NAIROBI — Treasury officials across East Africa began modeling a sustained drop in Gulf remittance inflows over the weekend as the first repatriation flights from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates carried hundreds of stranded domestic workers, construction laborers and security guards back to capitals where their monthly transfers had quietly become a load-bearing pillar of household consumption.

The flights, run under a hastily assembled coordination framework involving the Kenyan, Ethiopian and Ugandan foreign ministries, the International Organization for Migration and a small consortium of Gulf carriers, landed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Bole International in Addis Ababa and Entebbe over the course of Friday and Saturday, with roughly 2,300 passengers processed across the first wave, according to figures shared by the IOM regional office. Officials cautioned that the early numbers represented only the most vulnerable cases — workers whose employers had terminated contracts during the war and who had been sheltering in consular safe houses or with relatives in the Gulf — and that the larger flow, including workers whose contracts remained nominally active but whose employers had stopped paying, would unfold over weeks.

For finance ministries in the region, the diplomatic relief of the Islamabad ceasefire is already giving way to a sharper macroeconomic calculation. Remittances from the Gulf had become the largest single source of household foreign exchange for Kenya, Uganda and parts of Ethiopia over the past five years, eclipsing tourism receipts and rivaling agricultural exports in several quarters. Central bank data published in Nairobi on Friday showed remittance inflows in March falling 14 percent year-on-year, the steepest monthly drop since the pandemic, with the Gulf corridor accounting for almost the entire decline.

“We have been watching the war through a balance-of-payments lens since the first week,” said Patrick Njoroge, who advises the Kenyan treasury on external accounts and previously served as central bank governor. “The corridors that matter most to East African households are not the ones on the front pages. They are the corridors that flow through Riyadh, Doha and Dubai into mobile wallets in Kisumu and Nakuru. When those corridors slow, the effect shows up in school fees, in pharmacy receipts, in second-hand clothing markets. It does not wait for an IMF mission.”

The Kenyan finance ministry said in a brief statement Saturday that it had begun “scenario-based planning” for a quarter in which Gulf remittance inflows ran 20 to 30 percent below 2025 levels, a stress case that would push the country’s current account deficit toward 6 percent of gross domestic product and complicate the rollover of Eurobonds due later this year. Treasury Cabinet Secretary Njuguna Ndung’u told reporters at a separate event that the government was “in active conversation” with the World Bank about a contingency drawdown, though no figure was disclosed.

Ethiopia faces a different but no less awkward picture. Roughly 380,000 Ethiopian nationals work in Saudi Arabia alone, many under the kafala employer-sponsorship system, and rights groups have for years warned that the legal architecture leaves workers exposed during regional crises. During the war, the Ethiopian consulate in Jeddah opened two emergency shelters and processed nearly 4,800 distress cases, according to a foreign ministry spokesperson, Meles Alem, who said in Addis Ababa on Saturday that the government’s priority was now “an orderly return that does not collapse into a humanitarian backlog at Bole.”

The Ugandan government, smaller and more exposed to a single corridor, has been the most candid about the strain. Speaking at a press conference Friday outside Entebbe arrivals, Labor Minister Betty Amongi said the country had identified roughly 84,000 nationals in the Gulf, of whom an estimated 11,000 were “in active hardship” and would be prioritized for assisted returns over the next eight weeks. Asked whether Kampala had the fiscal space to absorb the inflow, Amongi was unusually direct. “The honest answer is that we do not. We are asking partners — the IOM, the African Union, the Saudi authorities, the Gulf Cooperation Council secretariat — to share the costs of repatriation and to honor the wages owed.”

The wage-arrears question has become a central diplomatic file. Several East African embassies in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have compiled lists, running into the tens of thousands, of workers whose final salaries and end-of-service benefits were unpaid when the war disrupted employer operations. A senior Kenyan diplomat in Riyadh, speaking on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were ongoing, said the Saudi labor ministry had agreed in principle to a fast-track adjudication mechanism but that “the file is enormous and the staffing is not.” Two Gulf officials reached separately said similar discussions were underway with Ethiopian and Ugandan representatives.

The African Union, meeting at its commission headquarters in Addis Ababa, said Saturday it would convene a special session of labor ministers later this month to coordinate positions ahead of a planned ministerial dialogue with the Gulf Cooperation Council. AU Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat said in a statement that the continent’s exposure to “the labor side of the Gulf economy” had been “underweighted in our diplomacy for too long” and that the post-ceasefire moment offered “an opening to rebalance terms that have not been seriously revisited in a generation.”

Independent economists in the region were measured in their assessments. Wandia Gichuru, a Nairobi-based development economist at the African Centre for Economic Transformation, said the remittance shock would be painful but probably not destabilizing if Gulf hiring resumed within two quarters. “The corridor will reopen,” Gichuru said. “Construction projects in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will need labor, and the wage gap with East Africa has not narrowed. The question is whether the returnees can be absorbed into domestic economies during the gap, and whether governments use this window to negotiate better protections before the corridor reopens at full volume.”

The reverse flow is also already visible in informal markets. Money-transfer agents in Nairobi’s River Road district reported a roughly 28 percent decline in Gulf-corridor volumes in March, with anecdotal reports of households drawing down small savings to cover school fees and rent. Mobile money operator Safaricom said in a brief filing that international transfer revenues had declined for the second consecutive month, though it cautioned that the broader picture would only be clear after the second-quarter reconciliation.

For East African leaders, the political optics of the returns are delicate. Many of the workers were among the strongest household earners in their communities, and their return without back wages or onward employment risks shifting the political conversation from the diplomatic success of the ceasefire to the domestic cost of the war. Kenyan opposition figures have already begun to test the line, with Wiper Democratic Movement leader Kalonzo Musyoka telling supporters in Machakos on Friday that “we welcome our children home, but we will ask the government what it has secured for them.”

IOM officials said charter flight capacity would expand next week, with up to nine additional flights scheduled across the three capitals. Officials said additional measures, including a coordinated wage-arrears claims platform and a regional reintegration fund, would be considered at the African Union labor ministers’ meeting later this month.