POVERTY: Phillipines: Is it really poverty that drives Filipinos overseas?

Susan K June 5th, 2011
Are overseas Filipino workers (OFW) being driven out of the country by poverty? Or is it just the latest opportunity and trend?
Over the years, poverty has been the common reason cited for the exodus of Filipinos out of the country: to “find work and sustain their needs as well as that of their families.”
Is this true? In recent years quite a number of studies have thrown more light on the matter.
Dr. Clement Camposano, a senior instructor and migration anthropologist from the University of Asia and the Pacific, said studies have shown that “although many countries are experiencing destitution, poverty is merely one of the factors and not the root cause of Filipino migration.”
He said that based on studies, those who work abroad are not all poor, or at least not the poorest of the poor. It takes a lot of money to prepare for overseas work.
Many OFWs are duped into forking over huge sums of money by recruiters. Many reach foreign lands heavily in debt.
In a way, OFWs are gamblers and risk-takers. They are drawn by the huge wage differential between local and foreign paychecks. They invest heavily to leave the country. They secure monies for placement and other processing fees to realize their dreams. They don’t give up easily, even though, at times, they fall prey to some illegal recruiters.
With all the monies that are tossed and spun in the process of migration, can we really say that our kababayan who search for so-called “greener pastures” are really the underprivileged?
Take the case of OFW Feliza Ibamit from Victoria, Laguna who appealed for help from Bantay OCW on August 18, 2010. She paid P270,000 as placement fee to recruiter Maria Novie Belludo who promised her employment in Italy. She waited for three years but was not deployed. After losing so much time following up her overseas placement, she sought assistance from Bantay OCW to get back her money.
Bantay OCW coordinated with the Philippine National Police-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (PNP-CIDG). It was reported that Beludo was in Rome at that time. Ibamit then filed a case against Beludo at the Regional Trial Court in Victoria, Laguna. After a series of hearings, Belludo’s sister, Maria Role Belludo, returned the full amount to Ibamit last December 23, 2010.
Regrettably, Ibamit signed a quit claim to withdraw any further case against the illegal recruiter and her sister.
Last March 5, 2011, Ibamit visited Radyo Inquirer to personally express her gratefulness to the program for the return of her money. She said she would use the money instead to support the education of her nieces and nephews.
According to Dr. Camposano, “whether we accept it or not, migration is innate to human beings… who are influenced by various cultures and their yearnings to discover those cultures by themselves.” Filipinos are preferred by many foreign employers. Aside from their diligence and passion for work, they have good fluency in both written and spoken English language.
Poverty is not the ultimate reason why they become OFWs. Going abroad is a personal decision. No one can force anyone to work abroad if there is no desire to do so.
Sad to say, some of our kababayan depart from the country although they are unskilled and ill-prepared. Some end up feeding themselves to the (loan) sharks, burying themselves in debt, drowning themselves in miseries, and living with loneliness.
Not all OFWs are driven by poverty. Some just want to be part of the latest trend. We all need to be better informed of the real situation abroad and what it really takes to benefit most from the OFW experience.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/3310/is-it-really-poverty-that-drives-filipinos-overseas

POVERTY: Migration, reasons, difficulties and benefits

LAHORE, 22 February 2011 (IRIN) -
In December last year Nazeer Sulaiman, 65, had open heart surgery in Pakistan.

“The cost of the operation I needed and of the medications I am now on are paid for by the money sent home by my son in Kuwait. Without this we could not have paid for the procedure, which has enabled me to start walking around much more rather than resting in bed,” said Sulaiman. A retired bank clerk, he is now hoping to take on some part time work.
“We were barely managing on an income of around Rs 25,000 [US$295] a month, brought in by my younger son, especially as I was sick,” Sulaiman said. “My eldest son’s migration changed our fortunes and doubled our income.”
The Sulaiman household is not alone. A new study by the International Organization of Migration (IOM) working with the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics investigates the impact - on 500 households in nine high-migration districts - of remittances from Saudi Arabia.
The study, commissioned by the Pakistan government, aims to compile empirical data on the social and economic impacts of remittances on receiving households. The study found average total remittances received per household from the time the migrants went abroad were Rs 1.05 million [$ 3,145] and that a large proportion of remittances were used in four areas - real estate and agricultural machinery, food, marriages and savings.
“It was also found the remittances decrease child labour, help with education, health and so on,” Saleem Rehmat, spokesman for the IOM in Islamabad, told IRIN.

