Gendered Migration, Food Insecurity, and Nepali Women Migrant Workers in the United Arab Emirates

This paper investigates the intersections of gender, food insecurity, and transnational labour using a qualitative study of Nepali women migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork conducted between May and November 2025, the analysis applies feminist food justice and intersectional frameworks to highlight how hunger, nourishment, and everyday food practices of these women are shaped by gendered power relations, restrictive migration regimes, and hierarchical global labour markets. The study situates the women workers’ mobility within Nepal’s broader neoliberal and agrarian transformations, in which declining agricultural viability, indebtedness, and intensifying care burdens have made labour migration both a survival strategy and a rare pathway to socioeconomic mobility. The main findings highlight a central paradox associated with this form of transnational female mobility: while remittances significantly enhance the food security and well-being of sending households, women migrant workers often face food insecurity, diminished personal autonomy, and emotional hardship in the UAE. We discuss how food is a terrain on which inequality, belonging, aspiration, and resistance are negotiated in the daily lives of Nepali women migrant workers.