Accent on skilled workers for migrant jobs

Moves to reduce females migrating as housemaids :

Rasika SOMARATHNA

Sri Lanka plans to gradually reduce the number of females who migrate for employment as housemaids while focusing on promoting skilled worker migration, especially among males.

“We are in the process of encouraging females to seek employment in skilled categories instead of domestic jobs, if they want to migrate for employment abroad,” Foreign Employment Promotion and Welfare Minister Dilan Perera said.

He said that the authorities have been unofficially discouraging Lankan women from taking up jobs as housemaids abroad and on the other hand has been training both males and females in different skills to take up professional opportunities.

An innovative mechanism is being developed to implement job-specific, country-specific and company-specific training programmes for people, who seek foreign job opportunities, the minister added.

Female domestic aides have been the core of Sri Lankan migrant worker fraternity which is the country’s largest foreign revenue earner. Their collective remittances amounted to 49 percent of the country’s foreign earnings in 2011.

Due to the efforts of officials, the number of female migrant workers which was over 60 percent a few years back has dropped to below 50 percent.

Last year, the male and female ratio of migrant workers were 55.22 percent and 44.78 percent.

However, yet from among all female migrants, around 80 percent (nearly 650,000) leave the shores to take up jobs as domestic aides.