Facts and Perspectives: Women's Labour Migration from the Philippines
This report presents findings from a small-scale research that aimed to understand the perspectives and attitudes of women migrant workers from the Philippines on return and reintegration. It shows that women's decision to return is not straightforward, with many factors playing a role, such as the availability of savings, children's wellbeing, other family members' expectations, and the overall feeling of success from the migration experience. The report also provides an overview of the Philippine government policies for migrant workers, including those on return and reintegration.
Read the report here.
See a short video that presents some of the findings:
What a Way to Make a Living: Violence and harassment faced by women migrant workers in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico
This research aimed to explore gender-based violence in the world of work from the perspective of women migrant workers. The 172 women interviewed by eight Latin American civil society organisations reported experiencing a spectrum of violence and discrimination, through dynamics created by patriarchal societies and families, racism and xenophobia and an entrenched neoliberal capitalist economy. This is creating a ‘new normal’ of permanent precarity through a lack of social coverage, poverty wages, exploitative working conditions and job insecurity.
View/download the reports:
Country reports (in Spanish)
La industria de la moda en Sao Paulo (ASBRAD, Brazil)
Colombianas y Venezolanas en el sector del servicio doméstico (SINTRASEDOM, Colombia)
Migrantes internas de Jalapa y Chimaltenango trabajando en sectores informales (ECPAT, Guatemala)
Venezolanas viviendo y trabajando en Lima, Perú (CHS Alternativo, Peru)
25 Reflections for GAATW's 25th Anniversary
The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) was founded in 1994 by a group of feminists engaged in the international activism around violence against women and women’s human rights. Since then, the Alliance has grown to a membership of more than 80 NGOs worldwide and has established itself as a leading voice for the protection of the rights of migrant and trafficked women. (See more about our history here.) This year, in 2019, the Alliance celebrated its 25th anniversary.
In this publication, 25 close allies of GAATW - Board members, former staff, representatives of member and partner NGOs and independent experts - share memories about their engagement with the Alliance, as well as reflections on past and recent developments in the migrant rights and anti-trafficking fields over the last 25 years.
Read the collection of these reflections here.
‘A Job at Any Cost’: Experiences of African Women Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East
To gain a better understanding on the trends, processes, challenges and opportunities around the migration of African women to the Middle East for domestic work, the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) condcuted research among prospective, current and returnee migrant domestic workers from six African countries. Other interviewees included members of the women's families, government officials responsible for labour migration, private recruitment agencies, and NGOs and trade unions working with migrant domestic workers.
Across the six locations, the research found that lack of economic opportunities and decent jobs are the main reason why an increasing number of women migrate to the Middle East for domestic work. At the same time, the regulatory, institutional and policy frameworks are lagging behind this trend and failing to ensure the safe migration and human rights of migrant domestic workers. Most of the women who participated in the research saw their migration bottom line as generally positive: their overseas work had allowed them to suppor their families, buy a piece of land, or start a small businesses. However, the vast majority had also faced various hardships, such as deception by recruiters, long working hours with little rest, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, underpayment or non-payment of wages, health problems, and others.
View/download:
Tanzania and Zanzibar country report
Learning from the Lived Experiences of Women Migrant Workers
In 2018, the International Secretariat of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW-IS) worked with partners in nine migrant-sending and receiving countries to document the lived experiences of women workers with regard to their migration . The research went beyong taking note of the forms and levels of violence that women migrant workers faced: it took a close look at the structural inequalities embedded into the current migration regime that allow such violence to persist.
This Report draws on the findings of a feminist participatory action research (FPAR), through which project partners spoke with 214 women migrant workers across the nine countries. Most of the women came from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and a smaller number from Benin, Guinea and the Philippines. For most, the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC), Lebanon and Jordan were the main destinations.
Reclaiming Migrant Women’s Narratives: A Feminist Participatory Action Research project on ‘Safe and Fair’ Migration in Asia
In 2018-2019, the International Secretariat of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW-IS), in collaboration with eleven organisations across nine countries in Asia, carried out a Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) on “Safe and Fair Migration: A feminist perspective on women’s rights to mobility and work”.
The research aimed to deconstruct dominant understandings of safe and fair migration and reshape these concepts from a feminist perspective. It was our collective effort to deconstruct and reshape a narrative of labour migration that is safe and fair for women workers, especially those in the most marginalised segments of society. This study serves as evidence to fight for the rights of migrant workers and amplify women’s voices in the local, regional, and international migration agenda.
The reports show that Safe and Fair migration cannot happen in a silo – the factors that produce gender segregated labour markets, industries dependent on flexible, underpaid and overworked migrant labour require a systemic change. This change can happen at the grassroots level, through self-organised groups of women (migrant) workers. Overall there is a need for critical conversations about serious limitations of safe migration policies and governance mechanisms in the context of a labour market scenario is which capital and power are increasingly being taken away from workers and placed into the hands of a few, under the thumb of repressive regimes.
Demanding Justice: Women Migrant Workers Fighting Gender-Based Violence
This report is based on research among women migrant workers carried out by thirty organisations and individual researchers across twenty-two countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The aim of the research was to document the nature of violence, harassment and exploitation that women migrant workers face, how they deal with it, and their demands for change.
Overwhelmingly, the data across continents and work sectors pointed to similar trends. Women Migrant Workers (WMWs) experience a continuum of gender-based violence and harassment, ranging from verbal insults to severe physical abuse, rape and sexual assault, psychological abuse and bullying, before, during and after their migration. WMWs do not experience physical and sexual violence and harassment as stand-alone problems. They are part of a system in which labour is violently extracted from their bodies.
III Assessment of the Implementation of Policies to Combat Trafficking in Colombia and Guatemala
In 2018, the Corporación Espacios de Mujer and ECPAT Guatemala re-evaluated anti-trafficking legislation in Colombia and Guatemala in order to identify the gap between what the legislation states and its implementation.
2018 is a crucial year for the fight against human trafficking in Colombia since a new national strategy is expected to be developed which will guide State efforts in the coming years. This III Assessment supports the adoption of initiatives including sectoral and inter-disciplinary protocols, rules, and regulations that seek to address the issue of human trafficking in state policy. In Guatemala, legislative progress is evident through the existence of several anti-trafficking policies and the approval of two instructions to enhance trafficked persons' care and support effective research. Nevertheless, there are still challenges in achieving an effective approach to prevent human trafficking and ensure the comprehensive protection of trafficked persons.
Both countries continue to place most focus on prevention, awareness-raising and training. Protection and assistance of trafficked persons continue to be understaffed and underfunded. Both states do not address the social, economic, political, and cultural factors that make people vulnerable to trafficking.