the
experiences of work and migration are intertwined with hopes for growth,
social and existential mobility based on the relational dimensions that shape
women’s lives. Usually, domestic workers invested their meagre savings to
enable their families to buy better quality food, or so their siblings could pay
school fees. However, their work was often free of charge and the rhetoric
of fostering was used by employers to disguise working relationships that
permanently indebted these girls to their protective employers for the hospi-
tality they received. Not to mention that, in some cases, girls were moved to
the city as a disguised form of pawning, where women’s labour was used to
pay off debts (Bryceson 2019: 325). Moreover, as in other contexts in Africa
and elsewhere, domestic work is perceived as a “natural” activity for women
and girls who, in return for their services, receive accommodation, meals and,
in the best of cases, meagre (irregular and occasional) earnings and school-
ing. Somewhat like the case of apprentices in urban Ivory Coast described by
Fabio Viti (2007), the work of female domestic workers is thus situated in a



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14	Silvia Cirillo

broad “in-between” zone: between work conceived as free family service and
a form of paid labour (ibidem: 195). From the intimacy of their work, with
its forms of personal dependency and asymmetric relations, women develop
strategies to solve problems and achieve goals.
   In my study, after their first (usually unpaid) work experience, domestic
workers moved to other households to perform remunerated work, and then
from house to house in search of better working conditions, facing both en-
abling and constraining situations. For example: at one household they
received a monthly salary, but were not allowed to go to school; or, they re-
ceived a salary, attended school, but suffered sexual harassment; or they went
to school, but were not paid and were exposed to various forms of mistreat-
ment. Some of these aspects will emerge through the ethnographic cases of
Tesfanesh in Ethiopia and Beatrice in Tanzania.

   Working in Debre Markos: the case of Tesfanesh
   Tesfanesh, a twenty-one-year-old Ethiopian woman, was born in a village
in the Amhara region (about seventy kilometres from Debre Markos). She
dropped out of primary school at the age of twelve, when she moved to the
city of Bahir Dar, the capital of the Amhara region. The decision was taken by
her parents and other family members in her community of origin. She was
told that her aunt and uncle in Bahir Dar could offer her a better education3.
Although she initially did not want to leave her birth place, she soon became
convinced that working and studying with a middle-class family in the city was
an opportunity not to be missed. Moreover, she valued this opportunity as a
way to postpone an arranged marriage back home. Indeed, working in the city
can also be perceived as a way to escape specific gender norms. Yet promises
about school were broken from the very beginning, and Tesfanesh remained
for three years in Bahir Dar without any chance to continue her education.
      They told me they would send me to school, but instead they just made me
      work, clean the house, wash clothes, cook, take care of kids. They used to
      send their children to high-quality school, but they didn’t do the same for me
      (Tesfanesh, 21 years old, 02/12/19, Debre Markos in Ethiopia).

   Tesfanesh argued that her parents were not aware of the exploitative work-
ing conditions to which she was exposed in Bahir Dar, and in particular about


3. Often, despite the use of kinship terminology these aunts, uncles and cousins were not
   related by blood. In this case, Tesfanesh specified that her aunt and uncle were “distant”
   relatives, somehow connected to her paternal uncle’s family.


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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                   15

