The Philippines I

Description
At the time of the Philippines’ first request to MIEUX in 2009, the country ranked third in the world on the list of top sending countries of international migrants, with nine million Filipinos, roughly 10% of the population, living and working abroad. Implementation of the existing legal framework to address human trafficking was weak. Additionally, with the increasing number of victims every year, the government saw the need for more aggressive and sustained collaborative efforts and strategies in the fight against illegal recruitment for potential labour migrants. Several initiatives were taking place to inform the public but were missing a solid set of indicators to measure their performance and implementation. This combination of factors prompted the Department of Labour (DOLE) to submit a request to MIEUX.

Thanks to this Action, staff from the Philippines Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) learned new methodologies to organise campaigns using social marketing techniques. A number of information campaign tools, such as the training-of-trainers, pre-deployment and pre-employment orientation seminars, were evaluated for the first time, and recommendations formulated.

Based on this evaluation, the POEA introduced several changes to the seminars and training sessions by targeting its beneficiaries, and placed more emphasis on practical content. In addition, the POEA enhanced its capacities to implement subsequent programmes such as “POEA-on-Wheels” (where POEA services are brought to the community level, thereby making them more accessible to the public) or the mandatory “Pre-Employment Orientation Seminar” to all first-time overseas workers, through an on-line facility.