Bangladesh has received $13.5 billion as remittances in 2017, the World Bank said on Monday.
Globally Bangladesh is the ninth highest recipient of remittances and in South Asia it ranks third after India ($69 billion) and Pakistan ($19.7 billion).
In its latest Migration and Development Brief, the global lender said Bangladesh’s remittance, after a steep decline of 11.5 percent in 2016, were flat in 2017.
The remittances account for the GDP’s 5.4 percent.
“They now show a promising uptick, driven by strong inflows from the main source countries — Saudi Arabia, UAE, the US, Kuwait, and Malaysia,” it said.
Sri Lanka, in contrast, saw a slowdown of –0 .9 percent in 2017. Nepal’s remittances stood at $6.9 billion, a whooping 28.9 percent of its GDP, the report said.
According to the report, Bangladesh may have avoided the impact of the Saudi labour market’s nationalisation in 2017 due to an earlier agreement to send 400,000 workers.
But, the pace of migrant worker deployments from Bangladesh slowed in February 2018, due to lower outflows to Saudi Arabia. Only some 59,382 workers went abroad that month, against 85,038 in the same month the previous year, it said.
As part of its effort to promote skilled migration, Bangladesh will send caregivers to 12 countries.
The state-run Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training signed a memorandum of understanding with the Universal Medical and Technical Training Institute to train caregivers in needed skills, the report said.