Diversifying manpower export market
December 7, 2008
GLOBAL economic slowdown appears to have a negative impact on Bangladesh’s manpower export sector. Employment prospects in Saudi Arabia, the single largest destination for thousands of overseas job seekers, has shrunk since July last as Riyadh has almost halted issuing fresh visas to the aspiring Bangladeshis.
According to statistics of the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET), some 20,980 Bangladeshis have found jobs in Saudi Arabia in July-October period of this year against 75,663 in the same period of last 2007 year. The BMET data also showed that some 1,624 Bangladeshis found jobs in Saudi Arabia during November 1-26 against 23,432 people found jobs in the same period last year.
According to reports published in the local media last week, it’s not only due to global economic slowdown, but also due to propaganda against Bangladeshi workers, which is being carried out by a section of Saudi media, controlled by journalists of two South Asian manpower exporting rivals. Such section of the media deliberately publish exaggerated reports involving Bangladeshi workers there, which has fuelled Riyadh’s anger and caused a near stoppage of recruitment of Bangladesh workers over last few months.
There are nearly 1.75 million Bangladeshis living and working in Saudi Arabia. Most of those Bangladeshis, who are now leaving Dhaka for Saudi Arabia, got visas before August. Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) president, called on the Saudi Ambassador Abdullah bin Naser Al-Bosairi to discuss this issue. He said the situation is expected to improve from next year. The Saudi ambassador assured him that Saudi Arabia will gradually soften its position in recruiting more manpower from Bangladesh.
In spite of its falling revenue due to drastic decline in oil prices which is the fallout of world economic meltdown, Saudi Arabia requires over a million workers to support its newly launched infrastructure development projects. Some 128,540 Bangladeshis found jobs in Saudi Arabia in the past ten months (January to October) this year against 161,488 jobs in the same period last year, according to statistics of the BMET. Until last year, manpower export was registering a phenomenal growth. The export figures from the year 2006 doubled in 2007, according to statistics released by the foreign ministry recently. The ministry also says that the Saudi government continues to import manpower from Bangladesh, contrary to recent media reports claiming otherwise.
The number of workers cleared to work overseas in 2007 was 0.83 million, up from 0.38 million in 2006. Meanwhile, a total of 0.16 million workers have already left for work abroad in the first two months of the current year, compared to 78,000 in the same period last year. The foreign ministry press release also says 20,200 workers have already gone for work to Saudi Arabia alone and the flow continues, adding that a Saudi company — a concern of Dallah Group — is currently recruiting semi-skilled and skilled professionals from Bangladesh.
In order to rejuvenate the manpower export market, Bangladesh government now wants to make a number of high-level visits to Saudi Arabia to iron out the differences on it issues. The ministry said they are stepping up efforts to reduce difficulties faced by Bangladeshi workers in Malaysia. The ministry has meanwhile urged Bangladeshis in Saudi Arabia to work in a way “that the host government is not unduly embarrassed.
Nobel laureate Mohammed Yunus in a recent visit to Saudi Arabia said that Bangladeshis do not break the law more than other communities in the desert kingdom, which is the destination for the highest numbers of Bangladeshi workers. But the media of that country is playing a foul game. A number of reports have appeared in the Saudi media alleging Bangladeshi workers’ involvement in murder, snatching and burglaries.
Such a situation demands involvement of some agencies that would promote employment of Bangladesh workers, particularly skilled ones, in the large number of prospective employer countries. In this matter, the government may give all facilities to BOESL, and maybe also involve NGOs like BRAC and Grameen Bank to promote employment of Bangladesh workers abroad.
The country’s manpower export issue was thoroughly analysed by the Royal Danish Embassy, Dhaka in their report Vision 2015, Bangladesh as a Leading Manpower Exporter January 2008, and by Bangladesh Enterprise Institute in their study on Policy and Public Benefit Interventions. All these reports were directed to help Bangladesh achieve annual migrant remittances of $ 30 billion by 2015.
