The Ministry of Labour's plan to train labourers in their home countries before they arrive here is an important initiative. As The National reported yesterday, the scheme will include structured vocational training and orientation workshops for labourers in India, Pakistan and the Philippines in an attempt to enhance their skills before they start work in this country and improve their prospects when it's time to leave.
Initially, 2,500 workers will be randomly chosen from Indians, Pakistanis and Filipinos applying for UAE visas to work in the building industry. Later, the scheme could be expanded to other employment sectors, including perhaps even domestic workers.
While it’s not yet clear when and how the scheme will be put into practice, it’s a promising project. The UAE will benefit from having better-skilled workers. These workers will get here with certificates that prove they are qualified to work in their chosen field. When they leave, those qualifications will be supported by on-the-job experience and they should be able to secure even better employment elsewhere. Their home countries often lack technical certification systems, which would make those returning workers who do acquire a paper qualification more attractive to employers or more able to start their own businesses.
The documentation is important for many reasons. A certificate of qualifications would surely also provide some level of protection against traffickers, who usually take advantage of the unskilled and desperate. It would also cut out the middlemen who charge hefty fees to, as they claim, find a worker a particular job in the region.
The proposal, to be presented at the Abu Dhabi Dialogue 3 labour conference in Kuwait on Thursday, will also improve coordination between the destination countries – the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – and those that dispatch workers, including India, Nepal and the Philippines. This kind of enhanced collaboration can only be a good thing for the region’s labour market.