Nepal

This case study forms part of a series of case studies on good practices, lessons learnt and recommendations extracted from the projects supported by the UN Joint Migration and Development Initiative (JMDI) to enhance migration management for local development. The experience of the JMDI shows that the most effective initiatives are anchored with local or regional authorities and carried out in a multi-stakeholder and participatory approach, including migrants and migrants’ associations or diaspora.

This paper, “Research on the Labour Recruitment Industry between United Arab Emirates, Kerala (India) and Nepal,” was commissioned to the International Organization for Migration by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) within the framework of the Abu Dhabi Dialogue. It examines the labour recruitment processes from India and Nepal to the UAE, with a focus on low-skilled and semi-skilled workers.

The Joint Migration and Development Initiative (JMDI) is a global inter-agency programme funded by the European Union and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. It focuses on the local dimension of migrants’ contribution to development and aims to maximize the potential of migration for local development. To achieve this, the JMDI provides technical and financial support to up-scale existing locally-led migration and development initiatives across 15 projects in eight target countries: Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Morocco, Nepal, Philippines, Senegal and Tunisia.

The DataShift is a multi-stakeholder, demand-driven initiative that builds the capacity and confidence of civil society organizations to generate and use citizen-generated data to monitor development progress, demand accountability and campaign for transformative change.  Ultimately, the vision is a world where people-powered accountability drives progress on sustainable development.

The global Integrated Programme on Fair Recruitment aims to promote fair recruitment practices globally and across labour migration corridors, including Philippines, Hong Kong, Nepal, Jordan, and Tunisia from West Africa and to the Middle East. 

The goal of this project is to improve financial services, including remittance delivery capacity, of 10 selected micro- finance institutions (MFIs) targeting the rural poor and migrant worker families. The project promotes migrant’s savings and investment through community-based MFIs in the migrant workers’ home villages.

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.

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.

The project works with Nepal's Ministry of Labour and Pakistan's Ministry of Human Resources to promote well-managed labour migration from South Asia. It works to ensure effective protection of the rights of vulnerable migrant workers and enhance the development impact of labour migration and reduce irregular flows. Specific objetives include:

a) providing reliable information on overseas employment opportunities and capacity building for job matching;

IOM, jointly with the Ministry of Labour and Employment (MoLE), implemented a project which aimed to contribute to the GoN’s initiatives to generate employment opportunities for returnee migrants and remittance receiving households (RRHHs), through the engagement of the private sector in Nepal. The project funded by IOM Development Fund was a joint initiative of the MoLE and IOM following discussions with government, returnee migrant organizations and the private sector.