THE MEDIA project 'On the Asian Migration Trail' will follow the human side of the migration phenomenon — the under-reported aspects of the issue that often take the backseat to reportage focusing on the economic or labour value of migrant workers.

This initiative by IPS Asia-Pacific, with support from Ford Foundation, aims to generate awareness, debate and analysis of migration issues through media in Asia, with particular focus on reproductive health/gender and the social, emotional cost of migration for work.

An expansion of its earlier 'On the Philippine Migration Trail' project, this programme will feature stories on migrant workers from and within Asia, whose economic value is often appreciated, but are socially isolated, and their health, emotional, and human needs sometimes ignored.

IPS will be running stories from a mix of writers in both labour-sending and labour-receiving countries.

While the first project was devoted to migrant workers from the Philippines — the largest organised exporter of human labour in the world — 'On the Asian Migration Trail' will delve into the plight of millions more Asian workers, many of them women, who end up in countries whose cultures are sometimes alien to their own, and in circumstances they were not prepared for.

By some counts there are more than 6,000,000 migrants working in East and South-east Asia alone, one of third of whom are in an irregular situation and most of whom are women.

More than 800,000 Filipinos leave home each year to work overseas. Up to 7,000 Nepali women and girls are trafficked to India each year, mostly for sex work, and 4,500 a year from Bangladesh, also mainly for sex work. Sri Lanka is a major labour exporter with close to a million migrant workers, 70 percent of whom are women.

China has seen, and will continue to see, internal migration of hundreds of millions of people due to its economic reforms.

Indonesia recently said it wanted to imitate the Philippine example of creating a government agency to deploy overseas workers, finding labour exports a handy economic formula during hard times.

The human costs the workers face is real — hardship in coping in alien lands, discrimination, rules that work against reproductive health, the difficulties of re-integration and the breakdown of traditional family structures.

All of these, and more, provide the backdrop for a rich mix of stories — and human voices — around migration.

The migration stories will be available in different Asian languages, will be sent to different media, activists, development workers and individuals in the region. They will also appear in special publications in the next two years.