UAE - IOM Director General William Lacy Swing on Wednesday, March 25, addressed the Dubai International Humanitarian Aid and Development Conference and Exhibition (DIHAD) in Dubai.

During his stop in the Emirate of Dubai, Ambassador Swing met with United Arab Emirates Minister of Labour HE Saqr Ghobash to sign an agreement for IOM to conduct a large-scale research project on labour supply chains and the recruitment industry between Kerala, Nepal and UAE.

“Any discussion on humanitarian aid and development must include migration and human mobility if it is to be a comprehensive and inclusive exchange,” Ambassador Swing told the gathering. “With more than 1 billion migrants — one in seven people in the world — migration is a megatrend of this century. Increased migration is inevitable, due to demographics and disasters; it is necessary, for durable and equitable economic growth; and desirable, if well-governed.”

Ambassador Swing reminded attendees that the armed conflict in Syria this month entered its fifth year, with no end in sight, and that the humanitarian situation continues to worsen. Syria’s crisis, moreover, is spilling over to neighboring countries with all four of Syria’s neighbors bearing a heavy load as humanitarian needs have increased twelve-fold since the conflict’s beginning; 12 million people now need humanitarian assistance; almost half of all Syrians have been forced to leave their homes, making Syria the world’s largest displacement crisis with 7.6 million Internally Displaced Persons, and 3.7 million refugees.

On South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, Ambassador Swing pointed out that some 2.5 million people are in a state of dire emergency—and only steps away from famine. Although the death toll is unknown, at least 50,000 people have been killed in another war whose end is not in sight.

“In brief, the world faces the largest number of simultaneous, complex humanitarian disasters that anyone can remember,” Ambassador Swing said. “That’s bad enough but the other stark reality is that there are, at present, no viable political processes or active negotiations that offer any hope whatsoever of a short to medium-term solution to any of these. In the midst of this, there is a vacuum of international leadership, and a serious erosion of authority.”

As part of IOM’s approach to helping governments manage migration and support the development of ethical and fair international labour recruitment practices, Ambassador Swing looked forward this week to signing the agreement for IOM to conduct a large-scale research project on labour supply chains and the recruitment industry between the UAE and the South Asian nations of Nepal and India.

Within this cornerstone project, IOM will work with the Indian Institute of Management–Ahmedabad and the Zayed University College of Business to conduct field research and analysis that maps out the supply chains, inter-institutional relationships, costs, and value-added within the labour recruitment network in these two corridors. The project falls within the framework of the Abu Dhabi Dialogue (ADD) and will conclude with a workshop to be delivered to ADD Member States in order to disseminate the results and recommendations of the report.

For further information please contact: Michael Newson, IOM MENA Regional Office. Tel: +202 27365140/41 ext.: 310, Mobile: +20 101 990 1797, Email: mnewson@iom.int

Or Hassan Abdel Moneim Mostafa, IOM Geneva, Tel: + 41 79 1038712, Email: habdelmoneim@iom.int