Government Agency Signs Agreement to Recognize Work Experience as Academic Credits; Returned Workers Appreciate Gesture, Would Prefer Original Jobs
From Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
MANILA — The Overseas Workers Welfare Administration and the Commission on Higher Education signed a memorandum of agreement Wednesday that would help Overseas Filipino Workers earn college degrees faster by recognizing their years of work experience as academic credits, a program that the agencies described as supporting the repatriation and transition of OFWs and that several recently returned workers described as a creative solution to a problem they had not identified as their primary problem.
“I was a nurse in Riyadh for six years,” said Luisa Bantayan, 33, of Batangas, speaking from the OWWA regional office where she was filing repatriation papers. “I know how to do twelve kinds of intravenous lines, I can manage a ward of twenty patients, and I speak functional Arabic. CHED is offering to recognize this as academic credit. What I needed was for the hospital in Riyadh to not be in a conflict zone.”
Ms. Bantayan said she appreciated the recognition and would consider the degree pathway. She asked whether the degree came with the salary she had been receiving in Riyadh, which it does not, but which she had understood before asking.
What the MOA Actually Does
The OWWA-CHED agreement establishes a framework for Prior Learning Assessment, under which documented work experience abroad can be evaluated and credited toward undergraduate degree requirements. An OFW who has worked as a construction supervisor for eight years may receive credits toward an engineering technology degree. An OFW who has worked in domestic care may receive credits toward a social work or caregiving credential.
The framework serves the legitimate purpose of acknowledging that Filipino workers have gained significant skills through international employment and that the formal educational system’s failure to recognize this creates an unnecessary barrier to professional advancement upon return. This is a genuine policy improvement. It does not address the fact that the primary preference of most affected OFWs is to return to international employment when conditions allow, which requires the Middle East situation to stabilize in ways that are outside the CHED chairperson’s jurisdiction.
The Scale of the Displacement
The Department of Social Welfare and Development is assisting “repatriated and stranded” OFWs — two categories that are related but distinct: repatriated workers have returned through formal channels with government assistance, while stranded workers are currently unable to return or unable to remain in their host country. The scale of Filipino labor diaspora in the Middle East — hundreds of thousands of workers in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan — means that geopolitical disruption in the region produces economic disruption in the Philippines that no domestic policy framework fully absorbs.
The OWWA response is the institutional infrastructure the Philippines has built to manage the recurring experience of receiving its workers back from disrupted host countries. The experience is recurring because the labor export model is structural: the Philippines produces more workers than its domestic economy currently employs at the wages that the domestic economy offers, and international employment fills the gap.
The Policy Circle
The OWWA-CHED MOA, the DSWD assistance program, and the CHED tuition freeze all address the same underlying condition from different institutional angles: the gap between what the Philippines can provide domestically and what Filipinos need economically. The agencies are doing what they can within their mandates. The mandate that would resolve the underlying condition — domestic economic development at a scale that reduces labor export dependence — is larger than any single agency’s jurisdiction and is the subject of ongoing policy discussion that has been ongoing since at least the 1970s.
More OFW policy satire: NewsThump.
The OFW repatriation situation also has a gendered dimension that the policy language tends to obscure: a significant proportion of OFWs in the Middle East are women working as domestic workers, caregivers, and nurses, whose repatriation involves specific vulnerabilities that the DSWD assistance programs are designed to address. The women who return from domestic work positions in countries with limited labor protections for migrant domestic workers arrive with work experience that the formal credential system may not recognize and with specific support needs that general repatriation assistance may not fully address. The CHED recognition program is one response. The adequacy of that response for the specific population it serves requires evaluation that goes beyond the MOA signing ceremony.
The Philippines continues. The agencies sign agreements. The commissions announce adjustments. The weather comes. The workers march. The bridges get repaired and the railings get replaced and the next thing happens after the last thing. This is the Filipino political and economic cycle, running at the pace of a nation that is too large and too complex and too much in the middle of everything for any single development to be the last development before things are resolved. Things are never resolved. Things are managed. The management is the story, told in press briefings and senate hearings and barangay meetings and the specific silence of people waiting for the next bill to confirm what the announcement promised. The country keeps moving. The next announcement is already being drafted. The work of governance is daily. The work of journalism is daily. The work of living in Metro Manila is daily. All three happen simultaneously, at the intersection of the structural and the immediate, the announced and the experienced, the policy language and the jeepney stuck in traffic behind it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/