IOM Malaysia/ RFP No. 2021-002/MALAYSIA/ Provision of Alignment Study – IOM’s IRIS with RBA’s Responsible Recruitment Program (RRP)

Organizational context and scope:

Established in 1951, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Migration Agency, is the leading inter-governmental organization in the field of migration and works closely with governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental partners. With 172 member states, a further 8 states holding observer status and offices in over 100 countries, IOM is dedicated to promoting safe, orderly and regular migration for the benefit of all. It does so by providing services and advice to governments and migrants.

According to the best estimates, over 2.5 million Asian workers leave their countries every year as contractual workers1. For the labour sending countries in Asia, labour migration represents both significant opportunities for national growth as well as challenges to secure safe employment for their workers. Thus, strengthened labour migration management is a shared concern among all countries involved and is reiterated in Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 8.8 to “Protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers” and SDG 10.7 to “Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies.”

States bear the primary duty of protecting migrant workers from exploitative practices in recruitment and employment, as well as providing them with appropriate services in order to mitigate their vulnerability before, during and after labour migration.

To promote ethical international recruitment of migrant workers, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and partners have launched IRIS: Ethical Recruitment, which is a global multi-stakeholder initiative that supports the governments, private sector, recruiters and civil society to establish ethical recruitment as a norm in cross-border labour migration.

The Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) has implemented the Responsible Recruitment Program (RRP), which aims to transform the market for ethical recruitment practices, targeting labour recruitment agencies through their participation in a development path to certification equivalency. Collaboration and consistency among these programmes are critical to ensure a single approach to achieve the objective of promoting ethical international recruitment and to avoid creating confusion among different actors in the process.

The IOM and the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) signed a global Memorandum of Understanding in 2017 to boost cooperation, promote ethical recruitment and protect the rights of migrant workers. In October 2020, the IOM together with the RBA’s supporting charitable arm, the RBA Foundation, launched a project that aims to reduce instances of exploitative working conditions, forced labour and debt bondage experienced by Indonesian and Nepalese women and men migrant workers in Malaysia. The project is funded by the Walmart Foundation (WF).

Objectives:

IOM is seeking a service provider/consultant(s) to analyse and compare IOM’s IRIS with RBA’s RRP standards and their capacity building programmes targeting private recruitment agencies for the recruitment of international migrant workers. This builds on a previous benchmarking study of IOM’s IRIS, RBA’s Responsible Recruiter Program (RRP) and the Vietnamese Manpower Agency (VAMAS) standards, with the specific objective to understand the similarities and differences of IRIS and RRP standards and capacity building programmes. Through a gap analysis of the two programmes, this will inform the areas to align to ensure recruiters meet the standards of the IRIS principles. The task will result in an alignment study report which will be used to identify gaps, avoid possible duplication, and ensure consistency across the two programmes. The service provider/consultant(s) is expected to complete the following tasks:

Alignment study of IOM’s IRIS and RBA’s RRP ethical recruitment standards and their capacity building programmes:

i. Identify, review, benchmark and analyse gaps between the IRIS and RBA standards.

ii. Compare the methodologies and tools of the IRIS and RRP capacity building programmes used to prepare recruitment agencies to conform to the IRIS and RBA standards.

iii. Provide recommendations and develop a plan for further alignment (as necessary) of the IRIS and RRP capacity building programmes including methodologies and tools used in the implementation of the capacity building programmes and to assess recruitment agencies.

iv. Validate the results with IOM and IOM’s partners, including but not limited to RBA Foundation, in a workshop.

v. Finalize the report based on feedback received from IOM and RBA Foundation.

How to apply:
Interested service provider/consultant(s) should send an application including a technical and a financial proposal with detailed proposed methodology, as well as examples of previous similar work, via e-mail to iommytender@iom.int before midnight 11 June 2021 (GMT+8).

The application and accompanying e-mail should be titled: IOM Malaysia/ RFP No. 2021-002/MALAYSIA/ Provision of Alignment Study – IOM’s IRIS with RBA’s Responsible Recruitment Program (RRP)