Migration and the Gender Impacts of COVID-19 on Nepalese Women: Global Development Working Paper 1

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives globally: while most attention has been on the various challenges faced by each country, there are also the people ‘stranded’ overseas with little if any support in getting home. The stranded people can be tourists, visiting families, students, or they are migrant workers whose remittances bolster the household and home country’s national GDP. It is these migrants that are often overlooked in COVID-19 responses. In particular, the women who are employed in the domestic work sector, who are the last on repatriation flight lists and returnee policies and programs. This paper looks at Nepali women migrant workers in Lebanon, and how COVID-19 has made an already precarious working life even more so. It focuses on how women in these situations have been able to exercise their agency in a complex socio‑political environment and how this has been disrupted by COVID-19 and the hostile political and social environment at home for these Nepali women in Lebanon.