Transfers and lack of funding have been identified as some of the barriers affecting effective execution of planned institutional activities of the National Labour Migration Technical Working Group (NLMTWG).
Currently most donors are shifting their support packages towards displacement as the result of the Russia-Ukraine war whiles the domestic budget cut for Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) are also making it difficult for the institutions to execute their action plans for the year.
This came to light at the fourth quarter meeting of the group, attended mainly by Directors of stakeholder institutions in the migration sector, including the Ministries of Employment and Labour Relations, Foreign Affairs and The Interior, and their affiliate departments and agencies.
The two-day meeting was funded by the Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ) project undertaken by the Centre for Migration Studies, University of Ghana, Legon and attended by 46 representatives of stakeholder institutions.
The meeting is to initiate process of developing the Annual Labour Migration Institutional Work Plan to advance the course of implementation of the National Migration Policy in 2023.
It will also reinforce the collective efforts from the NLMTWG to support the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations execute the National Labour Migration Policy.
Professor Joseph Teye, a Co-Director of MIDEQ Project, said the MIDEQ Project was funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)/ Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).
He said: “The project is thought to be the world largest migration project and made up of 100 institutions, and the project is being done in 12 countries”.
“When we said 100 institutions it means it include some of the organisations that are not necessarily contacting the research but are part if the research. So all the UN agencies that deals with migration are part if the project,” he explained.
Prof. Teye said the MIDEQ project explores South-South migration in six corridors that links migrants countries of origin and destination.
The corridors are Burkina Faso-Cote d’Ivoire; China-Ghana; Egypt-Jordan; Ethiopia-South Africa; Haiti-Brazil, and Nepal-Malaysia. The CMS is doing China-Ghana corridor.
He said they were focusing on global south because “ if you look at migration movement about 60 per cent of movements are happening within the global south and yet, most of what we hear about migration is about migration is talking about south-north migration”.
He said findings would be used to deal with policy in the south-south migration in general, so maybe we can also build on what we got from China to Ghana and Ghana to China to make policies for Ghana and Nigeria.
“We will share our findings with you to see how you can incorporate some of them into the National Labour Market Policy,” he added.
Mr Ernest Berko, Deputy Director, PPME, said the technical working group was a mechanism in place to ensure all relevant agencies draw activity out of the implementation plans of the policy and also implement them themselves.
“We meet every quarter to look at how far we have gone with the implementation and how to support each other to address the challenges that we have.
Today’s meeting is fruitful because we are able to report on work done so far and identified some challenges and what can be done to address them.
He said: “Going forward, we’re just going to look for activities that we could not implement this year and also come out with some mitigating strategies for the challenges identified, and then how we can reposition themselves to ensure that the challenges they faced do not repeat next year so that we will achieve the objective of the policy,” he added.
Prof. Mary Boatemaa Setrana, the Director of CMS, said as part of their mandate was capacity building workshops and also host MIDEQ project with other researchers with CMS on it.
She expressed the hope that as they share their findings, they would see how to integrate south-south migration issues in the policy.
She noted that most of the discussions in policy circles did not focus on south-south migration as they always think about Europe.
“We are hoping that through this discussion of developing the work plan we can integrate some of the ideas.
“Though we sharing issues like migrants’ protection and migrants’ access, they are same everywhere and so hope that as we share, it is not only our corridor but they reflect on other corridors and we can use all the findings and what we learn from it to also plan our 2023 Labour Migration work plan,” she said.
Mr Dennis Benneh Diawus, a Planning Officer at PPME and the rapporteur for the group, said some of the activities were beyond the purse of the institutions and advised them to look at the low hanging fruits and go for achievable plans within the year.
The National Migration Policy was passed by Parliament in 2016 but has not been implemented ever since.