Japan faces growing worker shortages that will reach 3.4 million by 2030, driven primarily by an aging population and low birth rates. As one solution to this problem, the country created visa pathways for foreign workers in multiple sectors including, but not limited to, nursing, automobile repair, food service, manufacturing, accommodation, construction and agriculture.
Kenya seeks to become a global workforce leader as part of a national strategy to address youth unemployment and increase the size and contribution of its diaspora. Kenya’s President Ruto is making substantial investments in developing the infrastructure for increased labor mobility, including signing bilateral agreements, and aims to move 250,000 workers abroad each year. Currently, Kenyan workers go primarily to the Gulf which often involves unsuitable work conditions and low pay.
Japan provides Kenyan workers a safer, higher-paying alternative to Gulf migration and presents a new frontier for African labor migration overall.
Through a grant from the Livelihood Impact Fund, LaMP is developing a pilot program to facilitate the movement of workers from Kenya to Japan across trade and service sectors. While the project focuses mainly on construction, manufacturing, agriculture and accommodation, there is the possibility to explore other sectors. The main objective is to demonstrate the viability of a Kenya-Japan migration corridor.
To achieve this goal, LaMP is building the ecosystem required to support labor mobility to Japan, including partnering with a responsible recruiter in Kenya, securing partnerships with receiving side organizations and employers in Japan, designing language training programs, defining costs and processes to facilitate movement of workers, and understanding the legal requirements of Kenya-Japan migration.
Our long-term goal is to gather insights that will inform the development of a formal migration pathway and contribute to the existing knowledge base on labor migration to Japan, an area that is not widely understood outside of Asia, where most of Japan’s migrant workers come from.
We are also working on advocating for a bilateral agreement between the Kenyan and Japanese governments to ensure scalability and sustainability of this program beyond this pilot.
Learn more about our work in the Kenya-Japan corridor in our recent blog here.
For more information, contact:
Prerna Choudhury