From these reports it can be seen that the possibilities of manpower export are enormous. For example, there is a worldwide shortage of qualified nurses, and Bangladesh has got practically millions of unemployed women. Other skilled workers like carpenters, plumbers, auto-mechanics, air-conditioning technicians, and so the list goes on. Also there are qualified technical workers like IT engineers, computer experts etc.
In one sense, Bangladesh is practically surviving on the remittances of its workers. The total remittance in the year 2006-2007 was $6.0 billion, and the remittance for the period July-December 2007 was $3.44 billion. For the year 2007-2008 the remittance is likely to exceed $7.0 billion. Ironically, although the government and the country are reaping huge benefits from wage earners’ remittances, not enough is being done to administer the whole business of manpower export, which is really the goose that is laying the golden egg.
If one examines the whole manpower business in depth, be numerous underhanded dealings, both by the recruiting agents and the agents abroad, would be found. False passports, false visas, false recruitments proliferate on Bangladesh side. And in overseas, if a company has 100 vacancies the foreign agents may take out permission for 1000 vacancies, and Bangladesh workers who land up in the foreign country are left stranded without a job.
Presently, almost all job seekers are hostage to the unscrupulous recruiting agents in Bangladesh and also to their counterparts in the country of employment. Actually, most large companies and government agencies abroad do not charge any money from the workers they employ. The lower grade employees of the overseas companies tie up with some local agents and charge money for any recruitment. The entire business of manpower export requires review by a group of professionals as Bangladesh can benefit much more from it than it does at present.
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Call for withdrawal of restriction on manpower export
December 7, 2008
Action plan for grooming skilled manpower discussed
December 7, 2008
A national panel Sunday elaborately discussed a 14-point action plan for grooming skilled manpower suiting contemporary job requirements at home and abroad, reports UNB.
The recently formed National Skills Development Council (NSDC) in its first meeting at the CA’s office took up the action plan for a detailed appraisal.
Chief Adviser (CA) Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed convened the meeting to know the progress on activities of the NSDC as well as its action plan.
The skills council was formed in September on recommendation from Bangladesh Better Business Forum (BBBF), a high-profile government-private platform constituted for maintaining suitable business-investment atmosphere through joint public-private partnership for economic uplift.
A power-point presentation was made to apprise the meeting of the Action Plan of the council that envisages expanding and upgrading skill-training curricula to cater the present-day needs.
At the meeting emphasis was put on setting up demand-based skill-training centres to groom skilled workforce in line with the demand for skilled manpower on domestic as well as overseas job markets.
0.8ml find overseas jobs in first 11 months of 2008
December 7, 2008
Over 0.8 million Bangladeshis found overseas jobs in the first 11 months of this calendar year as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) alone employed nearly half of them, official sources said.
The Middle Eastern country recruited 393,201 Bangladeshis in the first 11 months (January-November). Many of them were employed in that country’s booming construction sector.
The total number of overseas emplyment stood at 830,677 at the end of November.
“A large scale infrastructure development in the UAE comes as a big boon for Bangladeshi job aspirants. Over 35,000 Bangladeshis found jobs on an average every month in the gulf state,” said an official.
The official at the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET) told the FE that “Recruitment of a large number of Bangladeshis by the UAE companies helped us record 10.8 per cent growth in overall overseas jobs in the first 11 months over that of the corresponding period last year.”
At least 91,999 found overseas jobs in January, 71,716 in February, 56,384 in March, 72,257 in April, 82,739 in May, 98, 002 in June, 88202 in July, 54,708 in august, 69,768 in September, 74,029 in October, and 55,772 in November this year, according to the BMET.
This higher growth in overseas jobs helped Bangladesh receive $2.992 billion worth of remittances during July-October period of this fiscal year against $2.178 billion in the same period of 2007-08 from the country’s more than 5.61 million people who work and live abroad.
