Press Releases

Year 2002 Presidential Awards for Filipino individuals and private organizations overseas

The Philippine Embassy is pleased to announce that the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) is accepting endorsements from Philippine Embassies and Consulates for nominations to the Year 2002 Presidential Awards for Filipino Individuals and Organizations Overseas. Awarding rites will be held in Manila in December 2002. Read more

Migrants' rights groups warn
Legislators' foreign consultations with OFWs could delay absentee voting bill approval

Legislators are going on "overseas consultations" on the absentee-voting bill, starting with trips to Tokyo and Hong Kong, even as church and civil society groups called these travels unnecessary. Over ten senators and congressmen joined the Tokyo and Hong Kong bicameral consultations last February 21 and 22. Consultations will also be held in Saudi Arabia and Italy in March, and the United States in April. But members of the Philippine Migrants' Rights Watch, a local civil-society network working for migrants' rights, and the Philippine Bishops' Episcopal Commission on Migrants and Itinerant People assailed these trips, saying that these will only delay the bill's immediate passage. Jeremaiah Opiniano and Christopher Mark Tinsay filed this report. Full story

OFW remittances drop due to global recession

Comparative Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas figures reveal a downward trend in OFW remittances from P5.856 billion in 1999, to P5.101 billion in 2000, to only P4.837 billion last year. The drop in overseas Filipinos' remittances has been recorded in spite of the steady rise in the deployment of OFWs in the last few years. Experts attribute this downward trend the on-going recession in the United States and Japan. Jannis Montanez and Jeremaiah Opiniano of the OFW Journalism Consortium report. Full story

Local businesses tap potential of OFW market

The economy, as measured by the Gross National Product or the sum of domestic output and the net factor income from abroad, has relied on the almost US$7 billion annual remittance of Filipinos overseas to maintain its growth rate. But while the country has been exporting local talents for three decades, it was only two or three years ago when local companies began to flock abroad to tap the OFW market. Villy Cabuag of the OFW Journalism Consortium reports. Full story

Balikbayani findings
OFW-managed enterprises tend to fail

According to the soon-to-be-published research of a non-government organization, 70 percent of the enterprises established by former migrant workers go bankrupt due to lack of planning and management skills. Balikabayani Foundation, Inc., in a paper to be presented at a conference this April, says that while business possibilities for some seven million OFWs are endless, capacity-building for aspiring OFW entrepreneurs are rarely addressed, causing their enterprises to collapse in the end. Villy Cabuag, writing for the OFW Journalism Consortium, reports. Full story

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