Shadow Governance and the Political Economy of Nigerian Women's Labour Migration to Egypt

Abstract

This paper develops shadow governance as a framework for understanding how labour migration is organised where formal migration institutions hold legal authority but limited practical reach. Focusing on the Nigeria-Egypt corridor, it examines the documented recruitment of Nigerian women into domestic and care work through informal intermediaries, debt-based arrangements, sponsor control, and transnational networks. Drawing on qualitative documentary analysis of investigative journalism, trafficking reports, institutional documents, legal instruments, and existing scholarship, the paper argues that this system is better understood not as a governance vacuum or a collection of isolated trafficking incidents, but as an alternative, non-democratic order that performs functions normally associated with regulated migration institutions: recruitment, matching, financing, contractual obligation, labour allocation, enforcement, and management of exit. The paper identifies a political economy within this order in which migrant labour generates value for employers and intermediaries while the costs and risks of mobility are disproportionately transferred to migrants. Particular attention is given to the documented transition of some former migrants into recruitment roles, and to the use of digital platforms in reproducing recruitment networks. The paper argues that shadow governance permits constrained individual agency while denying migrants meaningful institutional voice over the rules governing their mobility, and concludes that effective migration governance requires credible institutional alternatives capable of performing the functions informal systems currently monopolise, not criminal enforcement alone.