President urges Brunei to recruit skilled manpower
December 7, 2008
“Brunei can recruit more Bangladeshi doctors, engineers, IT experts, nurses, pharmacists and teachers to meet the manpower requirement of her growing economy,” he said while the newly appointed High Commissioner of Brunei Darussalam to Bangladesh Haji Abdul Razak Bin Haji Mohammad Hussaini presented his credentials to the President at Bangabhaban in the city.
ICT outsourcing and Bangladesh
December 7, 2008
THE global outsourcing business has seen a tremendous growth in past years. The outsourcing in software and information & communication technology (ICT)-enabled services (ITES) created an immense interest in Bangladesh seeing the success of the developing countries like India, Philippines and Vietnam. The factors for the growth of ICT industry from modest start in the successful countries ranged from government support, infrastructure roll-out, financial support and availability of human resource.
A industry experience report by Rob Kommeren & Päivi Parviainen titled, ‘Philips experiences in global distributed software development’, discussed the Philips experience of over 10 years of distributed development through outsourcing involving dozens of projects. The outcome is an aggregate of experience and lessons learnt of a long-term and large-scale development activity. Since the experience and lessons learnt discussed here have been found repeating in several projects over time, in different settings and observed by different people, they can be seen as general, common issues occurring in, and because of outsourcing.
The report, in its opening statement states, that — ‘The highly competitive business environment — with the ever increasing functionality of the products implemented in software — places intense demands on delivering higher quality software faster. Companies need to use their existing resources as effectively as possible, and they also need to employ multiple development teams on a global scale. The ability to collaborate amongst these teams has become a critical factor in software development life cycle’.
The report also states in its conclusion that — ‘The general lesson learnt from this experience is that the reality of distributed software development is significantly deviating from the theoretic hypothesis: the efficiency of distributed software development is perceived to be disappointingly low, whereas increased efficiency was expected. First measurements indicate that up to 50% of the development effort is spent on overhead (such as extra project management and team coordination) and communication. This has lead to that global distributed development which has in practice been two to three times more costly compared to one-roof development. Preliminary conclusion is that, in general, distributed software development should be avoided as far as possible’.
In February of this year, US President-elect Barack Obama proposed that he would stop providing tax breaks for companies that were shipping jobs overseas through outsourcing activities and instead give tax breaks to companies that invested in the United States. This was an ominous sign of a possible protectionist attitude that the US could adopt to curtail outsourcing activities of US firms.
These information are important for Bangladesh to take appropriate measures to develop into outsourcing destination. The main reason for the outsourcing is ‘delivering higher quality software faster’. This means higher productivity and efficiency, which translates to requirement of highly skilled manpower backed by appropriate copyright act and technical infrastructure. The ICT industry in Bangladesh today is more vocal on the issues of access to finance and the price of the bandwidth whereas in the light of the evolving global scenario after the current recession requires the industry to proactively ponder on the actual needs for the development of the industry.
Globally outsourced software development allows organisations to benefit from access to a larger, qualified resource pool with the promise of reduced development costs. Another potentially positive impact of global outsourcing is innovation: mixing of developers with different cultural backgrounds may trigger new ideas. On the other hand, several studies have indicated problems in outsourcing software development, including Damian et al. 2004; Boland and Fitzgerald 2004; VA Software 2005). Such problems are:
- Poor visibility and control of remote activities,
- Inadequate communication, collaboration and coordination across individuals, teams, time-zones and projects,
- Insufficient (or lacking) knowledge and asset management capabilities,
- Language and cultural differences,
- Trust factors, and
- Lack of shared contextual awareness.
The growth of the ICT industry in Bangladesh has been very slow due to the above challenges. This is visible from the number of software professionals’ employment in these companies. Baring a handful of ICT companies, most others have remained less than ten programmers’ company even though a considerable time has elapsed after their inception. The capability and technical competence of these programmers are also not accredited which is a barrier to winning client’s confidence. The government’s initiative to build qualified pool of ICT professionals initiated a six month internship programme for ICT industry. Under this programme, a qualified graduate on employment in ICT Industry gets 60% (@Taka 3000/month) from government and 40% (@Taka 2000/month) from the employer. The industry failed to absorb the desired 500 ICT Professionals per batch leading to 1000 professionals per annum even after the government subsidy on salary due to the quality of these graduates. That has resulted in very slow growth of the local ICT industry. The industry insiders point that the intake is falling due to the quality of the graduates.