the fact that she was not attending school. She was not given the chance to
communicate with them. Her uncle used to visit her village and informed her
parents about her situation: “He lied all the time. He told them that I was fine
and going to school, while I was only working!”.
   The relations between her parents and the people she worked for are not
clear. Three years passed before Tesfanesh took the drastic decision to leave
that house. In her account, she waited this long because her uncle in Bahir Dar
was covering part of her father’s medical treatment during a period of illness.
This aspect shows us that her work involved some form of “family” compen-
sation. Furthermore, it shows that domestic workers are responsible for taking
care of their employers on the basis of expected and experienced reciprocity.
For a long time Tesfanesh shows deference, trust and gratitude towards her
uncle (employer), adhering to a model of justice and values according
                                                               ​​        to which
rewards are achieved only with and through the long-term display of loyalty
and submission (Malara, Boylston 2016: 46). Yet once her expectations were
completely disappointed, she was ready to leave the household and look for
another job. Expectations and confidence in the actions of others, as well as the
perception of future risks that certain relations imply, change over time and
can be renegotiated. In this case, disappointed expectations lead to a radical
dissolution of ties. Thus, care responsibilities and obligations must be analyzed
by considering also their “temporalities” (Thelen 2015: 506-7). The event that
finally convinced Tesfanesh to break all relations with her uncle occurred when
her mother got sick. Her uncle told her he would also cover her mother’s med-
ical treatment. But one day she found out that her mother had died: there had
already been a funeral and she had been buried. In Tesfanesh’s account, in this
way she was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral, she was cheated
as her uncle was pretending to continue to cover her mother’s medical treat-
ment even after the death of her mother. After this event, Tesfanesh left Bahir
Dar and, at the age of fifteen, she moved to Debre Markos. She started work-
ing without remuneration for a married couple who agreed to cover her school
expenses, although the workload made it difficult for her to attend school ev-
ery day. She occasionally received pocket money from her female employer
because she assisted her in running a coffeehouse. With this money, she was
able to financially support her siblings in the rural area. She moved to another
house when her male employer sexually harassed her and her female employer
blamed her for provoking him. This is a common experience for many female
workers, as sexual violence is often naturalised and women are held responsible



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16	Silvia Cirillo

for the behaviour of men who react to their sexual instincts (Ribeiro Corossacz
2018: 398). Following the experience of sexual harassment, Tesfanesh tempo-
rarily abandoned domestic work and worked for about a year as a day labourer
on construction sites. This is a very strenuous job with low wages, exposing
women to additional risks. Tesfanesh formed solidarity relationships with oth-
er female workers with whom she shared an accommodation, but the difficult
working conditions were not sustainable in the long term. Although this job
allowed a degree of freedom of movement and access to new personal networks
in the urban context that domestic work made impossible, working as a domes-
tic worker for someone who promises safety and protection can be a certain
guarantee of freedom. Tesfanesh stopped working on construction sites when
a domestic worker in her neighborhood who was moving from Debre Markos
proposed her as a replacement in the household where she was working. Here
Tesfanesh established good relations with her employers, and for the first time
she received a monthly salary as a live-in domestic worker. At the time of our
encounter, she had been working in the same household for three years. Her
living and working conditions had improved compared to the past, but she had
abandoned the idea of completing the Primary education, and she used her
salary to allow her siblings to buy better quality food and satisfy other needs.
At the same time, she saved a small amount of money that she could invest in
other personal plans. Indeed, her ambition was to attend a business course,
to move to Bahir Dar and open a coffee shop with an older woman and former
neighbour who was a live-out domestic worker in Bahir Dar.

   Working in Morogoro: the case of Beatrice
  Beatrice, a twenty-four-year-old Tanzanian woman, was born in a village
about 40km from Dodoma city. When her father died, her mother married an-
other man and Beatrice was raised by several relatives, moving from house to
house within and near her village of origin.
      I was raised by many people because my mom had many relatives, so I was
      living with my uncle, although before that I was living with mom, I was
      moving here and there […] I went to my aunt, from there I went to my step
      mom, from there I went to another aunt… (Beatrice, 24 years old, 21/08/19,
      Morogoro in Tanzania).

