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Bangladesh eyes 2 mln overseas jobs in next 5 years

Xinhua, December 19, 2016 Adjust font size:

Remittance-reliant Bangladesh expects some 2 million overseas jobs for the country's skilled and semi-skilled workforce in the next five years, a senior official said here Sunday.

"We hope that some 2 million Bangladeshis will be able to go abroad with overseas employment in the next five years if the current trend continues," said Selim Reza, director general of Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET).

Officials say the expectation comes after about 600,000 Bangladeshis found overseas jobs so far this year.

In 2015, the country's overseas employment was more than 500,000, the BMET record showed.

Speaking at a program marking the International Migrants Day in Dhaka's Bangabandhu International Conference Centre (BICC), also known as Bangladesh-China Friendship Conference Centre, Reza said more steps are underway to create more overseas employment opportunities for Bangladeshis in the coming years.

The Bangladeshi government has long been pursuing to send more Bangladeshis abroad to keep inflow of remittances, major source of foreign currency for the country, undisturbed.

"The flow of inward remittances in the 2015-16 financial year (July 2015-June 2016) fell about 2.55 percent to 14.93 billion U.S. dollars,"a Bangladesh Bank (BB) official had earlier told Xinhua.

Sources said the decrease in total inflow of remittance were due mainly to sluggish overseas employment in some middle eastern Asian countries and devaluation of the currencies of the United Kingdom, Singapore and Malaysia against the U.S. dollars.

Although remittance inflows from nearly 9 million Bangladeshis, living and working in about 100 foreign countries, recorded a fall in the 2015-16 fiscal year, the growth rates in June, the final month of the last fiscal, showed an upward trend.

According to the BB official, non-resident Bangladeshis remitted home in June 1.46 billion U.S. dollars, up by 248.21 million U.S. dollars from the level of the previous month, for celebration of the Eid-ul-Fitr festival that marks the Muslims holy month of Ramadan.

The bulk of remittances, which still contribute to around 11 percent of the GDP for Bangladesh, comes from Middle-Eastern Asian countries including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, followed by Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Italy, Britain and the United States. Enditem