What: Launch of Regional Guidelines for the Development of Bilateral Labour Agreements in the Southern Africa Development Community and Regional Guide to Facilitate South-South Labour Mobility in Southern Africa.

Where: Sheraton Hotel, Pretoria.

When: 10:00 to 10:30 AM on Thursday 30 March 2017. There will be time for one-on-one interviews thereafter.

Who: International Organization for Migration (IOM), International Labour Organization (ILO), multilateral and bi-lateral donor organizations.

Why: Africa confronts a growing, youthful population coupled with jobless growth and a dearth of formal employment. This combination translates into increasing mobility of skills and labour within, from, and to Africa.

In 2013 the Southern African region recorded over 4 million migrants, excluding irregular migrants, of which 44 per cent were female and 20 per cent were under 19 years of age. Flows remain therefore mainly informal and undocumented or irregular, which has prevented countries from leveraging the full benefits of labour mobility. Skills development, unemployment and extreme poverty or underemployment, urbanization, environmental changes, instability constitutes important determinants of economic migration in the region.

In this context, bilateral labour migration agreements play a crucial role in strengthening the regulatory framework aimed at the protection of migrant workers in the labour migration process. Although there are existing initiatives at the regional level (SADC Labour Migration Action Plan and Regional Policy Framework) there are still limited tools and guidance on labour migration governance at the national and regional levels to encourage countries within Southern Africa to move toward the formalization of intraregional labour migration schemes and effective regional integration.

Selected thematic experts from the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Organization for Migration (IOM)) will be available for one-on-one interviews.

For more information please contact : Lerato Tsebe: E: ltsebe@iom.int T: +27-72- 1277094 Chiara Frisone: E: cfrisone@iom.int T: +27 (0)79 520 4696