Returning Migrants Participating in Decision-Making Back Home

What is the migration link with governance, and how does this impact the achievement of our #GlobalGoals?
The achievement of the SDGs requires inclusive, responsive, and equitable processes and institutions, as well as enabling people to become active participants in those processes.
Novelita is a former overseas domestic worker who became indebted to her employer. Upon her return to the Philippines, she joined a Trade Union for Domestic Workers and started to actively participate in decision-making processes, promoting the rights of female domestic workers. She is now Union President, advocating for administrative and legislative change.
Target 16.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls on governments to ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels. As we enter the “Decade of Action”, it is essential that migrant representatives’ engagement in local and national governance is facilitated, in order to achieve the SDGs by 2030.
The “Safe and Fair programe”, implemented by ILO and UN Women and funded by the European Union (EU) under the multi-year EU-UN Spotlight Initiative, is working towards realizing women migrant workers’ rights in the ASEAN region. One of the key areas of this work supports their efforts to organize so that safe and fair migration is promoted and gender-based discrimination is addressed.
Through the “Mainstreaming Migration into International Cooperation and Development” (#MMICD) project funded by the EU, IOM produced a series of videos to show the #MigrationConnection between different sectors and capture what this means in practice for people and communities. For more information, please visit eea.iom.int/mmicd.