Desperation
The advantages to be gained by having a family member migrate are well established for many families. Indeed, the desperation to reach a country overseas has sometimes led to drastic measures being attempted.
In January this year, a man who had apparently attempted to reach Dubai after stowing away in the landing gear of a commercial plane died after falling to the ground soon after the flight took off. Tens of thousands of other people try to leave illegally each year sometimes attempting hazardous road journeys across international borders.
The IOM report recommends that given the developmental benefits of remittances, the cost of migration needs to be reduced by improving the recruitment system and clamping down on exploitative practices by middlemen. Such middlemen play an important role in lives in districts such as Gujranwala in Punjab Province, an area from where migration is high, according to the IOM study.
“I have paid an agent Rs 150,000 to arrange for me to get to Europe. Let’s hope I can go soon,” said Munir Ahmed*, 22. He hopes the money he plans to send home can help pay for the marriages of his sisters, aged 20 and 18. “It is a real concern for us. We do not know where we will find the money to pay for the weddings,” said Ahmed.

Making a “huge difference”
The remittances sent in from abroad have helped families educate children, build up savings and improve the quality of lives. “Money that comes in to households from overseas makes a huge difference to the quality of life people lead. Better schooling and higher education becomes possible. People have been able to build up savings and move into better housing. We have seen this happen right before our eyes,” Raja Amjad Gul, president of the Young Ittehad organization, which works for community welfare in the town of Kharian in the high-migration Gujrat district of the Punjab, told IRIN.
According to the Ministry of Labour, there are currently 4.5 million migrants from Pakistan in various countries. The money they send home has changed the lives of millions, and enabled families to climb up the economic ladder above subsistence level to a situation where money in bank accounts offers them more options and new opportunities.

Http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=92001

POVERTY: KENYA: Livestock at risk as drought worsens

 Photo: Mike Pflanz/IRIN
“The situation has moved from an alarm level to disaster”

MARSABIT , 7 January 2011 (IRIN) - Millions of heads of livestock in northern Kenya could die because of drought unless urgent action is taken to mitigate water shortages and stem the spread of disease, say officials.
La Niña weather conditions are likely to affect thousands of pastoralist households and threaten more than 22 million livestock. Displacement of families migrating in search of water, pasture and forage in northern Kenya has already been witnessed, Titus Mung’ou, spokesman for the Kenya Red Cross Society, told IRIN.
La Niña events are generally associated with drier-than-normal conditions in the eastern sector of East Africa, and wetter-than-normal conditions in the western and northern sector of the region.
In Kenya, the events are mainly affecting the North Rift Valley, east and upper eastern region, says Julius Kabubi, head of the Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Unit at the Kenyan Meteorological Department.
A potential disaster
The Ministry of Livestock Development announced that more than 150,000 camels, 16 million goats and six million cattle are facing death as harsh weather conditions ravage most parts of arid and semi-arid lands in Kenya.
Livestock Development Minister Mohammed Kuti said KSh1.5 billion (US$186 million) was needed to minimize losses in the affected communities who have yet to recover from recent droughts.
“We need to implement contingency intervention measures, start an immediate livestock purchase off-take programme, acquire veterinary drugs for the migrating animals and a monitoring programme,” said Kuti.
The Food Assistance Outlook Brief of December 2010 produced by the Famine and Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) announced above-average assistance needs in Kenya by June 2011.
This is due to the poor 2010 rains that will reverse the recent recovery from the 2007-2009 drought in northern and north-eastern pastoral areas, leaving pasture and water availability below average, explained Mung’ou.
Figures provided by the International Federation of the Red Cross estimate that 20 million people were affected by the dry spells in the whole Horn of Africa Region in 2009.
Livestock owners should be exempted from paying fees for water. The government should help us

