Jamil Mahmud

When Julekha Begum left the country in mid-February for a housekeeper job in Saudi Arabia, she promised her seven-year-old son of better days.

As many as 573 migrant workers have gone to Malaysia for employment in August, shows latest data of Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training.

Persons belonging to ethnic minority communities in Bangladesh will be getting employment opportunities as “seasonal” workers in South Korea’s agriculture and fisheries sectors.

The Greek government is likely to start regularising undocumented Bangladeshi migrants from mid-September, according to the Bangladesh embassy in Athens.

Romania has emerged as a destination for Bangladeshi migrant workers.

About 34,000 Bangladeshi undocumented migrant workers in the Maldives are in the pipeline for regularisation under an amnesty programme there, according to an estimate of Bangladesh High Commission in Malé.

More than five months have passed since the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Bangladesh and Greece on sending workers to the European country, but the fresh recruitment is yet to begin.

The government yesterday gave recruitment approval to two agencies for sending migrant workers to Malaysia amid allegations of attempts to create a “syndicate of 25 agencies”.

Parul Begum (name changed), a single mother of two, thought she caught a break when she got the offer to work as domestic help in Qatar for a monthly salary of Tk 40,000.

In face of growing pressure on the country’s economy, the government issued strict directives to field-level administration to practise austerity while spending from the budget allocation.

Bangladeshi migrant workers continued to face financial hardship in Lebanon, while many found it difficult to remit money home after making ends meet, due to a prolonged economic crisis there.

Household loss and damage due to natural disasters saw nearly tenfold increase in 2015-2020 compared to that in 2009-2014, says a report of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.

Women spend eightfold more time than men in domestic and care work, said a new survey of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.

Remittance inflow fell in 11 months of the current fiscal year mainly because a large number of migrants switched to informal channels like hundi from formal ones for sending money, say experts.

In his latest budget speech, Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal emphasised on giving importance to young women’s skill development in professional and technical fields to reduce the country’s gender gap.

The government is going to discard its plan to bring all elderly poor under its social safety net programmes in 100 more upazilas in a bid to prevent the non-poor from misusing the support.

Bangladesh is missing out on a large labour market in Malaysia after Kuala Lumpur stopped taking in any fresh Bangladeshi migrants over irregularities by recruiting agencies in 2018.

Nearly 8 lakh migrant workers went abroad in the first 10 months of the current fiscal year, comfortably exceeding the numbers a year ago, a development that bodes well for Bangladesh as it could pave the way for higher remittance earnings.

Kabir Matubbar (not his real name) took an illegal route to Italy from Bangladesh in 2015. The trip included a daring boat journey in the Mediterranean Sea from Libya.

After a severe dip in his earnings in the last two years of the pandemic, Hajrat Ali, a migrant worker in Malaysia, is very happy this time as he sent home an additional amount for his family’s Eid celebration.