Technical consultation on recruitment costs borne by migrant workers

Since 2014, the ILO and the World Bank have collaborated through a working group of the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD) to collect migration cost data which is comparable across countries of origin. This partnership has yielded extensive information about migration and recruitment costs that has been critical in building an evidence-based reporting system so as to advocate for fair recruitment at national, regional and global levels.

Often workers tend to pay high recruitment fees in order to secure employment abroad. Indicator 10.7.1 of the SDGs aims to measure “Recruitment cost borne by employee as a proportion of yearly income earned in country of destination.”

The ILO is organizing two meetings on this subject. The first meeting will be a technical consultation to stimulate discussions on measuring recruitment costs and earnings of workers. This discussion will contribute to the development of a methodology to collect data and produce statistics -- used to monitor SDG indicator 10.7.1. The second meeting is a training organized by the ILO for research institutions from the region. This training aims to strengthen their understanding of the recruitment survey objectives and also enable them to conduct comparable surveys and control the quality of data.

The consultation is being organized by a number of ILO migration projects in the region and the ILO’s Global Action to Improve the Recruitment Framework of Labour Migration (REFRAME) project in collaboration with the regional migration specialists in Delhi and Bangkok.