Women expat workers in UAE send Dh2,000 more home

Dubai: Women expatriates send back home Dh2,000 more a year, on average, than their male counterparts, a paper by the American University of Sharjah and sponsored by Western Union showed.

The paper, “Women Migrants, Remittances and Their Impact in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region”, was authored by Dr Esmail Genc, Professor of Economics, and Dr George Naufal, Assistant Professor of Economics, at the American University of Sharjah. It examined the macroeconomic indicators and available research on women workers in the Middle East as well as in other regions.

Naufal said that according to official records, migrant workers in the GCC generate up to $80 billion (Dh293.83 billion) in remittances a year. The international remittance figure is $500 billion a year.

He explained that these figures might only account for half of the actual figures, because this figure does not take into account money that workers brings back when they travel home or send with friends of colleagues back home and through “hawala”.

Hawala is a mode of transfer of money where a person tells a hawala agent, who is part of a hawala network, that he needs a certain amount of money to be delivered to someone in a different country. The person gives the agent the money, and then that agent calls another agent in the desired country and tells him to deliver the amount to the recipient’s address. “There are no official records so we cannot track this,” Naufal explained.

Naufal added that many countries in the region depend on remitaances, as it sometimes makes up for 20 per cent of that country’s GDP.

One of the sets of data used in the research was a survey of 1,500 expatriate workers in the UAE, of which approximately 30 per cent were female. The paper showed that 60 per cent of the female workers have a degree, as opposed to 30 per cent of the males.

However, Naufal said, having a degree did not mean having a good job, as they found that most of females were over-qualified for the jobs they do.

Naufal added that “in the past decade more and more women have left their home countries to work abroad”. He added that the majority of those women come from south and southeast Asia.

The paper also showed that 95 per cent of female foreign workers in the UAE send money back to support their households; 39 per cent of the women support their children’s education, while 78 per cent send the money to the older generation.

Genec said that some of the paper’s recommendation include creation of policies in host countries to attract foreign workers, support highly educated women to reach their full potential, create policies to help unite families and promote female migrants’ role in economic development.