MANILA - The Philippines is one of 16 countries pre-selected for a Euro15-million (about P950 million) funding program from the European Commission (EC), in partnership with the United Nations (UN), it was announced this week.

The program is known as the Joint Initiative on Migration and Development (JIMD), which aims to promote the positive impact of migration on development, “using an innovative, bottom-up approach that will support small-scale actors to undertake concrete actions.”

The UN-EC initiative will be launched in Brussels on December 1 this year and, thereafter, proposals for “best practices and innovations” will be welcomed from local government units of the 16 countries and civil societies.
Ambassador Alistair MacDonald, head of the EC Delegation in Manila, said both sectors can propose projects individually or in groups and even with each other.

Once the proposals are screened by a Migration Advisory Board, which would include a Filipino, these should be ready for implementation in September 2009.MacDonald said the initiative follows the EC’s adoption of a Migration  Pact on October 15.

He said the Philippines was pre-selected because of the “sheer size of  Philippine diaspora of its total population and that not only the government but also its civil societies have lots of ideas” that could  serve as a model for the 15 others chosen.

The initiatives cover four areas: migrant remittances and how they are leveraged for development, migrant communities and their links with labor sending and receiving countries, use of migrant skills and mitigation of the so-called brain drain, and rights to information for prospective migrants and returnees. Sri Lanka is the only other Asian country pre-selected. The others are  Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Georgia, Moldova, Ecuador, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Cape Verde, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.