Psychosocial Implications of Fair Recruitment Initiative: Lessons from Nigeria Intervention Projects.

Abstract

Safe, orderly and regular labour migration are the common watch-words that are necessary to understand the need for fair recruitment in this era where modern information technology has made all sorts of practices (negative and positive) easy. The fair Recruitment Initiative (FRI) document and the General Principles and Operational Guidelines (GPOG) have set standards which have guided countries to develop specific policies that can promote fair recruitment. A pertinent query has been whether the FRI pillars, the GPOG and national documents contain enough policies that can protect the psychosocial well-being of labour migrants. The present article reviewed the psychosocial components of some selected national and international labour standards. The results showed that all the reviewed documents have components that provided rules and guidelines that ensure protection of the psychosocial domain of the labour migrants. It was recommended that some of the national documents require revision to accommodate and clarify some major issues such as recruitment fees. Also, there is need for more information dissemination so that more labour migrants could learn about their rights and thus use the knowledge to protect their psychosocial well-being.