Handa is free, multilingual legal guidance for overseas Filipino workers. When wages go unpaid or a passport is taken, it shows a worker what to do, where to file, and by when — in the language they read.
The law and the steps differ across the corridor, so Handa's guidance is country-specific. Choose a destination to open its guide.
Six destinations in the Philippines–Gulf corridor. Select one to continue.
Across the Gulf, withholding a worker's passport is already against the law. Unpaid wages already have a complaint process. On paper, the protections exist.
But for a domestic or construction worker — far from home, watched, often without their own documents — the hard part is the next step. Which office. Which deadline. Which evidence. In a language they actually read. That is the part that doesn't exist.
Government apps can tell the state that a worker is in distress. They rarely tell the worker what to do about it. Handa is built to complete that infrastructure, not to replace it.
Distress gets detected. Handa equips the action.
Each starts from a worker's real situation, not from legal jargon — and never sends them somewhere a lawyer hasn't checked.
A few plain questions map a worker's situation to what the law actually gives them — and the concrete steps to act on it.
Passport, contract, IDs and medical records — kept on the worker's own phone. Handa cannot read them; only they can open them.
Emergency contacts and key details on a single screen — that still works when there's no internet.
Plain-language warnings — including what "absconding" means and how to avoid it — so trouble is easier to sidestep.
The preview on this page is the real flow. Switch languages, watch Arabic flip the layout, and try the passport route for Kuwait to see how the absconding warning works.
A worker harmed by wrong guidance is the one outcome everything here is designed to prevent.
No legal pathway reaches a worker until a licensed lawyer has signed it off. Until then it's shown plainly as "under review" — never as settled advice.
Sensitive content stays on the worker's own phone. Handa cannot read a vault — and the app never stores anything usable against the worker.
Handa takes no funding from destination-country governments. There's no conflict of interest in the room — only the worker's.
We're building in the open. Here's the honest state of each phase — no phase is described as further along than it is.
Website live; two intake pathways drafted — unpaid wages and document confiscation — for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait; a working app preview; and a legal-content scaffold now in front of lawyers and clinics for review.
Unpaid wages and document confiscation, each signed off by counsel, in Tagalog, English and Arabic. With the evidence vault, guided demand-letter drafting, and warm hand-off to pro-bono partners. Android-first and built for patchy connections.
A lighter intake over WhatsApp, for workers who can't safely install an app on a phone their employer monitors.
Additional destination corridors and languages, more legal pathways, and the first tracked case outcomes — workers who took a redress step they wouldn't otherwise have taken.
Handa is designed to plug into work already underway across the migration corridor — not to start from zero.
A 2025 agreement connecting distressed OFWs to law-school legal-aid clinics. Handa aims to be the digital rails for exactly that referral.
A cross-border legal-referral backbone spanning the corridor — the structure Handa connects workers and clinics through.
New requirements broadening pro-bono legal service among Philippine lawyers — added capacity that the right tool can channel to the workers who need it.
If any of these is you, a short call goes a long way. We've kept the asks small and concrete.
Verify a pathway, or take a referral. The legal work is already scoped into bounded, country-specific pieces — not an open-ended ask.
Review a pathwayTell us what actually happens at filing — not just what the statute says. Field reality is what keeps a pathway honest.
Share field realityHelp reach workers before the harm, not only after it. Catalytic support and tech credits both move this faster.
Support the workOr just say hello — contact@handahelp.org