New foreign employment strategy

Focus on skilled migrant workers:

Sanjeevi Jayasuriya

A five year comprehensive plan for the betterment of the foreign employment sector will be implemented shortly.

Asanga Abeyagoonasekera

The plan consists of a detailed study of the industry, trends in the global market, potential and the areas Sri Lanka can benefit in the next five years.

It will focus on positioning Sri Lanka as a country supplying skilled workers to the international markets, Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Agency Chairman Asanga Abeyagoonasekera told Daily News Business.

The country will focus on markets in countries such as Bahrain, the Caribbean Islands, USA and Canada. The professionals in the hotel sector care givers and nurses will be given priority. Attention will be paid to improve the English language skills to facilitate more skilled workers to these markets.

“We need to diversify our labour supply. The workers need to have the right set of qualifications. We will appoint foreign employment agents in different countries to promote Sri Lankan labour”, he said.

A remarkable progress has achieved under the program “Sayuren Etherata” which also emphasises on skilled labour supply.

The program links with training institutions to provide skilled labour with a four- throng approach. It collaborates all the training institutions to supply required training to meet the world demand ensuring safety and security of the workers.

The program is transparent as the Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Agency (SLFEA) is the only Government agency that offers service to migrant workers, he said.

A batch of 300 seasonal agricultural workers from Sri Lanka to Israel was recruited under a pilot project launched by the two Governments. This is the third largest project handled by Sayuren Etherata program launched in June 2010 by the SLFEA.

It started with the deployment of 40 factory workers in Malaysia followed by a job order of 76 factory workers who will be flying nearly this month.