By Sabina Zaccaro
ROME, Apr 12 2007 (IPS)

Filipino migrant workers around the world sent home 12.8 billion dollars in remittances last year, almost 20 percent more than in 2005. Of these, 44 million dollars come from Italy, the fourth biggest source of remittances sent by Filipino workers after the United States, Saudi Arabia and Canada, according to the World Bank.

The Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) says in a report that Filipino people make up the sixth largest foreign group in Italy after people from Albania, Morocco, Romania, China and Ukraine. The Filipino population in Italy is about 90,000, of whom 52,918 are women, mainly in Rome and Milan.

According to ISTAT data, women account for 63 percent of documented Filipino workers in Italy.

The high number of Filipina (female) workers in Italy led the United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-Instraw), an institute undertaking research and training projects contributing to the empowerment of women and gender equality, to study Filipinas’ remittances from Italy.

“Much attention is paid to remittances and their potential for development,” Carmen Moreno, director of Instraw told IPS. “Nevertheless the large part of the studies conducted so far does not take gender perspectives into account. Any analysis of the development potential of remittances should take into account the inequalities between women and men, and their influence on migration and remittance flows.”

The Italy-Philippines case study is still ongoing, Moreno said. “We’re doing interviews with Filipinas in Italy and in the Philippines. In Italy, the Filipino community have started to get organised to help each other and to train each other to better know the laws and the way to improve their labour situation.”

“What we want to learn,” said Moreno, “is why women send remittances home, what for, who to, and the ways in which women’s migration and remittances are affecting gender roles.”

A similar case study conducted in the Dominican Republic, focusing on migrant women of Dominican origin in Spain, showed that in the beginning migrant women would send remittances to men, often to their partners, Moreno said. “Then they stopped, because moneys were often used for different purposes, to establish a new family, for instance.”

Now Dominican women are sending remittances to their mothers, sisters or daughters. “It’s a women to women network,” Moreno said. “They send moneys mainly for education and health purposes, and to improve their houses.”

The study in the Dominican Republic showed that women who come back from Spain often use money they had sent home to open a small business. Not all of them succeed, Moreno said.

“Therefore, in collaboration with the Dominican government, we have started a training project for migrant women who are back home to get some financial awareness, to learn how to start small business initiatives, especially in rural areas, and how to use banks.”

According to the Rome office of the Catholic charity Caritas Internationalis, the Filipino community in Italy is the most ‘feminised’ group of migrants and the most concentrated in the domestic work sector.

“Many women migrate for economic reasons, others for family reunification, while others are escaping from gender specific discrimination such as domestic violence,” Charito Basa, president of the Rome-based Filipino Women’s Council told IPS.

The Council carries out enterprise training for the Filipino community in Rome to promote better integration of migrants into the labour market and facilitate reintegration of those who are planning to go back home.

“It is still unclear how much women migrants remit,” Basa said. “That is a question that researchers are trying to find out.” According to UN-Instraw, only sparse sex- disaggregated data is available, and gender perspective is still an under-researched topic.

“What we already know,” said Carmen Moreno, “is that there is an increasing feminisation of migration, and that women who migrate independently are often the economic providers to their families.”

“If migrant women in the diaspora contribute to the economic development of their hometown communities, they should have full access to resources,” Charito Basa said. “In Italy, and in most parts of Western Europe, migrant women are usually invisible, and remain excluded from the scope of labour legislation. In most cases, their legal status is only a facilitating factor for further discrimination and abuses.”

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