In 2018-2019, the International Secretariat of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW-IS), in collaboration with eleven organisations across nine countries in Asia, carried out a Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) on “Safe and Fair Migration: A feminist perspective on women’s rights to mobility and work”. In our study, FPAR is used as a framework and approach to capture migrant women’s complex realities of and perspectives on labour and migration. What distinguishes FPAR from other forms of research is that it is deliberately women-centred and participant-driven; the knowledge comes from the community and is owned by them and based on their lived experiences; the research participants propose solutions so the research results become a tool to collectively organise advocacy actions. This research project is an attempt to deconstruct dominant understandings of safe migration and fair migration and reshape the concepts from a feminist perspective. We believe our approach of building knowledge from the ground up and creating an evidence base will add value in addressing the structural causes of power disparities that affect women’s migration and livelihoods. Our research community stretches across South, Southeast, and West Asia offering views from both countries of origin and destination, as well as adding the perspective of internal migration from rural to urban areas. Three distinct sectors of work are covered in this study: the domestic work sector, the garment sector, and the entertainment sector. The lead research groups who facilitated the discussions with women migrants were: Anti-Racism Movement (Lebanon), Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions (Cambodia), International Domestic Workers Federation (Lebanon), Karmojibi Nari (Bangladesh), Legal Resources Center for Gender Justice and Human Rights (Indonesia), MAP Foundation (Thailand), Sandigan (Kuwait), Self Employed Women’s Association (India), Society for Labour and Development (India), Women Forum for Women in Nepal (Nepal), and an independent researcher based in Jordan

To read the full report click here.

GAATW promotes and defends the human rights of all migrants and their families against the threat of an increasingly globalised labour market and calls for safety standards for migrant workers in the process of migration and in the formal and informal work sectors – garment and food processing, agriculture and farming, domestic work, sex work – where slavery-like conditions and practices exist.