IOM comes up with a new project

The International Organisation of Migration (IOM) launched a P55 million project on remittance corridors in the Philippines and Indonesia. The project is aimed at improving research and inter regional information exchange on remittance corridors and national development in Southeast Asia and Europe. It will use three methods to establish remittance trends: research on remittance corridors, policy dialogues and pilot projects. The European Commission, through its AENEAS program, is funding IOM’s remittance project that seeks to identify links between migrant workers’ remittances and development. It is set for 18 months and is going to map remittance corridors for the Philippines from Italy, which has a population of 128,080 Filipino migrants. The research will be undertaken by the non-government group Economic Resource Center for Overseas Filipinos (ERCOF). It would also include remittances to Indonesia from the Netherlands and informal remittance flows from Malaysia to the Philippines and Indonesia.

Remittances came from permanent, temporary and undocumented Filipino workers, whose number reached 8.2 million in 2007. Filipino migrants can be found in 193 countries. But the growing concerns in terms of the remittance business are what the IOM is going to analyse. It will look at concerns like the high placement fees, expensive transfer costs, differences in the regulatory approaches and ways of strengthening financial literacy of the OFWs and their families.