Sunday, July 17, 2011

Ethiopia asked to expedite maids' recruitment

(July 18, 2011, JEDDAH)- Chairman of the recruitment committee at Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry Yahya Hassan Al-Maqbool has urged the authorities concerned in Ethiopia to expedite granting visas and facilitate recruitment procedures for housemaids to work in the Kingdom.

He said the Ethiopian recruitment offices should be able to deal with a bigger number of Saudi offices instead of just two at present.

"This will expedite the recruitment of Ethiopian housemaids and reduce the procedure’s duration which is three months at present," he told Arab News in a statement.

According to Al-Maqbool, Ethiopian recruitment officers were only allowed now to deal with two Saudi offices. "The Ethiopian offices should be allowed to deal with many offices in the Kingdom," he said.

The chairman said at present, each Saudi recruitment office was processing 60 visas from Ethiopia every month. "We are requesting to increase the number of visas given to each Saudi office to 500 monthly," he said. He also called for increasing the number of weekly flights between the two countries. "These procedures will expedite the recruitment of housemaids from Ethiopia," he added.

Al-Maqbool described the manpower recruited from Ethiopia so far as good, but said the final judgment would take time to make.

Al-Maqbool believed that the recruitment of 25,000 housemaids from Ethiopia during the coming few months was not difficult or impossible if there was cooperation from the Ethiopian side.
"The Ethiopian manpower has proved that they are a successful substitute for manpower from Southeast Asia, who were causing a lot of problems."

There are 170 licensed offices in Ethiopia and 150 offices in Kenya to export manpower to Saudi Arabia. According to press reports, the Kingdom will open training institutes in the two African countries to qualify manpower before they are sent to the Kingdom.

The demand for housemaids in the Kingdom has gone up these days with Ramadan only two weeks away. Many Saudi families are now seeking the help of illegal housemaids who demand a monthly payment of SR2,000.
Source: Arab news.

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