International Labour Organization’s Country Office for Sri Lanka and the Maldives conducted a consultation on 12th October 2015 at the Galadari Hotel, Colombo, to draft recommendations to be shared at the upcoming Global Forum on Migration and Development.

Chaired by the Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Employment, the National Consultation featured a total of 55 participants, including senior representatives from Ministries of Foreign Employment, Foreign Affairs, Labour and Trade Union Relations, Justice, Health, Women’s Affairs, senior officials of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, trade unions, employers’ organizations, including the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon, and a wide range of civil society organizations and academics. Key recommendations were formulated based on the outcome of group discussions held on the following three thematic areas pre-selected by the Sri Lankan delegation based on in the country:

a) partnerships to promote inclusion and protect the human rights of all migrants in order to achieve the full benefits of migration; b) reducing the human and financial costs of international migration, particularly labour migration: cooperative approaches to fair recruitment practices and lower remittance fees; and c) making migration work post-2015: implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.

The recommendations fed into the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) held from 14 -16th October 2015 in Istanbul, Turkey, which provides a platform for challenges and opportunities related to migration and development to be shared and discussed by policy makers and practitioners from around the world. The overarching theme for this year is “Strengthening Partnerships: Human Mobility for Sustainable Development”, which reiterates the importance and role of international migration in reaching broader development goals of States and their respective societies and seeks to enhance better action-oriented approaches for reaching these goals. The GFMD is a voluntary, informal, non-binding and government-led process, open to all Member States and Observers of the United Nations.

The above workshop is a component of the technical support ILO is providing to the Ministry of Foreign Employment through its project on “Promoting decent work through good governance, protection and empowerment of migrant workers: Ensuring the effective implementation of the Sri Lanka National Labour Migration Policy – Phase 2 (Labour Migration Project)” which is implemented with the financial partnership of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in Sri Lanka.