The National Board for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers (BNP2TKI) gave awards to nine heads of the Former Indonesian Migrant Workers Association and four Indonesian Migrant Workers activists, namely: Ratih Pratiwi Anwar (Researcher at the Center for Asia Pacific Studies Universitas Gadjah Mada), Latifah Iskandar (Head of the Economic Council and the Indonesian Economic Council Employment of PP Aisyiah), Rommy Heryanto (Head of the Komunitas Hijau NGO), and Mardiono (former migrant worker in Malaysia, now restaurants owner and migrant workers motivator).
The BNP2TKI’s award was given as an appreciation for the contributions they made to improve the economic welfare and the protection of prospective migrant workers, migrant workers, former migrant workers and their families in the area of Special Region of Yogyakarta Province. The awards were handed over by the Deputy of Protection of BNP2TKI, Dr. Anjar Prihantoro, S.E., M.A., on Wednesday, October 9, 2019 during ‘The Dialogue on the Protection and Entrepreneurship of Indonesian Migrant Workers’, which was held by the BNP2TKI’s provincial office (BP3TKI) in Yogyakarta.
Every year there are around 1,000 – 1,500 people from Special Region of Yogyakarta Province going abroad to work in the formal sector and around 1,000 migrant workers who had finished their contracts returned to Yogyakarta. However, just 150 returnees had received entrepreneurship training from BP3TKI Yogyakarta each year and only about 30 percent have succeeded in becoming entrepreneurs. Therefore, the role of those nine former migrant workers associations as well as the supervisors, motivators, and observers of former migrant workers is very much needed so that returnees can use their remittances for productive businesses which are economically beneficial to both their family and their village community.