Principal Secretary Kaituko Geoffrey Address Issues Affecting Seafarers
Principal Secretary Kaituko Geoffrey Eyanae for the State Department of Shipping and Maritime Affairs, in the Ministry of Mining, has today met with seafarers in a forum organized by the Housing Finance Company of Kenya (HFC) to discuss issues affecting them.
The meeting, which had various stakeholders, aimed at educating the Seafarers on better ways of financial saving, including investments like building houses so as to eliminate issues of financial misappropriation heavily witnessed in the sector.
“With professionals like yourselves, questions arose because professionals actually do much better than domestic workers in most of those Middle Eastern countries. And the professionals were interested in knowing what we were doing as a government to enable them, one, to save, number two, to invest back home, and number three, to access credit any time they wanted.
We agreed that we were going to look for some banks that were going to help us design products or come up with products that are suitable for Kenyans who are living outside the country or working outside the country. The reason being, diaspora remittances have been and still remain our highest foreign exchange.” Said Principal Secretary Kaituko Geoffrey Eyanae for the State Department of Shipping and Maritime Affairs, in the Ministry of Mining.
PS Kaituko added that, In the Ministry of Labour, he was tasked with the mandate of coming up with a migrant workers welfare fund, which was supposed to be a voluntary fund that would support any Kenyan. We developed a bill, and when he left to the Ministry, that bill was at an advanced stage.
Stage of public participation. He is hoping now it’s been progressed further. That was, that bill, the proposals in it, were supposed to create a safety net for Kenyans, or Kenyans who either fell into hard times when they were working abroad, or Kenyans who got sick, or those who, unfortunately, either died or experienced emergency situations.
The PS further observed that they are prepared to support all kenyans working in Maritime sector and are in the process of forming Seafarer wages council that will cater for the needs of all employees.
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