Lessons Learned Part 1: Outreach to migrant women in areas of origin

This document describes the lessons learned by the Work in Freedom programme on outreach to migrant women in areas where they migrate from. This compilation was preceded by an earlier edition of Lessons Learned in October 2017, followed by another one in February 2019. The findings are important to inform Governments, donors and civil society groups on their policies regarding the protection of migrant women, safe migration, pre-departure training and orientation and more.

Lessons Learned Part 2: Recruitment

This document describes the lessons learned by the Work in Freedom programme on recruitment of migrant workers. This compilation was preceded by an earlier edition of Lessons Learned in October 2017, followed by another one in February 2019. This new edition focuses particularly on recruitment of migrant workers. It lists and describes the nature of both conventional and non-conventional interventions and reviews some of the assumptions behind the rationale for these interventions.

The invisible workers: Bangladeshi women in Oman

The purpose of this ethnography is to follow the lives of working women from Bangladesh and document and analyse the diversity of their individual and collective experiences. The findings reveal a reality that contrasts from the usual characterisations of migrant women.

This study explores the work and lives of women from Bangladesh in Oman. It is meant to be an exploratory study about the working and living conditions of women domestic workers from Bangladesh. The study lays out the context of women’s migration from Bangladesh to Oman, it’s relationship with the migration of men, the types of work and living arrangements that were encountered, the social networks of migrant women and other considerations that Bangladeshi women reflected on. This ethnographic study fills a gap on research regarding migrant workers from Bangladesh in Oman.

In the Shadow of the State: Recruitment and Migration of South Indian Women as Domestic Workers to the Middle East

Recruitment Monitoring & Migrant Welfare Assistance: What Works?

As numbers of temporary labour migrants have rapidly increased over the past four decades, facilitating international migration has become a highly profitable and multi-faceted business. Human rights defenders, civil society organisations, journalists and academics have consistently exposed exploitation of migrants which occurs during recruitment processes. Abuses include high recruitment fees that lead to debt bondage, the processing of fake employment and immigration documents, confiscation of identity documents, and emotional and physical violence, or even trafficking for forced labour. On arriving in many destination countries migrants are left unprotected and vulnerable to more exploitation.

This study, conducted by an international research team between January and April 2014, reviews existing recruitment monitoring mechanisms and migrants’ access to rights and welfare assistance across Colombo Process Member States (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam), and key destination states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Yemen).  With analysis presented thematically, the report concludes with a series of recommendations for Colombo Process governments.