“Migrants returning to Bangladesh should develop skills and businesses to reintegrate in the local community. These brave men and women should warn others of the dangers of migration through irregular channels,” says Meherpara Union Chairman.

Yesterday, at the Meherpur Union Parishad, International Organization of Migration (IOM) Project Associate, Lubna Farjana, and Project Assistant, Anika Azhar, met with 50 returnee migrants who were trapped aboard a trawler on their way to Malaysia.

These returnees had attempted migration through irregular channels and subsequently faced harrowing conditions of torture and starvation on a ship at sea for many months.
IOM, the UN Migration Agency, helped to bring them back and provided training, counseling and seed capital to help mitigate their trauma and indebtedness (as most of them incurred huge debts to pay the miscreant-recruiters).

IOM project partner NGO POPI (People's Oriented Program implementation) is supporting the returnees with asset transfers and income generation training. Best practices and lessons learned will be recorded for future scale up of this initiative.

IOM’s Building Resilience of Returnee Migrants project, funded by the Australian government, aims to help migrant returnees get back on their feet. IOM aims to promote safe migration and support victims or irregular migration through awareness building at the national and community level. IOM also works with the government to create safe migration enabling policies for both internal and international migration.
Every year, about half a million people migrate out of Bangladesh in search of job opportunities. Bangladesh benefits greatly from remittances so more investment is needed to make the migration process safe and secure for workers.

For more information, please contact IOM
Shirin Akhter, Tel: +8801711187499, Email: sakhter@iom.int.