Bones pràctiques europees en mobilitat i contractació en origen

of people available to fill these posts. By the way, the same situation also affected the agriculture and construction sectors.

In this particular case, the shortage of domestic workers or care givers for elderly people was turning into a serious social problem for the local authorities. Families’ needs and requirements were often covered by Non-Governmental Organisations, as it was too expensive for families to send their relatives to a private home or clinic for the elderly, added to which they often expressed a preference to continue living in their own home and maintain their independence.

While the Italian authorities were concerned with this problem, Italy witnessed increasing numbers of legal or illegal immigrants arriving year after year. This increase was especially noteworthy from 2005, when Italy granted its latest ‘amnesty’ to illegal immigrants. Since that time, more than 700,000 people have applied to regularise their situation.

Therefore, the Italian Labour Ministry and the region of Tuscany, signed a cooperation agreement on migration with the Sri Lankan government which made it possible to execute this programme. IOM was asked to run the pilot programme designed to provide family care givers to families in Tuscany, in other words, IOM was asked to organise all the selection and pre-departure training as well as the subsequent monitoring, while the Tuscany Region will have provide the matching between families and workers .

Naturally, we studied the best way to move forward, because in a country like Sri Lanka it is impossible imagining to publish a public advertisement saying some “Come to Italy to provide family care”, without receiving –to say– three million of applications, by people demanding to go to Italy, even by people who in Sri Lanka occupy more skilled professional jobs, of course because providing in-house family care in Italy is more profitable than continuing to work in Sri Lanka.

Therefore we asked the Sri Lankan Government to provide us with a set of 300-400 pre-selected workers from whom we had to | 173 |