The following data obtained from Bangladesh Association of Software & Information Services (BASIS) gives the picture of employment under ICT Internship programme.
After detailed discussion and analysis of this unfortunate situation with the industry, academia and the government, it was observed baring a few, most of the graduates lack the pre-requisites for employment. To overcome this bottleneck and to ensure growth of our ICT industry, a programme to develop the human capacity under ICT Professional Skill Assessment and Enhancement Programme (IPSAEP) was designed and was formally approved in the ICT Task Force meeting, chaired by the Chief Adviser. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Science & ICT is sleeping with the proposed IPSAEP.
We have missed the industrial revolution because of the various constraints and now the golden opportunity to enter the ICT revolution is being hampered by the delays from within the government. The new global environment emerging out of the recession in the developed world will mean stricter cost control in ICT outsourcing similar to the measures seen after the dot com burst.
Bangladesh has no dearth of human resource but delay in appropriate measures quickly to tap the resource will mean failure of our dream with ICT. In contrast to our effort, the Philippines government is creating ‘Next Wave Cities’ to increase its share in the ICT and ITES outsourcing business. So-called “next wave cities” are areas around the country outside Metro Manila and Metro Cebu which offer the best potential to support the growing outsourcing sector. The 30 cities considered for the list were scored on talent (50%), infrastructure (30%) business environment (15%) and cost of doing business (5%). The Philippines outsourcing industry is targeting to expand its market share to 10% of the global outsourcing market, which is expected to grow to be worth $130 billion by 2010. The Philippines currently corners 9.0% of the global outsourcing market - a far second to the worldwide leader, India which has around half of the global market. These cities are an important ingredient in the Roadmap 2010 initiative of the Philippines. Late last year, the Philippines industry group launched its Roadmap 2010, which projects the industry to grow to 900,000 to a million employees by 2010, from 300,000 in 2007. Export revenues are also expected to grow to $12 billion by 2010 from under $7.0 billion by yearend. However, unlike the proposed ICT Roadmap for Bangladesh this Roadmap 2010 of the Philippines does not prescribes anything against its national integrity.
The Indian government, industry and academia are working together to enhance the skill-sets to match the global demand. The growth of Software Finishing School ensures India remains the number one choice for ICT outsourcing whereas our Bangladeshi bureaucrats working in the Ministry of Science & ICT are ensuring that IPSAEP fails to take off. IPSAEP which bears contribution of over eight months of hard work from our academicians like Dr. Jaffar Iqbal, Dr. Lutful Kabir and Dr. Lutfur Rahman as well as ICT Industry and government and approval of the Chief Adviser is not given appropriate importance because of the programme brings no extra benefits to the bureaucrats. The Philippines experience shows that it has given highest consideration on talent by putting 50% weightage on building ‘Next Wave Cities’ and has created many institutions to nurture and shape the talent for national growth. The whole ICT-based business requires appropriate skill sets and knowledge attained through high standards of education and training program to supplement industry requirements.
In this month of December we snatched independence in great odds through determination and leadership. Will this December bring the same victory for the ICT industry? The answer is yes if the industry can show its determination and leadership quality.
This will surely wake our ICT leaders from their slumber to be proactive and tackle the odds with the same determination taught by our valiant freedom fighters.
Manpower export
December 7, 2008
Almost all the developed countries are now looking for foreign workers. Despite the recession, there is demand for workers from the developing countries.
But surprisingly we cannot seize the opportunities like other countries such as India, the Philippines or other Asian nations. Many people of our country to go abroad to work. Some also have to return, being deceived by someone or the other. Bangladesh needs to address the issues that could affect the demand for its workers abroad.
The government needs to provide the needed support.