SHRINKING overseas employments for Bangladeshi workers mainly due to closure of traditional job markets has thrown the country’s migration sector into a serious crisis. Against the backdrop, the government desperately tries to explore new destinations in Asia and Africa, while hundreds of workers are coming back home from the Middle East countries every month, as per a local daily report.
The government must devise comprehensive strategies to retain the rest of the traditional job markets as fast as possible by discovering new sectors for sending workers abroad. They can do this by identifying some new destinations which can be economically profitable for our workers. To ensure this we should look at fast developing countries like China and our South and East Asian neighbours like Thailand and Cambodia.
Over 10 lakh workers from Bangladesh migrated abroad in 2017 but the overseas employment came down to 7.34 lakh in 2018 and in 2019 the situation is more dire – only about 4.7 lakh Bangladeshis got overseas jobs, BMET data show. This is mainly due to global economic recession.
This trend will adversely affect the inflow of remittance and thus create a negative pressure in our balance of payments. It will create a downward pressure on the local job market and the economy. The job market in the Middle East, the largest destinations for Bangladeshis, is also shrinking because of their priorities on creating jobs for their own people in troubled economy.
To counter this Bangladesh government should focus on grooming skilled workers while continuing to explore the new destinations. Malaysia, the third largest job market for Bangladesh, suspended recruiting Bangladeshis in September last year on allegations that a syndicate of ten recruiting agencies monopolised the recruitment business and charged recruiting fees as high as Tk 4 lakh a worker in 2016-18.
The easiest way to ensure economic migration is to see that the recruitment process is transparent and has comparatively lesser costs. Transparency will make foreign governments like the Malaysian government trusts our recruiting system. Proper training and skills development, especially in the trade sector and the more affluent white collar occupations will ensure that our workers are competitive globally. So reforms are essential in this sector if we are to build up our migration levels.
