Foreign employment for domestic empowerment

Nepal is a landlocked country which heavily relies on remittance as the main source of income. National data shows that more than 30 percent of the countries income is generated from the remittance. In the gloomy time of moist insurgency when what little income the country generated domestically went to an anxious downfall, the remittance acquired from the transactions of Nepali workers from foreign lands to home in Nepal helped sustain the country. It goes without saying that the people belonging to the working class are the true heroes of this country.

At this point of time, Nepal is demographically very strong. Records from 2016 census show that about 60 percent of total Nepalese population consists of people belonging to working age and if we break down this record further, more than half of them are women.

Now the question is if Nepal is so rich on demographics then why is it lagging in the development and growth sector?

The capacity of these working age group is the primary factor behind that. Having working age human population is one thing and having workable human capital is another. Especially when women, who comprise more than half of the population in this group, had been systematically deprived of capacity building in various forms mostly based on traditional and cultural grounds. The paradigm is shifting with growing women participation.

According to ILO, female participation in the labor force was 80.1 percent in 2008. This shows that women are changing their economic status from someone who is ‘dependent’ to an ‘economic actor’. This is a promising record in comparison to the participation of women in the labor force that hovers below 50 percent in other south Asian countries. Despite the colorful record, however, women in Nepal face the added burden of working in the field and culturally undetachable household works

Another main factor is the lack of employment opportunities within the country. To this day, remittance is the greatest contributor to the country’s economy. The trend of foreign employment among Nepalese has grown rapidly in the past decades. While it was initially men who mostly sought for employment abroad, according to the national record, in the recent decade the number of women in foreign employment has grown to 6 percent in 2012 from mere 2.1 percent in 2001. Significant changes have been observed with the increase of Nepalese women in foreign employment.

Today women contribute more than 20 percent in the remittances but still, the figure seems in-optimal if we analyze the potential of economic growth with the number of total working age that exists.

This has largely to do with the cultural factor and unsurprisingly to the patriarchal mindset that prevails underlyingly and in many cases prominently.

The trend of foreign employment within Nepalese women started with the engagement in the ‘care-economy’ as a domestic worker a rather informal sector in the job market. This is because of what experts call ‘coercive- advantage’ that women possess which comes from the imposed gender roles of women as caregivers, especially in the south Asian parts of the world. But at that time, the concept of women being the breadwinner or income generator was so nascent in its own patriarchal sense that there wasn’t any effective mechanism to safeguard the overall migration process for women in the already weak policies, that dealt with migration for foreign employment as a whole.

This led to the exploitation of women, who were in foreign countries for employment, especially in the informal sector where women worked as ‘domestic worker’. Many cases of physical abuse and harassments were surfacing due to poor regulation in both origin and destination countries.

The government instead of strengthening the regulations and facilitating the safe form of foreign employment migration of women imposed restrictive policies and even put a ban on the ‘domestic sector’ which was only lifted in 2003 in the more liberalized socio-economic context.

But despite the bans and restrictions, the number of women in various sectors working abroad continued to grow especially in GCC countries.

This was because of the reason that many women hoped to alleviate theirs as well as their family’s economic condition. Therefore, many opted for the exit process through illegal channels. This also gave birth to human traffickers who would act as agent and traffic naïve women of the village to hostile working environments in other countries or into slavery.

At a certain point, the implication that the women working abroad must have been sexually exploited stigmatized the concept of women working abroad, thanks to the sensationalization by Nepalese media.

Despite this, it became evident that Nepalese women wanted to opt for the jobs in the global market and slowly governments began to take initiatives in regulating and monitoring the foreign employment, especially in the Gulf countries.

There still exist the protective approach in Nepalese policy related to migration for employment and the system is still struggling to have appropriate and citizen-friendly migration policies. But the conditions have improved a lot in the past decade as people have started to become more aware once exposed to the outer world.

There have been thousands of success stories of women migrant workers who contribute to the family expenses which ultimately add to the national development. Therefore, it is safe to say that migration for employment in countries like Nepal can help in poverty reduction.

That is why the country should discard the cultural patriarchal mentality and come up with rational policies to use its demographic resources (more than half of whom are women) efficiently.

The state should initiate comprehensive studies and research work to find out the best policies and system to help women working in other countries. It should also seek international expertise while doing so. Even though several capacity building programs have emerged, the government should boost its approach to multiply the development.

Nevertheless, while there have been many severe cases where women have been mentally, physically, legally and socially jeopardized as the consequences of foreign employment, there also have been significant positive changes in them and the society.

Today more women instead of binding themselves in the patriarchal values choose to be economically independent. They have become more courageous and more confident. This sets an optimistic tint for the future and soon it seems that the whole nation will bound to capitalize on this very confidence of Nepalese women.