IT was a different homecoming for Annabel Liray when she arrived at the terminal of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) sometime in September.
Instead of her family members, the 38-year old household service worker (HSW) was met by the media and recruitment leaders, who had eagerly awaited her, as well as the other distressed overseas Filipino workers (OFW) from Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
They were accompanied by Labor Secretary Silvestre H. Bello III and government officials, who had just completed their visit to the KSA.
Liray was patiently waiting for her turn as Bello and the recruiters started handing out groceries and cash assistance.
Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (Owwa) Administrator Hans J. Cacdac said they will be also extending other reintegration services to the repatriates.
The aid, Liray later told the BusinessMirror, was more than welcome after what she went through in her second job in KSA.
The Davaoeña earlier decided to leave her employer, who had threatened not to pay her for two years, after she was accused of stealing some clothes.
“That’s why I decided to escape…. I was lucky someone brought me to the Philippine shelter,” Liray said.
“There were around 600 of us in the shelter. Some were escapees like myself. Some were raped. There was even this one OFW, who was injured after being hit by a hammer by her employer,” she added.
New reintegration
Cacdac said the latest batch of repatriates are among the lucky ones, who would benefit from their new financial-literacy oriented reintegration program launched in February.
Dubbed “Pinansyal na Talino at Kaalaman [PiTaKa]” program, it aims to develop responsible use of income for OFWs by helping them with savings and investments.
OWWA said the initiative will allow its beneficiaries to generate enough income from their Balik Pinay, Balik Hanap Buhay (BPBH) program, so they will opt to no longer work abroad.
Under the BPBH, qualified OFWs are given a P20,000 cash grant to put up their own livelihood after going through the mandatory entrepreneurial seminar and a site inspection.
The more crucial aspect of PiTaKa, Cacdac said, is the new monitoring mechanism, which they will implement to check on the performance of their livelihood beneficiaries.
“We are poised to further enhance our monitoring measures. Initial reports say that 80 percent of them are immediately able to set up their livelihood businesses but we have to further enhance monitoring so that is why we are partnering with DTI [Department of Trade and Industry], DA [Department of Agriculture] and even the Employers Confederation of the Philippines [Ecop] to enhance our monitoring networks,” Cacdac said during the Senate budget hearing last month.
Prior to the said monitoring system, many of the livelihood assistance given by Owwa would seldom last long due to mismanagement by the beneficiaries.
Liray was among the applicants of BPBH in 2018. She was supposed to use the P20,000 grant to buy a motorcycle, which she will use for a tricycle business. However, she has yet to be given by Owwa the complete amount for the purchase.
“That is why I decided to work again abroad this year,” Liray said. Wrong call: the latest stint ended with misadventure; and fortuitously landed in a Philippine shelter before finally coming home for good.
Liray hopes to finally start her own business since she is no longer planning to work abroad again due to her frequent bouts of high blood pressure.
“I would just stay at home and be with my child,” she added.
More beneficiaries
THE implementation of PiTaKa comes as more and more repatriated OFWs are now deciding to go home and avail themselves of the BPBH program.
Cacdac said their average number of repatriated OFWs would typically range between 30,000 and 35,000 a year. As many as “80 percent of them are in the Middle East,” Cacdac said.
However, he noted the previous amnesty program for irregular migrants by some countries in the last two years have led to an increase in the average number of repatriates.
In 2017, the government repatriated an additional 10,011 OFWs from the amnesty program in KSA and another 1,300 was recorded from Malaysia.
The following year, 5,248 OFWs were brought home after availing themselves of the Kuwaiti government’s amnesty program.
Despite this spike in the number of repatriates as a result of amnesty programs, Cacdac said they are now able cover almost all of them in their new reintegration program.
He said this was apparent from the number of their reintegration beneficiaries in 2018, which reached 35,593—higher than the 33,000 OFWs who were repatriated by the Philippine embassies abroad.
This was a significant improvement from 2016, when only 3,993 of the 18,000 repatriated OFWs availed themselves of reintegration services.
The difference between the reintegration beneficiaries in 2018, Cacdac explained, is caused by some OFWs, who went home without going through the Philippine Embassy.
“Some of them were directly sent home by their employers. Still other simply don’t want to go through the embassy and went home by themselves,” Cacdac said.
Reintegration gaps
WHILE the Owwa reported considerable improvements in its reintegration efforts, the survey results of Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and the University of the Philippines (UP) indicate that such government initiative is still far from perfect.
In its 2018 National Migration Survey (NMS), PSA said only 4 percent of the Filipino migrants abroad get government aid upon their return.
The most common support given to the beneficiaries are welfare-related (42 percent), followed by financial (12 percent). Only 10 percent of the respondents said they were given livelihood.
The study, which covered 49,000 households, further reported that only 24 percent of the respondents were aware of the migration networks organized by the government.
Only 2 percent of the respondents said they are members of such migration networks and only less than 1 percent said they were former members of such groups.
The so-called migration networks are usually tapped by Owwa to ensure its program reaches the grassroots level as well as covers the concerns of OFWs and their families.
The NMS also revealed the common difficulties faced by returning OFWs, when they reach home.
The majority or 70 percent said they have a hard time getting new jobs. For 12 percent of the respondents, the difficulty lies in getting a job corresponding to their skill and another 10 percent, while the other 10 percent said it is with establishing a new business.
This implies the government may also have to improve the employment facilitation component of its reintegration program.
With these issues in mind, Cacdac said they are now in the process of increasing their personnel to further improve their services, particularly their reintegration program.
“That is why we have been hiring a lot of front-line job order workers to literally hand out and process the benefit [for OFW],” Cacdac said.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes, AP/Bullit Marquez