Jamil Mahmud

The government yesterday gave recruitment approval to two agencies for sending migrant workers to Malaysia amid allegations of attempts to create a “syndicate of 25 agencies”.

Parul Begum (name changed), a single mother of two, thought she caught a break when she got the offer to work as domestic help in Qatar for a monthly salary of Tk 40,000.

In face of growing pressure on the country’s economy, the government issued strict directives to field-level administration to practise austerity while spending from the budget allocation.

Bangladeshi migrant workers continued to face financial hardship in Lebanon, while many found it difficult to remit money home after making ends meet, due to a prolonged economic crisis there.

Household loss and damage due to natural disasters saw nearly tenfold increase in 2015-2020 compared to that in 2009-2014, says a report of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.

Women spend eightfold more time than men in domestic and care work, said a new survey of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.

Remittance inflow fell in 11 months of the current fiscal year mainly because a large number of migrants switched to informal channels like hundi from formal ones for sending money, say experts.

In his latest budget speech, Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal emphasised on giving importance to young women’s skill development in professional and technical fields to reduce the country’s gender gap.

The government is going to discard its plan to bring all elderly poor under its social safety net programmes in 100 more upazilas in a bid to prevent the non-poor from misusing the support.

Bangladesh is missing out on a large labour market in Malaysia after Kuala Lumpur stopped taking in any fresh Bangladeshi migrants over irregularities by recruiting agencies in 2018.

Nearly 8 lakh migrant workers went abroad in the first 10 months of the current fiscal year, comfortably exceeding the numbers a year ago, a development that bodes well for Bangladesh as it could pave the way for higher remittance earnings.

Kabir Matubbar (not his real name) took an illegal route to Italy from Bangladesh in 2015. The trip included a daring boat journey in the Mediterranean Sea from Libya.

After a severe dip in his earnings in the last two years of the pandemic, Hajrat Ali, a migrant worker in Malaysia, is very happy this time as he sent home an additional amount for his family’s Eid celebration.

The government has established a dedicated centre for migrant workers to reduce the hassles they face while migrating abroad and returning home.

Saudi Arabia has shown interest in investing more than $10 billion in 15 large- and small-scale projects in Bangladesh.

The long-awaited universal pension scheme, one of the pledges of the ruling party’s 2008 election manifesto, is expected to take off within a year.

The struggle of UAE-bound passengers at the Dhaka airport islikely to be over as the Gulf country issued a new travel advisory yesterday withdrawing the mandatory provision for Covid RT-PCR test at the airport within six hours before departure.

With 4.57 lakh workers hired from Bangladesh just last year, Saudi Arabia has been the top destination for Bangladeshi migrants for the past five years.

Expatriates’ welfare ministry has taken up an initiative to revise the costs for international migration, with the aim to make it more “realistic” for the labour force.

Bangladesh’s efforts to send workers to five countries have suffered a blow as those nations adopted restrictive measures before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.