Philippines ranks 4th in cash remittances from workers

MANILA, Philippines —  Amid the global lockdown due to the pandemic, the Philippines still raked in a whopping $38 billion in cash remittances in 2022 from around 11 million overseas Filipino workers who sent their hard-earned money to families back home.

Data from the World Bank showed that the national government received the amount “from all channels in 2022,” making Manila the world’s fourth largest recipient of money from its overseas workers, after India, Mexico and China.

House Minority Leader Marcelino Libanan, on the other hand, observed that the number of Filipino workers deployed abroad has since dropped to less than one million yearly, compared to pre-pandemic.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said the Philippines deployed a total of 2.1 million workers to overseas labor markets in 2019, or an average of 5,890 every day, according to records from the Department of Migrant Workers.

It is through this that the opposition congressman proposed the inclusion of foreign languages in the K-12 program of the Department of Education (DepEd) headed by Vice President Sara Duterte, who is leading the agency in a concurrent capacity.

Libanan filed Resolution 910 in the House of Representatives, noting “the whole world has become a global village with multilingual labor markets, thus creating a strong demand for workers with foreign language skills.”

Global corporations based in the US, China and Japan – the world’s three largest economies – have been known to prefer hiring staff who can speak a second foreign language besides English, he pointed out.

Libanan, who heads the 28-man House minority bloc, said that exposing young learners to foreign languages “will vastly improve their employability in the global labor markets of the 21st century.”

With the demands of globalization and the introduction of borderless technology, Filipinos should take the cue from national hero Jose Rizal who developed a passion to learn foreign languages, he said.

“Our school system by tradition has been teaching Filipino children to emulate and aspire to be like Rizal. We might as well encourage them to study foreign languages, just like Rizal,” Libanan, of 4Ps party-list, suggested.

House Resolution 910 urges the DepEd, which is currently conducting a review of the K-12 program, to “integrate” foreign language studies other than English in the school curriculum.

Owing to his fascination with foreign languages, Rizal became conversant in Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish and Swedish.

In her 2023 Basic Education Report, Duterte had declared that DepEd intends to revise and improve the K-12 program, with the view to developing lifelong learners who are competent and job-ready.