Mindanaotoday.com | Jobless NorMin OFWs get P32M OWWA aid
By: Uriel Quilinguing
CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY – Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) from Northern Mindanao, who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, went home and decided to stay for good, have received a total of P32,570,000 financial assistance from the government.
Eugene Mesias, who heads the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration-10 (OWWA-10) programs services division, shared these details in a Meet-the-Press forum in Cagayan de Oro on Wednesday, September 21, this year.
Mesias said OWWA-10 gave a minimum of P5,000 to a maximum of P20,000 to each of the 1,645 OFWs, depending on membership status, the application of which must be filed within three years after their employment was cut off.
The 1,645 laid-off OFWs, he said, are among the region’s 117,000 Filipinos abroad, either land or sea-based skilled, domestic, and professional workers.
Every OFW is required to pay US$25 – equivalent to about P1,350.00 based on current peso-to-a-dollar exchange rate – for a two-year OWWA membership which could be renewed five times.
“They can use the amount for start-ups or as additional capital to existing micro-business enterprise,” the OWWA-10 official said, even as he stressed the need for financial literacy and livelihood sessions with would-be recipients.
The P32.570 million monetary assistance, he said, was under OWWA’s “Balik Pinas, Balik Hanapbuhay” program released from May 26, 2020 to May 31 this year.
Mesias said the recipients were OFWs who took either sweeper flights or maiden voyages back home, after having been quarantined and stranded for weeks in Metro Manila and elsewhere.
They were the ones OWWA-10 assisted – escorted from air and seaports, brought to a hotel cum isolation facility, medically checked, before they were either picked up by local governments or sent home in hired coasters.
“We recognized how the local governments of Cagayan de Oro and Misamis Oriental made the most challenging tasks bearable, that of managing the influx of OFWs at the height of the pandemic, and when there were four sweeper flights that arrived at one time…” Mesias recalled.
Aside from the pandemic, distressed OFWs include victims of maltreatment, human trafficking, loss of jobs by economic downturn or political upheaval of host country, and ailment before the completion of employment contracts.
Other than the one-time livelihood assistance, OWWA-10 has been extending medical assistance a maximum of P100,000 to those who got injured or dismembered due to job-related accidents.
Mesias said the family of OFWs who transpired due to natural causes are entitled to P100,000 death benefit and P20,000 burial assistance, while those killed by accident his or her survivors would get P200,000 plus P20,000.
“This, if the OFW has religiously renewed his OWWA membership, if it has expired, the family of the deceased will only get P20,000 burial assistance,” the OWWA-10 official said. (MT)
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