Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Yet more about Qatar

The BBC has an article "five facts about Qatar you might not know", and the extremity of the imbalance noted in the first one is pretty surprising:

Men outnumber women - hugely

In a country of about 2.5 million people, there are fewer than 700,000 women.
This imbalance can be attributed to Qatar's sudden population explosion: this is a state built by immigrants, who are overwhelmingly young and male.
The promise of a job has meant people have flooded into Qatar - which is about the same size as Yorkshire - in recent years, taking its population from less than 700,000 in 2003, to an estimated 2.5 million in 2016.
 Yet their treatment of migrant labor is about as bad as everywhere else in the Middle East:
They come from all over the world, although the largest numbers come from India and Nepal, making Hindus the third largest religious group in the country, after Muslims and Christians, according to the CIA's World Factbook.
However, despite the promise of work and a better future, several reports in recent years have said migrants are being forced to work in appalling conditions, with more than half still living in labour camps around the country.
Qatar has promised to improve life for its workers, but Amnesty International's report for 2016/17 said they "continued to face exploitation and abuse".

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