As a preteen, Esther*, now 20, says she could not wait for the weekdays to come around. Going to school meant an escape from the dark, tin-roof home she shared with her mother in a poorer part of Makadara, a high-density neighbourhood on the south side of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
She disliked that their house sat directly in front of an open sewer and had walls so thin she knew exactly what her neighbours were up to. But it was the boredom between naps and chores she dreaded the most.
At school she had friends, a routine and could imagine a better life for herself and her mother, Mueni*, an informal worker who left the house each morning in search of the odd job, unsure whether she would return with cash or empty handed.
But in 2014, Esther’s grade six teacher announced that students would need to bring in their birth certificates to register for national examinations. The seemingly minor requirement morphed into an obstacle that would later push Esther out of education altogether.
Her estranged father had her birth certificate and the prospects of finding him were poor, while her mother’s attempts to get a copy from government offices ran up against bureaucratic obstacles. Officials sent her back and forth between their offices in Nairobi and Kitui – nearly 185km from the capital – as Mueni struggled to pay the bus fare on her meagre daily wages.
Lack of documentation is a common problem for women, rural families and people with poor literacy skills, according to a recent UN report, which warned it was depriving them of basic services such as education, and pushing them into informal employment.
Esther was repeatedly sent home for not producing the document and as she watched her mother’s failed efforts and their financial situation become more precarious, she became dispirited.
“I didn’t see the point of staying in school if I wouldn’t be able to take [the exams]. I felt there wasn’t a path forward for me there,” she says.
Instead, aged 11, she quietly dropped out against her mother’s wishes and later ran away from home. She had heard from a friend that a family in a lower-middle-income residential Nairobi suburb were looking for a housekeeper.
The first family Esther worked for, aged 12, promised to “treat her like a daughter” and to pay her £17 (3,000 Kenyan shillings) a month, but soon began overworking her and withholding her pay.
“She [the employer] said: ‘why should I pay you when you’re eating and living here for free?’,” says Esther. “I’d get up at 3am to clean the house and get the kids ready for school and work until the family went to bed. It always felt like I’d have to sneak time to rest. There are days I’d work until I felt sick, but they wouldn’t let me leave the house no matter how bad it got.”
Esther says their treatment of her was riddled with contempt. She was ordered to make separate meals for herself, often poorer in quality and less nutritious, or to prepare hers on the charcoal stove rather than gas cooker, which took twice the time and effort. Once, she was beaten with a pipe in front of house guests for a delay in serving tea, leaving her humiliated and sore all over.
“Nobody wants to do that kind of work,” says Esther. “If I had stayed in school, maybe I would not have been abused like I have been.”
There is no current data on the number of child domestic workers in Kenya, but domestic work is believed to be the second largest contributor to child labour in the country. A 2023 study found children as young as seven driven into work by poverty, with many facing physical abuse and denied access to their salaries.
While schools are legally obliged to investigate the reasons for a child’s absence, rights groups say dropout cases, especially in poorer areas, go unchecked, leaving children vulnerable to labour abuses and worsening the cycle of poverty in lower-income families.
Old friends from school gradually sidelined Esther, she says, leaving her socially isolated. After the family she was working for stopped paying her completely, she fled and became homeless until an older domestic worker introduced her to a group of street men and told her she could make better money working under them.
The gang operated across a handful of low-income neighbourhoods. Esther, then 15, transported drugs and weapons as girls were less likely to be suspected, arrested or shot by police. The gang bought her fancy clothes and took care of her expenses, such as food and housing, recording her work hours meticulously and promising to pay her when she left the group. She only decided to leave after two of the men in the gang were shot and another was arrested over possession of drugs and a gun.
“I was really scared,” says Esther. “The work was becoming too dangerous, but when I asked to leave and requested my money, they told me that nobody left the gang alive.”
Fearing for her safety, she escaped and returned to work as a maid for a family of seven in a middle-class neighbourhood. Once again she found herself abused by her employer, she says, but this time things got much worse.
One day, when the family left the house, their son, who was living at home while studying at a local university, raped her. When she told his mother, she accused her of lying and beat her. As Esther was working illegally and had no id diocuments, she says she feared she would be in trouble if she contacted the police. She also doubted she would have been fairly heard against the word of a wealthier family.
Her mother eventually contacted Cana Family Life, a Nairobi-based charity that helps children out of domestic work and back to school. After rescuing her, they enrolled Esther in a hairdressing course and are now trying to help her get a job at a salon or start a small one of her own.
The lack of a birth certificate still affects her prospects, however. She needs it to apply for a national ID card, in order to get a job or start a business.
“There should be more concern and help for those struggling to get these legal documents,” says Mueni. “It needs to be more accessible because the impact of not having it is so [catastrophic] – it’s derailed my daughter’s life.”
The Ministries of Education and Labour did not respond to requests for comment. The department of civil registration said it required further details on Esther’s case, including a copy of her birth certificate, to take action.
* Names have been changed
