The drop in remittances worldwide, due to the financial and economic crisis, may have devastating effects on long term human development. Careful consideration of the gender and social impacts of the crisis is urgently needed. UN-INSTRAW, in coordination with UNDP and IOM, will therefore conduct a Global Consultation to generate dialogue on the crisis and its impact on international migration and remittances from a gender perspective.
The Global Consultation, held from 29 June to 1 July 2009 in Geneva, will be attended by representatives of Governments, United Nations agencies, such as UNDP and its country offices, UN-INSTRAW, ILO, and IOM, as well as independent experts working in the economic sphere, on migration, remittances and gender equality. The objective is to generate dialogue, knowledge sharing and concrete recommendations for gender-sensitive policy and programmatic responses to the ongoing financial and economic crisis, in particular its impact on issues around international migration and remittances.
In 2008, IOM (the International Organization for Migration) estimated the scale of remittances to developing countries at about US$283 billion and over the last years a growing interest in remittances and their contribution to development has captured the attention of policy-makers and practitioners in governments, the United Nations and other international organizations, including the international financial institutions, as well as academia.
However, literature, studies, and assessments on migration and remittances have remained largely gender blind, with devastating results in terms of policies, strategies, and projects that do not take into account women’s contributions to remittance flows and the differentiated impact of remittances and migration.
The UNDP and UN-INSTRAW multi-country study “Gender and Remittances: Building Gender Responsive Local Development,” launched in 2007, aims to enhance gender-responsive local development in six countries by identifying and promoting options for utilizing remittances for sustainable livelihoods in poor rural and semi-urban settings. The project has been implemented in Albania, Dominican Republic, Lesotho, Morocco, Philippines and Senegal and research findings have established the importance of remittances and migration flows for rural women and their communities.
The Global Consultation will take into account the decline in remittances already recorded in a number of countries, such as Morocco, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka as well as in Latin America in the analysis of the research results from this project. Participants in the consultation will have the opportunity to exchange ideas about the UNDP/UN-INSTRAW project, as well as cross-country experiences on the impact of the current financial and economic crisis on migrant workers and remittance flows and evidence on the impact of the crisis on migrant women and men workers, in particular remittances flows and their utilization.
