JAKARTA (AFP): The Indonesian government aims to send a million workers abroad annually and wants to double the number of their destination countries, a manpower ministry official said Wednesday.

Indonesia has long encouraged the sending of semi-skilled and skilled manual workers abroad in a bid to boost foreign exchange earnings for the Southeast Asia’s largest economy and to reduce unemployment at home.

“The target is to send one million workers overseas each year until 2009,” ministry spokesman Joko Mulyanto told AFP.

He said that the government was also working to boost the number of countries accepting its workers from the current 11 to 25.

In 2005, Indonesia sent 474,310 workers abroad, up 24.6 percent on a year earlier, Minister of Manpower Erman Suparno said previously.

According to figures he provided, 62.7 percent went to Asia Pacific countries and the remainder to the Middle East.

Suparno said Indonesia earned US$2.9 billion in foreign exchange remittances from the workers last year.

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Wahyu Susilo
Project Officer Poverty & MDGs
International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID)
Jl. Mampang Prapatan XI/23
Jakarta 12790
Phone: 62-21-79196721/22
Fax: 62-21-7941577
e-mail: wahyu@infid.org
website: www.infid.org, www.infid.be

(The above article was forwarded to MFA Secretariate by Wahyu Susilo, contact details at the bottom.  Wahyu is also a member of Migrant Care, an MFA member based in Indonesia.)