Saudi Arabia Wants to Recruit Female Professors from Mohammed V University in Rabat

After many scandals broke out due to the cruel treatment of Moroccan maids in Saudi Arabia, the Arabian Kingdom is looking for a different kind of Moroccan female workers.

The Saudi Arabian embassy in Rabat has solicited Mohammed V University for a meeting between the faculty representatives and officials from Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University.

The Saudi university wants to recruit female professors from Mohammed V University, working in various fields including dentistry, computer science, psychology, fine arts and other domains.

Located in Riyadh, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University is the first and largest public university to be reserved exclusively for women, accommodating up to 60,000 students in total.

Despite the Saudi request to recruit female professors, Morocco has always been one of the main countries to supply Saudi Arabia with different kind of jobs, namely maids and domestic servants.

Saudi Arabia has long been home to more than two million housemaids from countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh and many others.

“Husbands takers,” “sex workers” or even “sorcery adepts,” there are just a few of  the assigned labels to Moroccan women living in Gulf countries, even though most of them are trying to nobly make a decent living away from their families.

Many foreign workers in Gulf countries, like Saudi Arabia, operate under the sponsorship system known as Kafala, which require foreign workers to have local sponsors and rigidly binds migrants to their employers, enabling the latter to commit abuses, while preventing workers from changing jobs or leaving the country.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) and the organization of Human Rights Watch has previously criticized the sponsorship system applicable in the Gulf States and considered it as a comparable to slavery.

Last year, many videos flooded social media, showing Moroccan women recounting their ordeal and claiming to have been assaulted and abused in Saudi Arabia.

In 2015, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation announced that it will no longer validate maids’ employment contracts in the Gulf state of Saudi Arabia, with an aim to “spare Moroccans” from facing “compromising situations.”