   Before moving to Morogoro (where I met her), Beatrice relocated to a small
town close to her village, where she helped her relatives in household chores
and in running a small restaurant. She moved to her “granny’s place”, she
started working for a woman – owner of a small restaurant – that during the


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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                   17

interview she called “grandmother”, then “little grandmother” and “granny”.
It should be noted that both in Tanzania and Ethiopia there is a conception of
kinship that includes people who are not related by blood (see Gelaye 1998;
Kraska-Szlenk 2018). Both workers and employers use the language of kinship
and blood to shape and naturalise their statements. They use it strategically to
legitimise mutual obligations and commitments, responsibilities of care and
support, attitudes of domination or subordination, to make or break bonds, as
well as to strengthen or weaken them.
    Beatrice specified that her employer was not her biological grandmother,
but rather “like a granny, my father used to call her aunt”. From her point of
view, by working at her “granny’s place” she would be spared the exploita-
tion she had experienced in the Dodoma region. In particular, she reported
experiences of mistreatments at the hands of her aunt who used to overwork
her, beat her for any mistake and would segregate her from the other kids in
the household. Moreover, Beatrice intended to continue her studies, at that
time she had completed her primary education and she wanted to enroll in
secondary school. Yet her expectations about school were only partly met. At
the “granny’s place”, during the day Beatrice alternated housework and run-
ning the small restaurant, but the amount of work did not allow her to attend
school regularly. After the first two years of secondary education she dropped
out of school. Beatrice then decided to move to another city and found a paid
job through a domestic worker who had previously been employed at her
granny’s restaurant. And so she moved to Morogoro town, where I met her.
She described her choices, and in particular the decision to migrate and find
a paid job, as part of her gradual transition into adulthood, which she de-
fined as a gradual process of awareness: “before that moment I was not fully
aware of myself. When I became fully aware of myself I moved to Morogoro
and told myself ‘I want my own salary now’”. Thus, the moments of transition
from city to city, from household to household, from unpaid to paid job, inter-
sect with other transitional processes that have to do with the construction of
subjectivity. The latter is an ongoing process through which domestic work-
ers construct a sense of self, and the kind of people they want to be, as they
navigate uncertainty and attempt to find an agreement between apparently
irreconcilable options (Massa 2021: 26).
    When I met her in Morogoro, Beatrice had been working in the same house-
hold for six years. Her monthly salary was higher than that of other domestic
workers I interviewed, who considered her a successful woman and a role



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18	Silvia Cirillo

model. She repeatedly highlighted her ability in negotiating better wages. She
asked for a salary increase on two occasions: when her female employer gave
birth, hence Beatrice would have to take care of kids; and when the employers
decided to move to a larger house that required more housework. With her
money, she helped her relatives build a small house in the rural area of the
Dodoma region, thereby fulfilling her desire to actively repositioning herself
in family networks of reciprocity, which matches the ambition of many wom-
en. During the interview, she described herself as the leader of the “business”,
the one who had the idea and was able to give directions for its success. Yet
she had less free time than other women. She was one of the hardest women to
reach, her employers exercised strong control over her by limiting any move-
ment outside the home where she worked. This shows that achieving certain
goals, for example negotiating a higher salary and improving living standards
by entering a wealthy household, does not necessarily imply that the control
that employers exert over women’s bodies and freedom of movement will re-
lax. In Beatrice’s case, her dependency increased, as did her submission to
those who provided protection. Moreover, she did not achieve all her ambi-
tions, since in Morogoro she neither got the chance to continue secondary
school, nor to attend a tailoring course, which was one of her plans. While
feeling the uncertainty and unpredictability of her future, she was reframing
other ambitions. She gave up on the idea of attending formal school, but she
wanted to invest her savings to pay for an intensive Technical and Vocation-
al Education and Training course. She didn’t have a clear idea of the field in
which she could work in the future, available opportunities were uncertain.
Yet she wanted to find a better paid job, for instance in a hotel, and seemed
to be worried about the passage of time. As she put it: “there will come a time
when I will no longer be able to work as a domestic worker”.