Quantifying the damage
“As our teams are still conducting the assessment, we cannot yet quantify the human impact and costs to mitigate the effects of the expected drought to the agriculture and livestock sectors,” Mung’ou told IRIN.
An assessment by the Arid Lands Resource Management Project indicates a severe shortage of water, pasture and forage in Marsabit, Moyale and Isiolo.
According to the Early Warning Bulletin released by the project on 4 January 2011, hundreds of families from the northern pastoral areas of Marsabit, Isiolo, Wajir, Mandera and Ukambani have already moved to southern Ethiopia as pasture in the areas is exhausted.
Schools and health centres have closed down in remote parts of Marsabit and Moyale after residents left, while water shortages have forced health workers to stop programmes at some facilities, say residents.
“Fears of conflict are high at the moment as desperate herders move away from their traditional grazing land, converging and congesting the few areas with pasture,” said Molu Sora, Arid Lands Resource Management Project co-coordinator.
“The situation has moved from an alarm level to disaster,” he said.
Sora further highlighted deaths recorded among cattle due to consumption of poisonous forage.
“We use a lot of money to get water for our animals and domestic use. Water is more expensive than food here in Marsabit, some people might die just because they cannot afford to buy water for their families or lose livestock due to lack of money,” said Wario Ndenge, a livestock owner from Marsabit.
Ndenge has 120 cattle and spends KSh360 ($4.50) per day to buy water for his livestock and KSh240 ($3) for domestic use.
“Livestock owners should be exempted from paying fees for water. The government should help us... I have sold six cattle in the past month to cater for water expenses,” he said.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91555

MALNUTRITION: The silent killer -- Malnutrition stalks urban poor

December 22, 2010
There is overwhelming evidence to establish a symbiotic relationship between malnutrition and children of migrant labourers living in urban slums. The recent death of 16 children, all of them less than six years old, from malnutrition and related illnesses in the last eight months in just one area of Mumbai serves to underscore urban poverty and the non-existence of even rudimentary healthcare system for the poor in our cities. These tragic deaths also highlight deep-rooted problems afflicting urban slums, where children are exposed to unhygienic condition, pollution and contamination due to overcrowding and lack of basic civic amenities. What should concern authorities is that malnutrition in urban slums remains neglected by policy-makers. Studies have shown that the nutritional status of slum children is even lower than the rural average. It is primarily because families living in urban slums do not qualify for the 'below poverty line' category. Moreover, the maternal and child health services that occupy an important place in socio-economic development programmes have failed to address the problems in urban slums because they follow the rural model. These services have failed to take into account that with both parents working, children are usually left unattended and neglected; that they are born with nutritional disadvantage because their mothers are malnourished and not in the best of health; and that they are more vulnerable to communicable diseases. Slum-dwellers are often ignorant of the fact that malnutrition is a silent killer.
Since migration from rural to urban areas will continue to happen, Government must work on providing better living conditions, access to clean water and healthcare for migrant workers. If Mumbai has only 183 public health posts and 162 public healthcare centres for over 82 lakh slum-dwellers, the situation in other smaller cities and towns can well be imagined. There is no denying that Integrated Child Development Services in cities is in a shambles with inadequate staff and thus fails to provide the necessary services, including vaccinating children, and monitor their health. What we need is a separate set of services for urban areas, especially urban slums. A point that often gets ignored is that there has been a steep rise in the level of urban poverty over the past few years. This is primarily because of increased migration to urban areas by those seeking jobs as workers on construction sites or in factories. This in turn has led to a steep rise in the number of people living in already crowded urban slums. The results, understandably, are sufficiently scary to make authorities worry about the future. The solution does not lie in regulating migration, but in ensuring migrants do not pay for absence of policy
http://www.dailypioneer.com/303733/The-silent-killer.html

