Ministerial mission off to KSA to boost manpower export

Minister for Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment Khandker Mosharraf Hossain left for Saudi Arabia Saturday to meet high officials in the oil-rich country in a bid to boost manpower export.
During his 8-day visit, Mr Hossain will meet labour minister, health minister, crown prince and governors of Jeddah, Riyadh and Dammam in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
He also will meet with the Bangladeshis working in the KSA-one of the largest overseas job markets for Bangladesh.
Officials said the visit will help increase manpower export to the Middle-Eastern country.
Before leaving Dhaka Khandakar Iftekhar Haidar, secretary of the ministry and also one on the eight-member delegation to the KSA, told the FE that they were hoping for expansion of the market for job-seekers following their visit.
The relation between Bangladesh's expatriates' welfare minister and the labour minister of the KSA is very nice. "So we hope discussion on both sides will be fruitful and will help the market expansion," he said.
Led by the minister, the delegation also includes senior secretary of the prime minister's office Abul Kalam Azad and director-general of the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) Begum Shamsun Nahar, among others.
The first priority of the visit is market expansion. Besides, they will discuss migration cost, combating visa trading, protection and rights of Bangladeshi workers etc, ministry officials said.
Presently, workers spend between Tk 0.67 million and Tk 1.6 million as migration cost to secure job in Saudi Arabia, a Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) report said.
Earlier, the KSA used to recruit more than 0.1 million workers a year. But the take has declined to about 10,000 in a slide since 2009 following a restriction imposed by the Saudi government.
The ME country now is recruiting only domestic workers from Bangladesh. A total of 2.63 million Bangladeshis had travelled to the job destination with jobs since 1976 till 2014, according to the BMET.
As per statistics released by the KSA on August 29, 2012, currently 1.5 million Bangladeshis are working in the oil-rich country.
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