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ASIA: Workers’ Remittances as Development Funds?

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 3 2006 (IPS) - Migrant rights activists are eyeing a regional conference starting here Monday to secure more protection for the frequently victimised overseas labour force. It comes as governments here, as elsewhere, are warming up to convert the millions being sent home by migrant workers for local development programmes.

Of greater concern to the activists are female migrant workers, who not only make a substantial slice of foreign workers in the jobs described as ‘’Four Ds” – for dirty, difficult, demeaning and dangerous – but are also the worst victims of discrimination both when employed abroad and after returning home.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is among those – in addition to officials of international financial institutions like the World Bank- who are giving shape to this emerging policy debate, which states that international migration, at one level, can help developing countries struggling to meet the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs).

The first goal of the MDGs, a set of eight targets countries are to achieve by 2015, is the commitment to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Foreign remittances can play a pivotal part to meet this target, notes the ‘’State of World Population 2006′, a recent report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). ‘’Many people are increasingly looking to migration as a way to provide for their families.”

Many of the eight South-east Asian countries attending the Bangkok meeting are marching in step with this view. ‘’All these (migrant) sending countries are one by one realising the remittances from migrant workers can foster development,” Jean D’Cunha, regional director of the East and South-East Asia office of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), told IPS. ‘’They are beginning to look at ways of using this money for productive investment, rather than it be used for conspicuous consumption.”

But UNIFEM, which is organising the two-day event on Nov. 6-7, warns that the rights and concerns of the migrant workers cannot be sacrificed in the process. ‘’Female migrant workers are always been looked at by countries as commodities to be traded. They are seen as resources who will bring back money,” says D’Cunha. ‘’What is needed is to look at them as human beings and their human rights need to be addressed.”

That can be achieved if the participating countries – Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand û put into practice the commitments made in backing an international treaty to protect women’s rights, adds D’Cunha. The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979, has been ratified by 184 countries.

South-east Asia’s stance in this emerging global approach to tie the remittances of migrant workers to the development agendas of their home country is important due to the relevance of countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, where the number of female migrants far exceed their male counterparts.

‘’In 2005, over 65 percent of the nearly 3,000 Filipinos that left the country every day for work or residence abroad were women,” says the UNFPA report released in September. ‘’Between 2000 and 2003, an average of 79 percent of all migrants leaving Indonesia to work abroad were women.”

The Philippines currently ranks as the world’s largest exporter of labour, with most jobs located in the Middle East, East Asia, Europe and the United States. At present, an estimated seven million Filipinos, nearly a tenth of the population of 80 million people, are employed in foreign countries. Their annual remittances home amount to some six billion dollars, of which a third come from the female labour force.

This number of employees is part of the estimated 19 million Asian migrant workers in Asia and over 25 million Asian migrant workers across the world, according to NGOs. ‘’Today, women constitute almost half of all international migrants worldwide – 95 million or 49.6 percent,” adds the UNFPA report.

What has triggered new thinking by U.N. agencies, the World Bank and other development agencies regards migrant workers – both male and female – is their earning potential. ‘’In 2005, remittances – funds sent by migrants to their country of origin – rang in at an estimated 232 billion U.S. dollars,” the UNFPA report notes. ‘’With 167 billion US dollars of the total going to developing countries, remittances are considerable larger than official development assistance (ODA).”

These remittances, in fact, have become ‘’the second largest source of external funding for developing countries after foreign direct investment (FDI),” it adds. ‘’Experts consider the actual amount to be much higher, since these estimates do not take into account funds transferred through informal channels.”

”No government in Asia has an explicit policy on migration and development,” Rex Verona, executive director of the Asian Migrant Centre, said in a telephone interview from Hong Kong, where this NGO is based. ‘’We are trying to ensure that governments, the U.N., the World Bank do not create policies that shifts the burden of development on migrant workers.”

More so because ‘’migrant workers do not get a fair deal at the moment, because their rights are denied and they have not been protected in the first place,” he added. ‘’Remittances should not replace foreign aid and ODA that have been committed for development.”