The Economist: African women unwittingly drawn into Russia’s drone assembly

Key topics:African women, some under 18, recruited to assemble Iranian drones in Russia.Factory in Alabuga SEZ produces Iranian-designed suicide drones for Russia’s war.Recruitment deceptive; workers face harsh conditions and risk becoming military targets..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here.From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist.Assembling Iranian drones in a Russian factory is an unusual option for a work-study programme. Few students or migrant workers, however desperate or foolhardy, would willingly sign up to become a military target. Yet that is the situation in which hundreds of young African women, some of them younger than 18, have unwittingly found themselves.On April 23rd Ukrainian drones attacked the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Russia’s Tatarstan region, where Iranian-designed suicide drones are made. On this occasion there were no reported casualties. But several African women were wounded when their dormitory was struck in a similar attack last year. The repeated strikes underscore the military significance of Alabuga, which has been under Western sanctions since 2024. But by drawing attention to the unusual presence of African workers on Russian assembly lines, they also raise troubling questions for African governments. Why are their citizens toiling at the heart of Vladimir Putin’s arms empire? And what, if anything, will they do to help them?Alabuga began producing drones shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. At first, the bulk of the workers it recruited—some allegedly forcibly—were local students. But soon war-induced labour shortages prompted the factory’s owners to look for cheap foreign labour to plug the gap. They established “Alabuga Start”, which they advertised as an exciting work-study programme for fields such as catering and hospitality. Though ostensibly open to “talented people from all over the world”, in reality most of those targeted by the scheme were in Africa. (Recently, South America has become an additional focus.) Most troublingly, the recruiters had one specific demographic in mind: women between the ages of 18 and 22.There is no obvious reason why this should be the case. The vast majority of those recruited from overseas are involved in manufacturing drones, according to a report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, a non-profit organisation. That hardly supports the scheme’s claim that “many of the professions available require a certain level of feminine attention to detail.” A more plausible explanation is that the preference for young women is about control. Timur Shagivaleev, the boss of Alabuga, has reportedly said that African men are “too aggressive and dangerous” to be pliant workers.Many recruits seem to have been oblivious to what the job really entails, possibly because employees are banned from talking to outsiders about their work. “I don’t think many know about the firm’s bad labour practices,” says an Ethiopian woman who cancelled her application after reading about the factory online. Adverts distributed on social media and Telegram, a popular messaging app, are so deceptive that the UN says the scheme could constitute human trafficking.Ukrainian officials have pressed their African counterparts to put a stop to recruitment in their countries—to little effect. Some African countries have signed formal agreements with Alabuga itself. African diplomats have toured the factory; adverts for Alabuga Start have been shared by African government institutions. After a handful of critical articles in the Kenyan press, the Russian embassy in the country insisted that its Kenyan counterparts see “a clear benefit from the participation of young Kenyans in the programme, and propose to expand the enrolment”. For its part, Kenya’s labour ministry said only 12 Kenyans were taking part in the scheme, and none had been involved in making drones. So far only Burkina Faso has seriously tried to halt recruitment.It is unlikely that many more will follow suit. Most African governments need jobs, however distasteful, for unemployed youngsters. Many also back Russia over Ukraine. Russia continues to expand weapons production. The probable—and tragic—consequence, says a Ukrainian diplomat, is that “at some stage an African woman will be a legitimate target for a Ukrainian missile.”

The Economist: African women unwittingly drawn into Russia’s drone assembly

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