• Mr Nusron Wahid, Head of National Agency for the Protection and Placement of Indonesian Migrant Workers (BNP2TKI)
• Ms Lisna, Protection Deputy of BNP2TKI
• All participants of the training of trainers

 Ladies and gentlemen,

Labour migration as one of top priorities under the new President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo administration. Employment is among the strategic issues that Government of Indonesia projects to be achieved in the next five year government administration as manifested in its National Midterm Development Goal (RPJM) 2014-2019. Three strategic issues identified in the current RPMN, namely:

• enhancing worker’s competitiveness and enabling employment environment.
• protecting the rights of migrant workers and promoting their decent life condition
• expanding the implementation of national social security.

Such priorities is in line with the fact that Indonesia is a major migrant sending county. About 6.3 million Indonesian currently working abroad and has placed it as the second largest migrant exporting country in Southeast Asia after the Philippines. Indonesian migrant workers are dominated by females and they work at domestic sectors which is less-protected and continually encounter violence in work place, abuse, and mistreatment.

Further to relatively huge number of Indonesian migrant workers overseas, on the other hand, they serve a critical role towards the Country’s economic development: the remittance transferred to the home country is more than USD 8 billion annually. I quoted Mr Nusron Wahid that the remitted money is equivalent with a half of foreign investment in Indonesia which is USD 16 billion.

In the same vein, Indonesian migrant workers also contribute to the development of destination countries’ economic development. The neighboring-receiving country like Malaysia has benefited from the role of Indonesian migrant workers through various sectors such as domestic, industry, plantation and mining.

Ironically, the majority of former migrant workers cannot move forward from their life difficulties: they are still economically poor without any better plan to manage the earned overseas income. From the quick assessment conducted by ILO (2010) on the remittances utilization, for instance, it is disclosed that the huge portion of remittances are utilized to loan repayment (38 per cent), family daily expenses (26 per cent), education (22 per cent), and housing (8 per cent). Only about 4 per cent of the transferred money purposed as productive investments.

Such a situation portrays the poor awareness of migrant communities on how to plan the migration, determine their migration goals, to access financial services, as well as invest the earned remittances productively. Lack of information on how to earn self-employment such as home-based industries and other micro enterprises are blamed to be the roots of such a pattern of remittances management by the migrants and their families. In addition to poor capacity in creating micro businesses, at the very basic level, the huge majority of migrant communities have no enough knowledge on how to plan of, manage to and control towards their overseas earnings.

We really appreciate the effort of Government of Indonesia, particularly BNP2TKI, for its continuous support to provide better services to migrant workers and their family members, among which is the effort the strengthen the economic capacity of former migrant workers and their family livelihoods. As the only UN tripartite agency which mandate is to promote decent work for all, including for migrant workers, we are committed to support the government to promote better protection to migrant workers.

Today’s training is as one of our commitment to strengthen the officials of BNP2TKI in providing entrepreneurial capacity building and economic empowerment for migrant workers and their families. The same training was also conducted last year in Jakarta. To reach more impact of the training nationwide, today we invited participants from 12 regional BNP2TKI offices from west part of Indonesia (Lampung) to the east (Kupang). We really expect that the introduced training model can contribute to strengthening the institutional capacity of BNP2TKI in providing the improved services to migrant workers in Indonesia.

Lastly, I would like to express our high appreciation to Bapak Nusron Wahid, the Head of BNP2TKI, for adopting our entrepreneurship training model since this year. We hope more productive collaboration will be jointly made in the future.

Have a productive training!