When domestic workers meet the NGO
   In both cases described above, the women’s working conditions improved
slightly over time, especially compared to their first work experiences, when
they were denied both wages and access to education. But as the conclusions
of the two sections above suggest, it was partly their wish to leave domestic
work at some point in order to find a more qualified job, perhaps in another
city. Up to now this has not been possible, and on the contrary, the achieve-
ment of certain goals might have led to a strengthening of the dependence
upon their employers. But this does not mean that dependency was perceived



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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                     19

as a permanent or static condition. Their imagination and hope suggested that
with time they would be able to negotiate protection through work activities
less regulated by the direct control of employers. Despite all the limitations,
migration and work experiences were perceived by these women as events
that would allow them “to go somewhere” and thus escape a condition of exis-
tential immobility (Massa 2021: 133). The meeting with an NGO such as CVM
– engaged in the struggle for the social and labour protection of domestic
workers – was considered as potentially functional to the realization of future
projects. Moreover, CVM was organising vocational training courses which,
according to many women, could help them in their search for a better job.
The NGO’s action strategies were mainly directed towards the formalisation
of domestic work. Yet in the two study contexts, attempts at formalisation was
potentially problematic and with limitations, which I will discuss in this sec-
tion using the example of written labour contracts.
   When I met Tesfanesh and Beatrice, they had come into contact with the
domestic workers’ Associations that CVM had established two years earlier.
Like other women I interviewed, they were eager to strengthen the Associa-
tions in the battle for domestic workers’ rights. They shared with members of
the association their knowledge of the urban context, the strategies employed
in previous years to negotiate better wages, and the forms of collective soli-
darity mobilised to improve their situation. Association meetings became a
way to discuss politics, socio-economic inequalities and labour exploitation,
thus revealing the political element of women’s informal ways of organising,
which could play a key role in the development of collective strategies of resis-
tance (Hepburn 2019: 46). Many of the interviewed domestic workers are now
joining the International Campaign for the Ratification of the ILO C189. Par-
adoxically, while on the one hand they extol Convention 189 by calling for its
ratification by governments, on the other hand they argue that the formalisa-
tion of domestic work with employment contracts is impossible to achieve. It
would inevitably exclude and fail to protect workers engaged in informal work,
for example unpaid girls who had been transferred from their rural natal home
to better-off households in the urban area as part of traditional institutions of
kin support. In this regard, a male representative of a community-based orga-
nization (CBO)4 in Ethiopia argued:


4. At the time of my fieldwork, several representatives of community-based organization
   (CBO) in both countries were helping CVM find new women who could be involved in the
   NGO’s activities and become members of the Domestic Workers Associations.


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20	Silvia Cirillo

      When labour activists came with this idea of advocating for domestic workers’
      rights, honestly at the beginning we were very surprised… we wondered “In
      what angle did they see domestic work as a social problem?!” For example,
      if you have a relative or other good relations in the rural area you may find
      a domestic worker who is your blood relative… maybe she is leading a low
      standard of living in the rural area… And so you may say to her family “send
      your daughter to us, don’t worry we will nurture your daughter like our own
      daughter” […] But it is also true that nowadays domestic workers may find
      themselves in very exploitative situations (Personal communication, 18 July
      2018).

    This was also the point of view of many employers who tended to describe
themselves as “good employers”, “saviours” and “protectors” of “needy” rural
girls living in extreme poverty. These statements are part of a strategy that em-
ployers use to legitimise and reaffirm the hierarchical and power relations they
exercise over their employees, to emphasise the subaltern position of domestic
workers, gain prestige for themselves and reaffirm the superiority of their so-
cial status (see Gardini 2019: 88-91). As also shown by studies on care work in
other parts of the world, deep ambivalences can emerge from the intertwining
of paternalistic attitudes and working relationships that recall master-servant
relations. What is said in words – phrases such as “I want you to feel at home” –
is often contradicted by the derogatory practices and attitudes of employers
towards their workers (Marchetti 2016: 139-40). At the same time – and this is
one of the most interesting aspects of care relationships – becoming “one of the
household” means establishing asymmetrical relations of power, gender and
class within a domestic space, where people of different ages, habits and per-
sonal histories interact, a space to which both the employers’ and the workers’
families, located elsewhere, belong. Thus, several domestic spaces are brought
together to create a larger and more fluid one in which complex affective and
social relationships are intertwined (Vietti 2019: 29). Hence, unequal relation-
ships might “include strong idioms of protection and care that can neither be
reduced to power nor wholly separated from it” (Malara, Boylston 2016: 4). Nor
is such separation something that people necessarily desire.
    Given these considerations, it should come as no surprise that written em-
ployment contracts highly praised by CVM find little room for applicability
in the study contexts I have examined. Interestingly, in specific contexts, the
formalisation of hired care work might produce recalcitrant realities and con-
tradictory consequences, and even reinforce structures of classed, raced and
gendered inequality. This is the case of post-apartheid South Africa (see Ally
2010), which witnessed one of the most remarkable efforts to recognise paid



