Livelihoods and Job Creation

In 2014, Indonesia issued the so-called ´Village Law´ which intends to push for development in villages and empower villagers in conducting business and economic activities. The law was one of the most significant pieces of legislation since Indonesia began a push for decentralization of power from the center to the regions in 2001.  The law guarantees that the central government allocate a specific amount of funds to Indonesia’s 74,093 villages so that they can finance their own development based on their individual needs and priorities

Costa Rica has designed a comprehensive National Integration Plan (2018–22) in 2017 that promotes equal opportunities and respect for human rights to improve inclusive social, economic and cultural spaces.

‘Cuidamos Centro’ (‘We Take Care of the Centro District’) is an employment training and practice programme that targets groups at risk of exclusion and long term unemployment in Madrid. The programme is coordinated by the Madrid Municipal Employment Agency and District Board. The initiative provides training and paid employment opportunities for those deemed most excluded from the city’s labour market. Whilst it does not exclusively target foreign-born migrants, the latter group are over-represented among the project’s participants (also known as dynamizers).

The partnership between the Moroccan National Federation of Public Works (FNBTP) and the German training organization 'Otto Benecke Stiftung', together with professional federations and German and Moroccan vocational training institutions, provides young people with vocational training in Morocco. The aim of the project is to contribute to the battle against youth unemployment and against irregular migration to Europe, as well as to provide vocational training in Morocco that meets international standards. 

The PARE 1+1 Programme for Attracting  Remittances into the Economy, launched in 2010, offers funding to complement migrants’ financial resources and provides entrepreneurial training to migrants and their relatives for business development. The Programme also provides beneficiaries with information on the existing business opportunities. For this purpose, diaspora networks act as important information dissemination channels thus raising awareness on available investment opportunities in Moldova.

Results:

Loan Programme for Returned Nepalese Migrants provides loans of 1 million Nepalese rupees ($8,908) to people who had returned to Nepal in the three years preceeding the beginning of the programme (November, 2018). The loans are meant to be used to build businesses and should be repaid within five years.

The Migrant Support Fund is a federal fund administered to states according to the size of their repatriated migrant populations, which provides migrants one-time seed grants of up to USD 1,500 to start a new business.

Because the Mexican labor market is saturated and often unfamiliar to returning migrants, especially those who have been abroad for an extended period, these entrepreneurial and self-employment opportunities offer a key path to their economic reintegration.

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.