migration & poverty

They are at work in the kitchens of our luxury homes and in the wards of our hospitals. They assemble toys and machine parts on our factory floors. They trundle laundry carts down the hallways of our most fashionable hotels. They are from India and Myanmar, from Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. They are from Thailand and the Philippines. They are Asia’s migrant women, and a great dawning force in the world’s war on poverty.

We at aidha see daily the promise of Asia’s migrant women. We are witness to their investment and learning and we know firsthand the positive change they can create. Launched in late 2006 under the auspices of UNIFEM Singapore, aidha brings financial education and small business management training to its students. From the Philippines and Indonesia, from Sri Lanka and India, all of aidha’s students are migrant woman. They are powerful women, educated women. They are mothers and daughters and wives, many of whom have already invested five, ten, or fifteen years working to remit monies home for food and routine expenses. Now, they work not simply to remit. Now, they save and invest with the purposeful intent of creating a more vibrant and sustainable future for their children and communities.

How substantial is their contribution? Might they indeed be this ‘dawning force’? Collectively, could they end the pain of poverty in our region? Yes. With continuing education, with peer support, and with more directed and dedicated savings, we argue that they can. We are witness and we hope.

In truth, today, there are many who hope as we do at aidha. Until the millennium, the migration literature recognized the increasing swell of migration from developing nations almost exclusively as a failure of development or as that ‘scourge’ leading to ‘brain-drain’ and the breakdown of family structures. Since 2000, however, there has been a notable shift in tone. There is an optimism and increasing vigor in the assertions that international migration can indeed yield real economic benefit, benefit experienced not only by the migrants themselves but also by the at-home family members, if not yet their extended communities.

Every year, international migrants direct some $300 billion in remittances to fuel the budgets and bank accounts of left-at-home families in developing nations. Second in scale only to foreign direct investment and outstripping by far our languid overseas aid, how can such a sum not have impact? Indeed, the United Nations and World Bank now credit remittances with observable declines in developing world poverty. One 2007 World Bank report remarks that remittances may have reduced the number of documented poor in Bangladesh by 6 percentage points. Similar reports suggest that the children of remittance-recipient households in Sri Lanka have higher birth weight, better health indicators, and a lower school drop-out rate than other households. Household investments in education and entrepreneurship in other Southeast Asian countries also appear to be generally increasing with remittances from abroad.

The data is still sketchy and many of the larger, structured research studies recently initiated by the UN-INSTRAW, for example, are still ramping up. Nonetheless, the world community now appears committed to a more systematic evaluation of migration as a solution to poverty. And, slowly, the evidence of migration’s potential is emerging.

But the source of that potential is not simply remittances. Fascinatingly, as, like archaeologists, the UN and World Bank researchers sieve the data, a more specific power is being revealed. It is not simply remittances or migration. It is women.

Despite earning significantly less than their male counterparts, on average, the women migrants of Sri Lanka are responsible for more than 60% of the nation’s annual remittances. Bangladeshi women working in the Middle East appear to send home, on average, a full 72% of their earnings. For women in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, the figures are similar. In general, women migrants appear to send a higher proportion of their earnings home than men. Regularly. Faithfully. And, they do so with significantly more focus on investment of their monies in education, health care, and social welfare than men.

At aidha, we work to take this work, this investment, and this potential to an entirely new level. Through our courses, our support services, and especially our COMPASS CLUBS, we help our students build the savings that will power still more productive investment. Our students, women who had worked here in Singapore for ten years and who had amassed no savings, women who had nothing to show for their time here other than the mounds of remittance receipts, now are the proud owners of small cafés back home. They have herds of cows and impressive tracts of land They have clean water and vehicles. They have new homes and new irrigation systems. Their children are productively in school. And, they have pride and a sense of accomplishment. What they have achieved is, without question, astounding. Our students, our migrant women are not simply potential. They are proven.

Imagine the impact of all 30 million Asian migrant women saving in this way, investing in this way. Were they to have the opportunity, there would be no question any longer of migration’s potential. It would be proven.