POVERTY: ETHIOPIA: Pastoralism against the odds

2 September 2010 (IRIN) -
Pastoralists’ disproportionate contribution to Ethiopia’s economy is belied by their marginalized status and by policy assumptions that they would be better off farming. But those who raise livestock tend to make the most of marginal land, according to experts, and are often proficient at adapting to changing circumstances. “People think that pastoralist production systems are just static and backward but this isn't true. “Besides women changing roles, pastoralists are using cell phones and participating in trade and development in their areas. This is key to shift policymakers’ thinking of the pastoral system,” Charles Hopkins, CARE’s pastoral programme manager, told IRIN. Although pastoralism has been recognized as a way of life in the Ethiopian constitution, the long-term focus is on sedenterization. “Pastoralists are often seen as people who should be told what to do,” said Hopkins. Pastoralists are often referred to as `Zelan’, a derogatory Amharic term meaning aimless wanderers. Yet mobility is a necessary response to climate and vegetation variations, according to experts, who regard pastoralism as a sophisticated land-use system that allows people to live on the harsh drylands that would otherwise provide livelihoods for no one. “Pastoral lands are also seen as idle and given to agriculturalists. With the growing food demand, pastoralists will always have this problem,” added Hopkins. Ethiopia has one of the highest populations in Africa and most of its citizens rely on agriculture. Grazing land is reducing due to the conversion of land for farming, an elder in the Jerar area north of Jijiga in Somali Region, told IRIN. “Before some of us were pastoralists but now most of our livelihood depends on farming,” he said. “But farming is like a game of chance, you harvest or you don’t. In the pastoral system, you move with the drought. At the farm you may work so hard for nothing.” Insecurity is affecting livestock movement too - there has been internal pressure in Somali Region from armed groups seeking the region’s secession. Informal trade Despite the odds, pastoralists, estimated at about 15 percent of the population, are contributing about 40 percent of the agricultural gross domestic product in Ethiopia, according to a 2009 Humanitarian Policy Group paper.
The milk market is a hive of activity Informal systems, heavily dependent on communal ties, are especially important in the dynamic unofficial cross-border trade in live animals in exchange for consumer goods across porous borders. The government describes the trade as contraband. “If a trader has the animals, we disperse them in different ways to Somaliland as we speak the same language,” said a livestock broker at the Jijiga Livestock Market. Nearly all animals crossing into Somalia are re-exported to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Gulf states. “There are few legal livestock exporters as we are limited by the tax system,” he added. Official marketing systems are burdened by regulations and taxes. “Livestock traders want to formalize the trade but there are bureaucracy problems such as the requirement to open accounts, and the need for foreign exchange yet Somalia lacks a functioning central bank,” said Mohamed Abdinoor, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) pastoral and livestock programmes technical adviser. The peripheral location of most pastoral regions leads to their being squeezed out of domestic livestock markets. Cattle and sheep sold in Addis Ababa, for instance, predominantly come from the highland areas, exacerbating informal trade in a country said to have the largest livestock population in Africa. According to Abdinoor, a clear policy on pastoral lands and reliable meat and live animal markets will help. USAID’s Pastoralist Livelihood Initiative programme is providing development and emergency support through pasture rehabilitation, water harvesting, targeted livestock feeding and slaughter destocking. It is also providing linkages with livestock pharmacies and animal health workers. Livestock serve as critical buffers against falling into persistent poverty, not only in pastoralist areas. “We depend on God. We also support each other in times of hardship by loaning animals,” livestock trader Abdikarim told IRIN. According to a UK-based Institute of Development Studies (IDS) report, effective engagement with pastoralists requires an understanding of these supportive connections. “This… is critical for pastoral systems where social, political, economic and environmental insecurity is catapulting people from managing well to merely surviving, often without warning.” Women’s role
Besides women changing roles, pastoralists are participating in trade and development in their areas Pastoral women are increasingly involved in income generating activities, too, ranging from goats and sheep brokerage to buying and reselling bulls and cereals. The milk trade largely depends on women. Every morning, women in their brightly coloured shawls unload donkeys and camels laden with yellow milk jerricans at collection points strategically along the highway to Jijiga town. “We all know each other. There is no risk of the middle man running off with our money,” said one of the women as she tied her jerricans to the waiting truck. Unique drawings help identify her jerricans. “The truck driver takes the milk to a broker in Jijiga for sale. He comes back with other foodstuffs and commodities that we need.” Payment is made once every five days. “Sometimes the milk goes bad and has to be returned. We warn the women about this,” said truck driver Geshe Alemanyuhu. There is a lack of milk preservation facilities but the women use smoke from the burning of some herbs to treat the milking trough, `dhiil’. This, they say, keeps milk fresher for longer. Education Increasingly, pastoralists are also embracing education. “In the past, the brightest boy in the family would be kept back from formal education and educated through the clan. Increasing livelihood insecurity and reduced herd size for some is changing that. Now the brightest boys, if it can be afforded, are being selected to send to school,” the IDS report said.But barriers remain such as long trekking distances to school. The harsh climate in Afar, for instance, also means that fewer children there attend and stay in school, as families depend on mobility to survive.CARE’s Hopkins said: “For the pastoralist, education is being seen as an adaptive mechanism.” aw/cb
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?Reportid=90373