State owned Foreign Employment Agency lose market share

Sri Lanka’s only state-owned manpower recruiting entity, the Foreign Employment Agency (Pvt) Ltd is losing its market share owing to management weakness and lack of dynamism in the face of high competition from mushrooming job agencies.

Around 1,000 foreign employment agencies are functioning countrywide forcing stiff competition to the state owned agency. However, only 350 agencies have registered with the Association of Licensed Foreign Employment Agencies (ALFEA), official sources said.

According to the statistics of Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), 310,786 foreign job opportunities have been received for the country in the year under review (2017/2018).

Out of this number, 427 job opportunities or 0.14 per cent had only been sent abroad by Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Agency (Pvt) Ltd, data showed.

Further, job orders decreased significantly considering the drop in job opportunities by 2211 received in the year under review as compared with the year 2016.

The company has failed to recruit qualified workers for 140,100 and 60 normal job opportunities received from countries such as Jordan, Singapore and Bahrain, respectively in the year under review.

Further, out of 58 technical and professional job opportunities received from Maldives, workers had also not been recruited for 55.

Although job orders had been received from countries like Qatar, Kuwait and Oman, the agency had failed to recruit enough people which resulted in the cancellation of job orders.

The Foreign Employment Agency (Pvt) Ltd has sent only 44 workers via MoUs for jobs mainly to West Asia out of 806 migrants in the year under review, the audit inspection revealed.

According to the SLBFE, ‘job orders’ from foreign countries are sent to the Sri Lankan embassy in that particular country and it is the responsibility of the embassy to check the type of employment being requested and the wages offered for it.

These orders are received by the foreign employment agencies in Sri Lanka, only with their approval, he explained

In the face of declining migrant worker numbers, the Ministry of Foreign Employment is in the process of training workers to fulfill 10,000 vacancies in Japan and a number of European countries, a senior official of the Ministry said adding that the opportunities are mostly in care giving and the construction sector.

However, the training centres run by the SLBFE are running below capacity, although some centres are equipped with modern resources to train large numbers, an onsite inspection revealed.