“COVID-19 and quarantine rules are keeping Lankan workers from going back abroad”, 25 July 2021

Sri Lankan migrant workers are reluctant to go back to work abroad. With rising COVID-19 rates and extreme quarantine requirements in destination countries the number of people registering with the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment is low.

The registered migrant employment worker rate in Sri Lanka dropped from over two-hundred thousand people in 2019 to a little over fifty-thousand people by the end of 2020.

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Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the only Gulf countries that are currently allowing Sri Lankan migrant workers to enter their local labor force..

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Incoming remittances from migrant workers were higher in 2020 than in 2019 due to an increased use of the traditional remitting processes.

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..[A] lot of workers used informal methods to get the money to their families.

..[T]his was partly because some workers did not have the necessary documentation and were employed abroad illegally.

The main reason, however, was a lack of faith in the banking system, arising out of a lack of knowledge.