FAO is supporting the sustainable reintegration of returnees through livelihoods support and a large-scale project with the Green Climate Fund aimed at increasing climate resilience of smallholder farmers and food systems in El Salvador. The project seeks to boost resilience of family farmers by transforming food systems and improving rural infrastructure, thus addressing an adverse driver of migration.
Programs of employment creation for migrants, and economic and psychosocial integration projects for returnees offer returned migrants in El Salvador access to local job-search databases, vocational training, skills accreditation, and seed grants up to USD 3,500 for entrepreneurial projects.
The National Network of Returned Entrepreneurs (RENACERES) offers counseling and seed capital to migrants who demonstrate potential to establish new businesses or projects.
OM, the UN Migration Agency, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to facilitate the ethical recruitment of Filipino workers between the Philippines and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The agreement will involve pilot testing the International Recruitment Integrity System (IRIS).
The agreement was signed on 8 June 2018 by IOM, the Ministry of Service of Alberta, the Ministry of Labour Relations and Workplace Safety of Saskatchewan and the Department of Labor and Employment of the Republic of the Philippines.
Supporting refugee farming initiatives in rural and regional Australia: This initiative evolved spontaneously from research led by University of Wollongong and University of Melbourne academics in partnership with a community-based food cooperative Food Next Door. The researchers were able to connect Burundi refugees and former refugees, who are ‘landless farmers’, with donated farmland and with Food Next Door and the Sunraysia Burundian Garden to grow culturally important crops.
FAO is working towards building the capacity of poor and vulnerable youth in migration prone areas, including cash transfers beneficiaries, and engaging them in productive activities along agro-food value chains; and support youth entrepreneurs to scale-up their businesses along selected value chains.
The Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot is a community-driven program designed to spread the benefits of economic immigration to smaller communities by creating a path to permanent residence for skilled foreign workers who want to work and live in rural communities where they can quickly become self-sufficient, and exercise their skills in agriculture and food production. This innovative, economic pilot will test a new community-driven approach to attracting and retaining newcomers to communities across Ontario, the Western provinces and the territories.
FAO supports rural youthwith alternatives to migration in a number of countries through fostering decent rural employment in sustainable agriculture and agribusiness along value chains.
The second implementation phase (2015-2018) of FAO's Integrated Country Approach (ICA) for boosting decent jobs for youth in the agri-food system targeted Senegal, Uganda and Guatemala. FAO's efforts in this programme are aimed at providing rural youth with alternatives to migration through decent rural employment in agricultural value chains, and by fostering diaspora engagement in agri-business.
In May 2017, the Government of Guatemala established the National Strategy for Labor Reintegration for Returned Guatemalan Migrants (Estrategia Nacional para la Reinsercion de los Migrantes Guatemaltecos Retornados) to collect returnees' sociodemographic and skill profiles, and to establis institutions and processes for facilitating skill certification.
The Ethiopian National Rural Job Opportunity Creation Strategy targets rural job seekers, primarily the unemployed and underemployed, literate and illiterate, and those without regular and sufficient income, both women and men, who are above 15 years of age. Furthermore, landless and school drop outs, technical and vocational trainees, and university graduates, farmers evicted from their land due to the expansion of urbanization and industrialization and those who need special support because of disability will be potential beneficiaries of the strategy.