Jamil Mahmud

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.

The government has established a dedicated centre for migrant workers to reduce the hassles they face while migrating abroad and returning home.

Saudi Arabia has shown interest in investing more than $10 billion in 15 large- and small-scale projects in Bangladesh.

The long-awaited universal pension scheme, one of the pledges of the ruling party’s 2008 election manifesto, is expected to take off within a year.

The struggle of UAE-bound passengers at the Dhaka airport islikely to be over as the Gulf country issued a new travel advisory yesterday withdrawing the mandatory provision for Covid RT-PCR test at the airport within six hours before departure.

With 4.57 lakh workers hired from Bangladesh just last year, Saudi Arabia has been the top destination for Bangladeshi migrants for the past five years.

Expatriates’ welfare ministry has taken up an initiative to revise the costs for international migration, with the aim to make it more “realistic” for the labour force.

Bangladesh’s efforts to send workers to five countries have suffered a blow as those nations adopted restrictive measures before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since her husband migrated to Saudi Arabia as a worker in 2018, Kulsum Begum (not her real name) has been looking after their family back home in Tangail.

Bangladeshis will continue to have the opportunity of applying for employment in Italy through the legal process as seasonal and non-seasonal workers in various sectors.

Migrant workers from Bangladesh may soon be able to go to Greece by legal means as the two countries are expected to sign a Memorandum of Understanding in this regard next month.

It took Habibur Rahman around two weeks of hectic journey to enter Greece from Turkey via an illegal route back in July 2020.

Migrant worker Mashiur Titu saw his monthly income in Lebanon drop by half in two years due to a prolonged economic crisis in the Arab country.

Employers in Malaysia will bear Bangladeshi workers’ migration costs incurred in that country, the expatriates’ welfare ministry said in a press release after the signing of an MoU between the two countries.

Malaysia will soon open its market for Bangladeshi workers, ending a freeze of more than three years, but concerns remain over the syndication of a few agents and the high cost of migration -- major factors behind labour exploitation in the past.

Shahidul Mia (not his real name) spent about Tk 4 lakh to get employed in Saudi Arabia last year.

Although Bangladesh has seen a rise in overseas jobs over the years, in majority of the districts, international labour migration is quite low, largely due to lack of recruiting activities in those regions.

Over 1,500 passengers, who need a Covid-19 negative certificate six hours prior to flying to the UAE, start crowding the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport every day since morning.

The worrying dip in remittance flow in recent months is the result of a reemergence of illegal channels of money transfer after the coronavirus restrictions were lifted, a sharp decline in overseas recruitment, and layoffs, experts said.

Afroza Begum (not her real name) worked for three-and-a-half-years as a domestic help in Saudi Arabia.