Invisible in life and death: The aftermath of Nepali female migrant domestic workers’ death

05 Aug 2025 Download

Executive Summary

In this report, we offer an urgent examination of the deaths of Nepali female migrant domestic workers abroad and the consequences for their families. Drawing on 17 cases across multiple districts in Nepal, we foreground the voices of bereaved family members and argue that Nepal’s migration industry systemically fails its most vulnerable citizens – women from Dalit, Janajati and low-income backgrounds. At the heart of this pilot feminist research is an important question:

What happens when the state that benefits from migrant women’s labour disowns them in death?

Research findings

1. Grief, debt, and dispossession

• Families of deceased female migrant workers suffer severe mental health related issues. This including, but not limited to, depression, trauma, anxiety, and social withdrawal. Elderly parents and children are particularly impacted but receive no formal psychosocial support.
• The death of a female migrant workers often results in financial collapse due to unpaid migration debts and lost income. As a result, several family members are forced to sell their houses, land and assets and relocate to different locations. Many families fall into high-interest debt cycles, with women-headed households suffering the most.
• Families endure social stigma and blame from their communities for sending their women via irregular channels. Marginalised castes face heightened exclusion, and children are often ostracised at school.

2. Institutional failures and irregular migration

• Body repatriation is slow, uncertain, or denied, especially for undocumented migrant women. Families often pay large sums or rely on community and diasporic donations to bring their loved ones home.
• Nepali missions provide minimal support, civil society’s support are mostly absent, and there is no systematic investigation into suspicious deaths is conducted despire supreme court of Nepal’s order of dual post mortems. These deaths are often labelled as suicides or natural causes and family members refuse to accept these official reasoning.
• Migration bans on domestic work force lower class and caste women into irregular migration channels. This increases their vulnerability to exploitation, abuse, and death.

3. Structural inequality and intersectional Injustice

• Nepali women’s labour and deaths are rendered invisible through a combination of gendered, caste-based, and class-based oppression.
• Protectionist policies, like the domestic work migration ban, are based on outdated assumptions on gender and serve to control women’s life, mobility and labour, not protect them despite their enormous contribution to Nepal.
• Even those with legal documents face bureaucratic hurdles and lack access to justice. These highlights a fragmented, inefficient system more concerned with regulating migration than safeguarding lives.

Core policy recommendations

To restore dignity and justice to female migrant domestic workers and their families, we call for a comprehensive restructuring of Nepal’s migration governance.

1. .Lift migration bans in domestic work and enable legal migration

• Lift the ban on domestic work migration.
• Facilitate accessible legal migration channels.
• Unconditionally, recognise, register and protect all undocumented migrants in embassies.

1. Strengthen compensation and social Protection

• Extend financial support and insurance coverage to all migrant families.  
• Establish a government-funded repatriation programme.
• Create simplified and localised claims processes.
• Improve institutional capacity and accountability
  • Increase staffing and resources at embassies.
  • Mandate dual post-mortems for migrant deaths.
  • Create a Migrant Death Review Board and a legal aid cell for bereaved families.
• Expand mental health infrastructure and community support
  • Establish ward-level psychosocial counselling infrastructure.
  • Support community-based organisations in offering legal and emotional support.
  • Launch national campaigns to reduce stigma around women’s migration. 
• Promote intersectional feminist migration governance
  • Include returnee migrants and bereaved families in policymaking.
  • Promote intersectional research led by Dalit, Janajati and other researchers and scholars from intersectionally marginalised communities.
  • Release disaggregated data on migrant deaths and repatriation.
•  Build gender-sensitive Structures
  • Conduct gender impact assessments of migration policies.
  • Recognise care work as labour in both policy and practice.
  • Ensure safe, transparent, and just migration systems for all citizens.

This report is a refusal to forget the women who left Nepal to support their families and never returned. It challenges all actors, government, civil society, media, and academia, to recognise the systemic violence that allows these deaths to occur without justice or acknowledgement. Their deaths are not isolated events, but the result of policy failures, institutional neglect, and deeply rooted inequalities. Each death is a national failure. Each story is a demand for change. This report is both an archive of grief and a call to action.