Sri Lanka raises minimum age of maids for KSA employment

Sri Lanka has raised the age limit of housemaids coming to Saudi Arabia to 25 years, Mass Media and Information Minister and Cabinet spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella told newsmen in Colombo following a meeting of ministers.
Confirming the statement, Deputy General Manager (Foreign Relations) of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) D.B. Senanayake told Arab News yesterday from Colombo that it was an announcement made by Foreign Employment Promotion and Welfare Minister Dilan Perera in Parliament on Thursday.
The Cabinet has authorized the ministry to impose conditions on female domestic workers seeking employment opportunities abroad in the future.
He said the minimum age for Saudi Arabia is 25 for housemaids and all female workers should have completed 21 days residential training and obtained National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 3 certificate for Domestic Housekeeping Assistant. Until now, the age limit was 21 for all countries.
There are 27 centers that train housemaids for foreign employment and issue NVQ certificate, he said, adding that the government has been making every effort to send the trained housemaids to Saudi homes so that both the employer and the employees will not have any problems.
There are some 1.5 million Sri Lankans working in the Middle East, 550,000 of them in the Kingdom. A sizable percentage of the Lankan workers in the Kingdom are housemaids.
To control under-aged housemaids going on foreign employment, Senanayake said the SLBF has deployed more than 50 staff at the Colombo International Airport to assist the island's overseas workers and to stop underage women from leaving the country for employment.
Last week, SLBFE sleuths stopped several women, including an underage girl whose documents were found forged.
In two separate incidents, four women who had forged SLBFE emblems in their passports were detained at the Colombo airport. All four were trying to leave for Saudi Arabia for employment as domestic aides.
The SLBFE uses a special stamp in the passports of Sri Lankan migrant workers to confirm their status as duly authorized labor migrants.
A foreign employment sub-agent responsible for using a forged SLBFE emblem on passports was arrested later. He is suspected of trying to help two of the women with the forged documents.
Two other women, one of them an underage girl, trying to fly to Malaysia to work as domestic aides were also caught. "They were trying to go abroad for employment on visitor visas instead of employment visas," the official said.
The minimum age limit for the five other Gulf countries is 23 years, the official said. The minimum age for Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Cyprus and other countries is 21 years.