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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                   21

domestic work as a form of employment. A new labor legislation was estab-
lished that included domestic workers and gave them a national minimum
wage, formal contracts of employment, extensive leave, a pension fund, and
other rights. In 2013, South Africa ratified the ILO C189. Yet Shireen Adam
Ally (2010) argues that in South Africa – like in postcolonial Zambia (Hansen
1990), Tanzania (Bujra 2000), and Zimbabwe (Pape 1993), among others – dem-
ocratic values have coexisted with continued servitude relations within paid
domestic work. In her study, domestic workers were refusing to sign contracts
and instead chose to informally negotiate the conditions of their work. The
context of South Africa is clearly very different from the Ethiopian and Tan-
zanian, particularly when we consider the specificity of white racism during
apartheid. However, even in the latter contexts, proposals for the formalisa-
tion of domestic work – as they are advanced by formal laboir movements
and international organizations – sometimes clash with local realities and are
not necessarily adequate in specific circumstances. In Ethiopia and Tanzania,
during my fieldwork, CVM staff was distributing a sort of formal contract pre-
pared according to standards proposed by Trade Unions to protect domestic
workers. Yet this project was often rejected both by employers and domestic
workers. Indeed, in the contexts under study it could be considered culturally
wrong, or not appropriate, to ask people (kin or non kin) closely related to do-
mestic workers’ families to sign a contract. This request might be interpreted
as lack of trust or suspicion (Mulugeta 2012: 19). The presence of a bond of
some kind, the existence of a patronage or family relationship, are conditions
that make any form of labour bargaining, as well as the explicit declaration
of the conditions of engagement, almost impossible. The logic of debt binds
the worker to a relationship of personal dependence that associates domina-
tion with protection and demands their total availability (Viti 2007: 175-6).
With few exceptions, both in Ethiopia and Tanzania the different agreements
applied to domestic workers were informal and verbal. Usually, they were
stipulated between influential adults without any clear agreement on the re-
sponsibilities of the worker. Ethiopian women who had worked in Addis Abeba
mentioned a brokering agency where written contracts could be produced for
both internal and international migrants. But usually this was a further step
for those who wanted to find a job within a household who was completely
unrelated to the village, community or families of origin.
   Interestingly, many domestic workers said they feared that, if applied, a
written contract would bind them “forever” to their employers. This point illu-



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22	Silvia Cirillo

minates several aspects. As has already emerged in the article, the positioning
of women workers vis-à-vis employers is not unidirectional and changes over
time, as women may aspire to remain under their protection and at the same
time wish to leave. But only by manipulating the asymmetrical relations of
power and care – from the intimacy of their work – can they try to loosen the
bonds of dependency, without this having too negative an impact on their
lives and threatening the need for protection. On the contrary, from the fe-
male workers’ point of view resorting to a formal employment contract could
have negative effects: that of undermining relationships of trust and relegat-
ing the worker to a condition of immobility and static dependence.
   The statements of the Ethiopian domestic worker Alemtsehay make the
point. She describes her female employer, within the same narrative, in dif-
ferent and contradictory ways. She condemns her for using derogatory terms
(such as gered) against her. At the same time, she describes her as protective
and caring. She refers to a hierarchy employer-employee that the domestic
worker is willing to maintain if she is “treated as a daughter”. If not, she will
leave the household in search of a better job. In this way Alemtsehay express-
es both her need of caring and being cared for.
      If she (employer) insults me I can leave this house and find another job! […]
      If she acts like a mother I just keep silent. It is not a problem if she beats me
      when I commit a mistake. I keep my head down and never leave her house.

