Legal Overseas Labour Migration Governance in Ethiopia: Policy and Practice
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Date
2020-10
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study deals with policy and practice of overseas labour migration governance of The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. To this end, it aimed at assessing institutional structures, roles and responsibilities of labour migration actors (state, non-state and private), the migration infrastructure, available instruments for labour migration management practices, and the challenges and gaps in overseas labour migration governance in the country.
The research mainly used qualitative approach to gather data from both primary and secondary sources. In terms of data collection tools, a thorough desk review of relevant documents, key informant interviews, and in-depth interviews were conducted to gather data from chosen data sources.The Federal Attorney General Office, Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, National Immigration and Security Agency, International Organization for Migration, and Private Employment Agencies, would be migrants and returnees were among the data sources consulted for this piece of research r.
The study identified that state, non-state and private actors with specific mandates and interests are engaged in labour migration along with different coordination institutional set ups /platforms. However, labour migration governance suffers from lack of actor‟s staff capacity, effective coordination, necessary attention to labour migration tasks and binding partnership agreement among actors.
Despite the good beginnings towards having an effective migration governance structure in place, the country still does not have a comprehensive migration governance policy, which in turn has contributed to weak labour migration governance. Weak linkage among labour migration infrastructures in Ethiopia is worsened by lack of use of technologies such databases and effective institutional setups to facilitate labour migration governance practices in particular and migration governance in general.
Legal labour deployment faces a number of challenges. For instance, file management process is very sluggish and there have been experiences of frequently missing documents due to absence ofefficient technologies such as a database system that connectsstate, non-state, and private business actorsparticularly MOLSA, MOFA and Private Employment Agencies (PEAs). Proliferation of PEAs (more than 800 since 2018) also has madelabour deployment process difficult to follow up and monitor by regulatory bodies. As a result,some Agencies were found breaching the law and they do not follow up employees they deployed anymore after three months of sending them off. Due to weak regulatory system, PEAs were sometimes forced to indulge into corrupt practices with some government employees to get more applicants from the regions. Existence of lengthy and bureaucratic recruitment in the legal deployment process also pushed migrants to go through illegal routes to avoid this tiresome process in the legal migration scheme.
Given the identified facts, the country should exert more efforts to speed up finalization of the design of comprehensive migration governance policy which has already been started. There should be better coordination and activities implementation mechanism through establishing functional actors‟(state, non-state and business) partnerships and institutional setups. Development of Ethiopia Migration Data Management System and Labour Information Management Systems should also come forward to be a top priority.
Keywords: Migration, Migration governance, labour migration, Overseas Labour Deployment
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Keywords
Migration, Migration governance, labour migration, Overseas Labour Deployment