Increasing the Capacity of Migrant Resource Centres (MRCs) in Nepal to Foster Safe, Humane and Orderly Migration

In Nepal, labour migration is a source of employment, and workers’ remittances are critical to poverty alleviation and socio-economic development. However, a lack of reliable information about the migration process exposes Nepali migrants to faulty contracts, inflated service charges, fraud, exploitation, movement restrictions, non-payment of wages, debt-bondage and unjustified high costs for migration. Migrants do not have access to the formal financial sector and resort to moneylenders and recruitment agencies to borrow money to cover the costs of migration. The very high interest rates migrants have to pay for these loans (between 35% and 65% yearly) represent a substantial part of the overall migration costs.

The proposed project aims to enhance the capacity of the Government of Nepal to ensure safe and orderly migration by:

• Providing potential migrants with accurate and up-to-date information on migration and the recruitment process so they can make more informed decisions;
• Interlinking the Migrant Resource Centres (MRCs) spread across the various districts of Nepal, by adopting common Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in order to provide reliable information to prospective and current migrants through a centralized database.
• Facilitate MRCs in playing a predominant role in migration process by becoming the “one-stop-shop” for migrants and their families as well as serve the purpose to collect data about the migrants for further policy and programming considerations.