Libya wants to recruit 2000 manpower from Bangladesh

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Naim-Ul-Karim
Oil rich North African country--Libya-- has expressed interest to recruit over 2000 skilled and semi-skilled manpower from Bangladesh soon at the government level, sources said.
They said the authorities concerned of the Libyan government have sent a draft Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to the government of Bangladesh for signing in this connection.
Sources said the government agency - Bangladesh Overseas Employment Services Ltd (BOESL) - is scrutinising the draft that was sent earlier this month.
An official source said the authorities concerned of the Libyan government expressed their willingness to recruit manpower from Bangladesh during the visit of Md Abdul Malek, director general of the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET), to Libya recently.
He said: "We are hopeful that the draft will be approved by the authorities concerned shortly. We will then send it back to the Libyan government for finalisation."
"We were requested by the Libyan government to complete the formality soon so that they can speed up the recruitment process," one official said.
When asked about the contents of the draft of the MoU, Md Abdul Malek, director general of BMET, said it basically deals with the recruitment rules and regulations, the amount of salary, service period and other related terms and conditions.
However, sources said the Libyan government will bear the cost of recruitment including plane fare. The salaries of the workers will be in the range between Tk 20,000 and Tk 55,000.
Libya will recruit graduate engineers, diploma engineers and technicians to support its booming industrialisation process that got momentum after 2004.
According to the statistics of the BMET, some 54,342 Bangladeshis have so far gone to Libya with jobs since the country's war of independence, but there is no information about how many of them returned home.
Sources said Libya, ranking 10th among petroleum producers worldwide, will also require huge skilled and unskilled workforce as its petro-chemical industry, which depends on the oil sector for raw materials, has been growing rapidly with large-scale industrialisation.
Despite the dominance of Libya's oil industry, they said, that country's farming remains the main occupation for which it will also require manpower.