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View all search resultsThe quiet injustice in migrant women’s financial lives
The migrant worker ecosystem needs to innovate from the current focus on remittance flows toward an integrated design that aims for empowerment toward financial inclusion and long-term financial health as the ultimate outcome.
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Home sweet home: Health workers check the body temperature of a migrant worker and her child upon arrival on Dec. 14, 2025 at Dumai Port in Riau, following their deportation from Melaka, Malaysia. (Antara/Aswaddy Hamid)
D
uring recent visits to Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, I met Indonesian women migrants whose stories continue to resonate with me deeply.
Their journeys are filled with both hardship and hope, stories of courage that often begin in small villages and stretch across borders in search of what they could not yet find close to home: security, dignity and hope.
Many step into the unknown, which might come with risks they barely even know, driven not by choice but by necessity. Yet in every story, I see strength, dignity and an unyielding spirit.
These women are not just overseas workers; they are dreamers, providers and changemakers. They carry entire households on their shoulders and quietly fuel local economies back home.
But a disturbing question lingers: Is their labor truly visible to us? And in terms of financial inclusion, have financial institutions truly designed products that uphold their agency, dignity and empowerment?
There are more than 5 million Indonesian migrant workers currently abroad, of which 65 percent are women. Migrant labor results in remittance flows that fuel economies back home. Bank Indonesia reports that in 2024 alone, migrant workers remitted more than US$15.7 billion, a figure equal to 1 percent of Indonesia’s GDP, excluding the informal remittances that are hardly detected.
This remittance flow increases from time to time, yet even when their remittances sustain families and drive local consumption, their own economic identities remain invisible to some extent.
