In any business that introduces a cleaner to a household or a company, the real product is not labour, it is trust. A client hands over keys, and often the run of a home, on the strength of what a stranger promises about a second stranger, while the cleaner hands over her time and her safety on the same thin basis. Whoever sits in the middle is selling confidence, and confidence is destroyed far faster than it is built.

Botswana is trying to move this kind of work onto firmer ground. The government’s Informal Sector Recovery Plan, developed with United Nations Development Programme support, places formalisation and decent work at its centre. Presenting it in Parliament in March 2025, the Assistant Minister of Trade and Entrepreneurship, Baratiwa Mathoothe, set out its aims as transition to formalisation, economic resilience, support for women and youth, entrepreneurial mobility and health. From September the pressure is legal as well as moral: the Employment and Labour Relations Act of 2025, which the Minister of Labour and Home Affairs, Major General Pius Mokgware, told Parliament would take effect on 1 September 2026, draws domestic workers and parts of the informal sector inside the labour law for the first time. A placement network that ignores all of this is not just unkind. It is building on sand. Here are five rules that keep it standing.

1. The cleaner never pays

The first rule is the one that separates an honest network from an exploitative one. The person doing the work must never be charged to be introduced, to be listed or to stay listed. An ethical model puts the fee on the client, who is buying the introduction, and leaves the worker’s wage untouched. The platform Kleana makes this explicit: the client pays a single introduction fee, the cleaner pays nothing at any stage, and where an independent agent brings the placement the split is between the agent and the platform, never a deduction from the cleaner. The day a network starts taking a cut of the wage, month after month, it stops being a bridge and becomes a toll.

2. Say exactly what you have checked

Trust collapses fastest when a badge implies more than it means. An ethical network states plainly, for every listing, what has been verified and what has not. A cleaner who has confirmed an email address and accepted the code of conduct is not the same as one whose identity document has been sighted and whose former employer has actually been telephoned. Kleana labels these as separate tiers, Declared and Kleana Verified, precisely so that no client mistakes a starter listing for a checked one. Honest labelling is worth more than an impressive badge, because the client can price the risk they are taking rather than discovering it later.

3. Fix the terms in writing before the first day

Most disputes in domestic and commercial cleaning are not about theft or misconduct. They are about terms that were never agreed: hours that creep, duties that expand, pay that arrives late. An ethical network requires both sides to settle the days, the hours, the duties, the pay and the notice period before the first morning, and it treats the worker’s dignity, access to water, a place to sit, use of a toilet, as non-negotiable rather than optional. This is now also what the law expects. A written charter is not bureaucracy. It is the document both sides reach for when memory and goodwill run out.

4. Protect the cleaner until the introduction is made

A placement market that publishes a woman’s name, face and telephone number to the whole world has already failed her. Before an introduction is agreed, a listing should show only what a client needs to choose, her skills, her area, her rate and her verification tier, and nothing that exposes her to a stream of unsolicited messages or lets a client pre-judge her on a photograph. Her contact details should pass to the client only once, and only when both sides have agreed to meet. Privacy here is not a nicety. It is the difference between a professional listing and an advertisement of a vulnerable person.

5. Make leaving and complaining real

A network is only as ethical as its exits. Either side must be able to end the arrangement with reasonable notice, and either side must be able to report a breach to someone who will actually act. If the only people a cleaner can complain to are the ones profiting from keeping her placed, the complaint route is decorative. A credible network keeps a channel open to both parties, treats a report from the worker as seriously as one from the client, and is willing to remove a client who mistreats a cleaner, not only a cleaner who disappoints a client.

Make the ethics operational

These five rules share a feature: none of them is a slogan. Each is a thing the network either does or does not do, on every listing, in every placement. That is the point. In a market built on trust, ethics that live only in a mission statement are worthless, while ethics wired into the fee structure, the labelling, the paperwork and the complaints channel become the reason clients and cleaners keep coming back. The durable network is not the one that promises the most. It is the one whose promises are built into how it actually operates.

Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa