Workshop on Financial Education for Migrant Workers and Their Families

Realizing to the poor understanding of migrant workers towards financial services and accesses, ILO is developing a financial education programme for migrant workers and their families, aimed to provide direct assistance on financial services and accesses as well as income planning and management.

Background and Justification

Many Indonesian migrant workers, which the majorities are domestic workers, still continually encounter trafficking and contemporary forms of slavery and forced labour such as debt-bondage, violence in work place, abuse, mistreatment, sexual harassment, etc. On other hand, lack of source of income and local employment has led migrant workers and their family members to go overseas for economic migration. With great expectation towards the improvement of life quality and economic situation, unskilled migrant workers relay on the ‘compassion’ of his/her employer since most of them are categorized as informal workers and excluded from legal protection system. 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.

Realizing to the poor understanding of migrant workers towards financial services and accesses, ILO Jakarta-Combating Forced Labour and Trafficking of Indonesian Migrant Workers Project is developing a financial education programme for migrant workers and their families. The program will directly collaborate with migrant-based organizations (NGOs and migrant unions) as well as government in order to sustainably provide direct assistance to migrant workers and their families on financial services and accesses as well as income planning and management.

Furthermore, at organizational level, the prospective trainers will be encouraged to master the skills of financial education facilitation which in turn will possibly function as financial education/training providers for migrant workers and their families. As the result, the beneficiaries of the program will be two fold: migrant workers and families as the direct beneficiaries, and the collaborating organizations as the institutional support beneficiaries.

Twenty five-selected male and female participants with migration background will be selected in 3 days Workshop entitled “Budget Smart: financial Education for Migrant Workers and Their Families.” The participants will be prospective migrants, returning migrant workers and family members of migrant workers from two districts in West Kalimantan: Kuburaya and Pontianak.

Objectives

The trainings will be facilitated by ILO officer and trainers PPSW Borneo who already trained by the ILO in 2010. In the longer term, the trainers also will be functioning as a financial planner/advisor for migrant workers and their families in the trainer’s respective areas. At the community level, it is expected that the selected trainees will further transfer the obtained knowledge to migrant workers and their family members. ILO will provide technical assistance and limited financial support as well as monitoring to ensure program better-implemented and result a strong impact to the intervened community.

ILO will then support the implementation of Workshop on Financial Education for Migrant Workers and Their Families “Budget Smart: financial Education for Migrant Workers and Their Families” in the above-mentioned locations.

Impact

  • The collaborating organizations will have a stronger capacity in facilitating financial education program, particularly with the ILO FE tools; and
  • 25 prospective financial education trainers will disseminate the obtained skills to 30 migrant workers and their family members.