EDIT: I previously uploaded this video on the 8th of October 2016. The video was originally 13 minutes long however this one has been edited due to one of the mothers in the original video having passed away. Out of respect to her memory, I decided to edit her out of the video and to delete the original. Her name was Fadumo and she was the leader of this group of women construction workers and she was known for having worked in this job for many years. As she mentioned in the original video, this job greatly affected her health and I was saddened to hear of her passing away after an illness. May Allah have mercy on her.


Construction worker in the Somali language is "muruq maal" which directly translates to 'earning money through one's muscles or strength' aka a labourer. The construction industry in Somalia is male-dominated, in fact it has never been heard of before in the country for a woman of any age to be working in this field. The construction site is noisy, dirty and tough to work in. And these are women who have families to look after but are waking up early in the morning and working hard for many hours every day.

The women who you can see in the video are mostly women with little to no male support or any means of financial support. They are a mixture of widows, single mothers, married women whose spouses send them out to do this job while they sit at home chewing khat and women whose husbands have abandoned their families. Some of these women previously had livestock that died due to droughts. All of them are working in construction because they have no other choice. They have families to feed and must toil on these building sites just to survive.

We heard about these women and decided to get in contact with them to see how we could help. We visited them whilst they were working on a building site in Borama and I was appalled by the sight of these mothers lifting heavy concrete blocks in an extremely loud environment with many men working and shouting instructions. I imagined seeing my mother or my grandmother working there and it made me feel incredibly sad. I believe that this work is wholly unsuitable for any woman. The men who were working there that we spoke to also agreed saying that they would never be happy with their mothers working there.

We met the women again at one of their monthly meetings and filmed a few of them speaking about their difficulties. They suffer from many health problems now because of this work and they all feel like they can't do this job anymore. Sadly, they have no one to support them. They told us that nobody around them has any real idea of their plight and that they've only been helped once before.

Thankfully, Allah has allowed us to come into contact with these women to make us a means of helping them and for you to see this to give you a chance to help them too.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said: “If anyone relieves a Muslim believer from one of the hardships of this worldly life, Allah will relieve him of one of the hardships of the Day of Resurrection... Allah helps His slave as long as he helps his brother.”
(Sahih Muslim http://www.sunnah.com/urn/2054270).