Regional

Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, UAE and Yemen signed an agreement to start electronic money transfers using technology that has been developed by the Universal Postal Union (UPU).

According to the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the agreement will now allow the eight countries to exchange money orders on a multilateral basis. This is particularly valuable in countries such as the United Arab Emirates, where more than 80% of the population are foreigners, and millions of dollars are sent to home countries through remittances. 

The Governments of India, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates launched a pilot project to test and identify best practices in managing the temporary contractual employment cycle. The lessons learned from the pilot project will form the basis for developing a comprehensive regional framework that can be carried out on a much larger scale.

The Development Marketplace for the African Diaspora in Europe (D-MADE) is a competitive grant program aimed at funding innovative, small scale development projects which are profit-making, results-oriented and have the potential to be scaled up or replicated.

The program has two components:

The Council has been established as an effective mechanism of cooperation. In practice, Russia and partners from CIS have signed bilateral and multilateral agreements and schemes for organized recruitment of foreign labour force which guarantee migrants with rights, competitive salaries, security and other crucial issues.

The Argentinean National Migration Directorate established via its disposition N. 53253/2005 a "National Program for Migrant Documents Regularization", which was also called "Patria Grande". This programme was arranged to regularize the immigration status of natives of foreign countries belongining to MERCOSUR (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela) and their associate member countries (Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname), that were residing in Argentina prior to April 17th, 2006.

The Migration Resource Centers (MRCs) provide correct information on labour migration process, wages, working conditions and employment opportunities in destination countries (Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia) in a joint ILO/IOM effort. The recent DIFD-ILO project seeks to promote "no fee" migration corridors as part of efforts to combat forced labour.

Launched in 1994, EURES is a European cooperation network of employment services, designed to facilitate the free movement of workers. The network has always worked hard to ensure that European citizens can benefit from the same opportunities, despite language barriers, cultural differences, bureaucratic challenges, diverse employment laws and a lack of recognition of educational certificates across Europe.

This web portal provides information on access to job opportunities in 32 European countries. It also promotes the cooperation amongst national employment agencies.

The Colombo Process is a Regional Consultative Process on the management of overseas employment and contractual labour for countries of origins in Asia. According to best estimates, over 2.5 million Asian workers leave their countries every year under contract to work abroad. A large proportion of workers from South and Southeast Asia head for the Gulf States to perform various types of service, trade and construction jobs, while others move to North America, Europe and Asian countries.

The programme objective is to strengthen the capacity of policy makers and social partners to adopt and implement gender-sensitive labour migration policies, legislation and administration. This will be done by promoting:

i) the adoption and implementation of policies, legislation and administration for better regulation of labour migration flows;

ii) strategies to enhance social security coverage of migrant worker and their families, and;

iii) the improvement of skills’ matching between sending and receiving countries and reducing de-skilling.

A five-year, technical cooperation programme with a targeted approach for the trafficking of women and girls from South Asia. The objective is to reach 100,000 women and girls in major South Asian countries and major destination countries of South Asian workers for an overall reduction of incidences.