Word.ws English Dictionary

kafala

kafala noun: a form of Islamic adoption in which the child is not regarded as a true child of the adoptive parents.

Noun

kafala (uncountable)

  1. A form of Islamic adoption in which the child is not regarded as a true child of the adoptive parents.
  2. A sponsorship system in the Middle East, used to monitor migrant labourers, mostly in the construction and domestic sectors.
    • Officials in Qatar have said that companies building World Cup stadiums will be held to higher standards of worker treatment, and proposed changes to the kafala system are undergoing legislative review.2015 July 15, Barry Meier, “Labor Scrutiny for FIFA as a World Cup Rises in the Desert”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 19 Jul 2015

Origin of kafala

Borrowed from Arabic كَفَالَة (kafāla).

Questions about kafala

What does kafala mean?
Kafala means a form of Islamic adoption in which the child is not regarded as a true child of the adoptive parents.
What part of speech is kafala?
Kafala is a noun.

Words near kafala in the dictionary

  1. Kaestners
  2. kaf
  3. Kafa
  4. Kafakomandoo
  5. kafal
  6. kafala
  7. kafals
  8. kafana
  9. kafanas
  10. kafeel
  11. kafeels

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kafala (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “kafala.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kafala. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.