Welfare Index of Migrant Workers in the Gulf: the Case of Qatar Abdoulaye Diop*, Semsia Al-Ali Mustafa* , Michael Ewers** and Trung Kien Le* ABSTRACT In December 2010, Qatar won the rights to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup games. The FIFA announcement came with increasing pressure from international human rights organizations, media and other groups for Qatar to reform its labour law, which governs the lives and work- ing conditions of foreign workers in the country. Although Qatar continues to develop and implement major reforms to its labour laws, until now there was no one unique tool based on survey data to evaluate the impact of the government’s policies on guest workers. The objec- tive of this article is to present the Qatar Guest Workers’ Welfare Index (GWWI), 1 a multi-di- mensional comprehensive tool based on survey data of migrant workers developed by the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI). In addition to assessing and tracking the welfare of this population, the objective of the index is to identify areas of improvement to guide policy formulation. BACKGROUND Qatar has faced fierce international scrutiny over the welfare of migrant workers involved in creat- ing and maintaining the country’s infrastructure, especially since Qatar was awarded the rights to host the 2022 World Cup. The kaf ala system of foreign labour sponsorship has been criticized as akin to “modern day slavery” (Pattisson, 2013), and the source of “serious and systemic abuses of migrant workers’ rights in Qatar” (HRW, 2019) that traps workers in “a maze of exploitation” (Amnesty International, 2018). At least 1400 migrant workers from Nepal alone are said to have died building World Cup stadiums (Kumar, 2019), and the heat is blamed for hundreds of workers dying per year (HRW, 2017). Others have focused on the poor living conditions that migrants are forced to live in (Lovett, 2019), including housing conditions so inhumane that workers are “sleep- ing 12 to a room in places and getting sick through repulsive conditions in filthy hostels ... forced to work without pay and left begging for food” (Pattisson, 2013). Without disputing the veracity of the information, too often such critiques have been based on anecdotal interviews with a small sample of individual workers who may not be representative of the labour migrant population. In addition to the misleading headlines, the data cited in these arti- cles is collected using unscientific methods, including a random selection of embassy documents, overall death rates without accounting for cause of death, and most often, targeted and unrepresen- tative interviews. Indeed, such accusations can flourish when accurate and reliable measures of worker welfare are not set in place. * Qatar University, Doha, Qatar ** University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina doi: 10.1111/imig.12667 © 2019 The Authors International Migration © 2019 IOM International Migration ISSN 0020-7985 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.