The Minister for Gender, Labour and Social Development, Hon. Amongi Betty, and the Chief of Mission for the UN Agency on Migration in Uganda, Mr. Sanusi Tejan Savage, met on Tuesday and discussed a string of measures to improve the safety of migrant workers.
During the meeting held at the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development headquarters in Kampala, the continued reports of maltreatment of migrant workers even in countries where bilateral labour agreements exist was of concern and a review of these agreements has been proposed to establish the loopholes.
Mr. Sanusi noted that the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) would soon engage a consultant to critically analyse the implementation of the agreements with a view of identifying the gaps and recommending measures to enhance the safety of migrant workers.
Uganda currently has bilateral labour management agreements with Saudi Arabia, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The agreements are meant to foster the overall safety and wellbeing of Ugandan migrant workers.
Minister Amongi noted that the online External Employment Information System (EEMIS) would also be scaled up to allow the logging in of complaints and tracking the responses.
“This will greatly help us in tracing the complaints logged in and what action or inaction was taken,” She said.
She also revealed that it had been agreed that Labour Attaches be deployed to countries where Uganda has a huge number of migrant workers to improve on the turnaround time in responding to distressed workers.
The Minister noted that efforts were still on to sign bilateral agreements with other countries like Qatar, Oman, Turkey, among others where there is already a huge number of Ugandans.
She commended IOM for having collaborated with the Ministry to develop a pre-departure training curriculum for Ugandans destined to work abroad. She noted that the trainings were critical in preparing the workers for the differences in culture, religion, work ethic, among other parameters and this has a direct bearing on the how the workers progress at duty.
Sanusi observed that since 2013, IOM Uganda has had a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development through which many undertakings have been implemented together to promote the safe and orderly migration of labour from Uganda.
“Currently we are implementing the Promoting Ethical Recruitment to curb the risk of exploitation of Uganda Migrant Workers while at the same time strengthening the capacity of the Private Recruitment Agencies to ethically recruit migrant workers,” Sanusi said, adding that as of 1st June 2021, IOM had trained 116 staffs from 76 private recruitment agencies.
He revealed that IOM would also embark on building the capacity of Government counterparts including Ministries, Resident District Commissioners and Local Councils on ethical recruitment starting next month.
He said IOM is also in contact with the Government on supporting the development of the National Labour Migration Policy, meanwhile the consultant for the Regulatory Impact Assessment has been recruited.
The meeting was also attended by the Minister of State for Labour, Employment and Industrial Relations, Hon. Okello Engola and the Director Labour, Martin Wandera, among others.