   This aspect also shows that, although domestic workers employ everyday
practices to challenge relations of domination and carve out spaces of resis-
tance for themselves, these “tactics” do not lead to a radical change of the
hierarchical relations that permeate the everyday life. Relationships of mutual
dependence between workers and employers are hierarchical and inevitably
shaped by complementary relations of domination and submission. Recognis-
ing the complexity of these relationships is important to understand the care
work that is performed by domestic workers in its many forms, assisting the
functioning of rural and urban households structures at different levels.

Conclusions
   This article has shown that care work reproduces itself in various forms
in the different phases of women’s lives, from their childhood in rural areas
and when they are domestic workers in the city. The women change several
households where they work. A woman might have worked with no remunera-
tion for someone (kin or non-kin) who offered accommodation and education,


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Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives                                   23

or someone who needed domestic help due to difficult family circumstances.
She might have worked performing domestic chores within the house but also
helping relatives or other people working in the informal sector. The same
woman might have then moved to another household to work with a remu-
neration. Overall, it is not easy to identify and disentangle the various forms
of hosting by pseudo-parents, friends, acquaintances, as well as the diverse
forms of work performed by women. Domestic work in Ethiopia and Tanzania
is often associated with values of intense caring that should assure the well-
being of household structures within the framework of a kinship ideology. The
women often perform domestic work free of charge, live in asymmetric power
relationships that, on the one hand, expose them to exploitative circumstanc-
es and, on the other, may provide them with some form of protection. From
the intimacy of their work, domestic workers manipulate power relations to
achieve certain goals, but they do not overturn the nature of hierarchical re-
lations that incorporate steep power relationships with the ethics of care.
Importantly, everyday practices of power and care must be analyzed in their
temporal dimension, in terms of how they are transformed and renegotiated
as agents’ expectations, risk perceptions, as well as expectations and trust in
the actions of others change (Thelen 2015).
   In the light of these considerations, solutions proposed by formal channels
which foster the formalisation of hired care work sometimes clash with local
realities and are not necessarily perceived as adequate by domestic workers.
This is the case of formal, written contracts of employment that might threat-
en the implicit covenants of trust between the women and the people for
whom they work, and more broadly, between rural and urban households in
their labor redistribution practices. Recognising these historically cultivated
practices of power in the affective world of domestic work is important pre-
cisely to ensure that attempts at formalisation do not disempower domestic
workers, but rather take their needs into account by working towards alterna-
tive solutions.
   Ethnographic research can play a key role in exploring how domestic work-
ers sustain, manage and live with asymmetric relationships in negotiation
with a dominant value system (Malara, Boylston 2016). These reflections
might generate new insights into the creation, reproduction and dissolution
of significant ties, and open up space for a broad reflection on the “funda-
mentals of care” (beyond established classifications), without diminishing the
focus on its varied registers in different contexts.



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24	Silvia Cirillo

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28	Silvia Cirillo

  Silvia Cirillo obtained her PhD in 2021 and is currently a post-doctoral researcher
  at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. She works on gender, migration and domestic
  work in Africa. She carried out her first ethnographic research on mediation and
  dispute resolution mechanisms in Tigray (Ethiopia). During her PhD, she conduct-
  ed a comparative study on female domestic work in Ethiopia and Tanzania. She has
  recently expanded her research interests to the study of domestic work in Mozam-
  bique, and started ethnographic research in the archives of the White Fathers in
  Rome, under the research group Genealogies of African Freedoms.
  silvia.cirillo@unimib.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Silvia Cirillo
Conceptualizing care practices in women’s lives: a domestic work case study in Ethiopia and Tanzania.
2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 3-28.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4932
