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Turning domestic workers into entrepreneurs
Family first: Workers send remittances home, in Sugar Street
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Family first: Workers send remittances home, in Sugar Street. Changing jobs is easier said than done.
Just ask 27-year-old Tri Winarti from Trenggalek, East Java, who slaved away as a domestic worker in Hong Kong for six years before dabbling in a business venture.
“Previously, I didn’t have the courage to start my own business,” said the recently wed junior high school graduate, who had no other choice but to leave her spouse to find work. But once she joined the entrepreneurship training program for Indonesian migrant workers at the Indonesian Consulate General (KJRI) in Hong Kong in July, she felt more confident trading goods.
She recently put her basic business knowledge into practice when she returned home for three weeks, selling Rp 1,000 coconuts for Rp 2,500 each, making a net daily profit of Rp30,000.
“Now, I see the opportunity to sell cooked food in my village,” she said to The Jakarta Post after her second training session that took place late August. She promised herself she would stop working as a domestic helper once her contract finished next year — her determination strengthened by a starting capital of more than Rp100 million, which she saved over several years.
While determination and capital are quintessential to start a new business, it is also necessary to have sufficient knowledge about entrepreneurship. To provide guidance for migrant workers, the University of Ciputra Entrepreneurs Center (UCEC) — in cooperation with the Productivity Promotion Center of the ministry of manpower and transmigration and the KJRI in Hong Kong — organized a workshop on entrepreneurship for migrant workers in Hong Kong late August. This training is expected to help migrant workers overcome the risks of failure when starting a new business.
“Entrepreneurship is not merely about trading, but also about channeling creativity, innovative thinking, being bold enough to take risks and capable of turning rubbish into gold,” said UCEC president director Antonius Tanan when training migrant workers for the second time.
Tanan believes migrant workers can benefit from acquiring entrepreneurial knowledge, which they can use when they return to Indonesia to better their chances in life.
“We hope our migrant workers already in the workforce for years will not come back [to Indonesia] as domestic employees, but as entrepreneurs,” Antonius told the Post following the training.
Most Indonesian migrant workers who have lived in Hong Kong for a while are bound to have adopted the city’s hard working ethics. Moreover, they will have gained valuable language skills in Cantonese, English and some technological know-how, giving them a competitive advantage when stepping into the entrepreneurial world.
Last but not least, these migrant workers tend to have a strong fighting spirit and willpower, gained from surviving in a foreign environment like Hong Kong. All these factors should encourage them to think creatively and innovatively amid intense competition in the business sphere.
“All these factors represent a golden opportunity that can be developed into business ventures. The assets they [migrant workers] have need only to be polished with the entrepreneurship knowledge to produce creative and innovative ventures no less competitive than other businesses of the kind,” Antonius noted.
The core issue when training migrant workers is to make them realize they have ample chances of building a better existence in the future.
According to Agung Waluyo, another instructor from UCEC, the training session drew the interest of 139 migrant workers. More than 90 percent stated on their application forms they intended to better their life when returning to Indonesia by starting a business.
A small number of participants said the training was confusing and hard to understand, while others commented entrepreneurship was interesting to discuss, but difficult to put into practice in reality.
Teaching a classroom filled with people of different academic levels was quite a challenge for instructors, especially when it came to picking training material most people would understand. Other instructors wished the training course lasted longer.
“Some of them would have found the concepts hard to grasp, and that’s OK. Let’s just think positively. At least, what we taught them is now stored somewhere in their brains,” added Agung Waluyo.
This program, aimed at fostering an entrepreneurial spirit in society as a means of relieving poverty and promoting the welfare of migrant workers and families, will be held in other countries like Singapore and Taiwan.
The program reached 139 migrant workers, a fraction of the 139,000 Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong as of May 2010.
Many of the people standing outside the training hall were not aware a program was underway at the KJRI to improve migrant workers’ livelihood.
The success of this program is in the hands of the KJRI’s organizing committee in Hong Kong.
“We share the vision they can change their fate for the better. When they go home, they do so to start businesses, rather than to prepare for another term of work here,” said Indonesian Consul General in Hong Kong Ferry Adamhar, when opening the recent workshop. “Now I see confident faces.”
This program, according to Sendra Utami, the KJRI’s manpower consul in Hong Kong, is set to run next year. Besides entrepreneurship training, the KJRI in Hong Kong has already opened cooking, make-up, hairdressing and Cantonese language classes, so as to give migrant workers additional skills once their work contracts in Hong Kong end.
