OF TREES AND FOREST
Former Senate President
Manny Villar
I had the opportunity to peruse the report published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM)-Philippines entitled, COVID-19 Impact Assessment on Returned Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). The study, based on surveys conducted on returning OFWs, offer valuable insights to policymakers on how to manage the influx of OFWs returning home.
Quoting data from the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), the report noted that in 2020, a total of 791,623 OFWs were repatriated. Moreover, there was a “drastic reduction” in the deployment of OFWs in 2020 with a total of only 549,841. The IOM study further noted that this “represents a 75 percent drop in deployments from a record high of 2.16 million in 2019.” This also comes on the heels of a “record high of USD 33.9 billion” remittances in 2019 which is “equivalent to nearly 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).”
I have devoted much of my political and business careers to helping our OFWs. The first house and lot that I sold was to an OFW family who kindly entrusted their hard-earned money and their dream of owning a house to me. So I do what I can to help OFWs in distress and provide them with support when they go back home. But my dream is to have an economy robust enough that our kababayans would not have to work abroad and leave their families here just to earn a living. I have stated before that, grateful as we are, we cannot have an economy dependent on Filipinos being forced by lack of opportunities to leave home.
On a related note, this is the theme of Camella Homes’ Christmas song, “Coming Home on Christmas Day.” We want them to come home so they can spend Christmas with their families, attend their children’s graduation or wedding, or go malling with them on weekends. But we want them to come back home because we have viable opportunities for them here not because they were forced to because of the coronavirus. Two-thirds (67 percent) of returning OFWs believed that COVID-19 was the determining factor in their return to the country while only 23 percent said they were returning regardless of the pandemic. It is also interesting to note that “nearly half or 48 percent of all OFWs indicated that they plan to re-migrate abroad in the future” while 34 percent stated they would like to remain home.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has just erased most of the economic gains we have achieved in the past years. In 2020, our unemployment rate hit a record high of 10.3 percent. Just last September 2021, the government reported an 8.9 percent unemployment rate. This is bad news for our returning OFWs and the IOM study confirmed this. It said that an “alarming 83 percent of OFWs were still unemployed three months after their return to the Philippines.”
This is another reason why government should only think about hard lockdown as an absolute last resort. I am hopeful that the recent relaxation of quarantine restrictions will allow many of our businesses to hire back and hire more. And as we near the holiday season, I am positive that we can generate more economic activities while observing strict health protocols of course.
There was one positive light in the IOM survey. When asked what type of income opportunities they were most interested in taking up, 45 percent of OFWs showed an inclination towards self-employment. This is the reason why I have been strongly advocating for entrepreneurship for our OFWs. We need to provide them support so they can start a micro or small business. Even without the pandemic, this is the solution to ensuring that they stay home rather than working overseas.
One of the ways we do this at the Villar Group is through the Annual OFW and Family Summit organized through our foundation, the Villar Social Institute for Poverty Alleviation and Governance (SIPAG). We will have our 10th Summit on Nov. 19 and because of the pandemic we will do it virtually. But the objective remains the same — provide our OFWs and their families with skills such as financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and the like so we can help them make the transition from overseas worker to entrepreneur.
So, as they have done time and again, OFWs, this time as entrepreneurs, will have another chance to be the country’s new heroes.