Kuwait-bound OFWs to be diverted to Hong Kong, Cyprus, Singapore — POEA

MANILA, Philippines — The Kuwait-bound domestic workers affected by the total deployment ban to the Gulf nation will be deployed to other markets such as Hong Kong, Cyprus and Singapore, an official from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration said Wednesday. 

POEA administrator Bernard Olalia said the country has to fill the 150,000 job orders in Hong Kong per year. 

“For domestic workers, the number one destination would be Hong Kong. Instead of deploying domestic workers to the Middle East where there are lot of welfare cases, why not deploy them to Hong Kong where there are fewer welfare cases?” Olalia said in an interview on ANC’s “Headstart.”

He noted that there are not many cases of abuses in Hong Kong because the “workers are aware of the culture.”

“They are now integrated to the ways of Hong Kong employers unlike in Arab countries where the culture is much different, their ways of life and the kind of food,” Olalia said.

The POEA administrator added that Singapore and Cyprus have 30,000 job orders each. 

Olalia noted that sending migrant workers to other markets is the not the long-term goal of the government, but only a “stop-gap measure” to address the problem. 

In a press briefing Wednesday, Department of Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Ernesto Abella said that the government will not be lifting the deployment ban in Kuwait anytime soon. 

But for Human Rights Watch, the ban is “more likely to cause harm than to help” overseas Filipino workers who resort to unsafe and unregulated channels to enter Kuwait. 

READ: HRW: Philippines, Kuwait should fix gaps to prevent abuse of OFWs

The death of OFW Joanna Demafelis prompted President Rodrigo Duterte to impose a ban on sending workers to the Gulf nation. 

Her body was found inside a freezer in an abandoned apartment in Kuwait more than a year after she was reported missing. 

According to date from the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, 196 Filipinos have died in Kuwait since 2016. Most of them due to medical reasons, while others committed suicide. 

More than 250,000 Filipinos are in Kuwait, most of them are domestic workers.