I represent the sublime convergence of three Global Agenda Councils. Sorry, that was a
joke – you’re supposed to laugh. Three councils: migration council, skills gap, and
gender and equality. We all came together in Dubai and said, ‘We’ve got one huge
common issue.’ It’s to do with skills and skilling the workforce of the future,
but it’s also to do with the movement of people across country boundaries on a global
basis. So, what we’re looking at here is trying to find a mechanism that will help
move people from one country to another, to benefit the economy, and then maybe to move
some of them back. We have a huge problem today. A quarter of a billion people work
outside their country of origin, and we forecast at the IOM that that might be half a billion
within twenty years. Clearly, there is a problem and an opportunity there. What we’ve tried
to do in the convergence of the council – and by the way, the slides up there don’t agree
with mine, so I’ll just look at these ones, if you don’t mind – what we’ve tried
to do is to say: if we want to change something and there is no organisation globally that
can help the governance of moving skills around the world, what do we need to do to improve
it, to get it to be better?
That is where we are starting. We have done a lot of pre-work. We have done a lot of analysis
of skills gaps inside of countries. There are internal mechanisms that we are working
on right now with governments to forecast talent in a much better way, and then to do
something about the supply and demand of the right talent in the right place at the right
time. Outside of that, the biggest issue we have for the three councils is the correct
treatment of people that move from one place to another. People move for three reasons:
climate or natural disasters; the second one is political and conflict situations; and
the third one is the economy – economic reasons, supply and demand, the pull of high
earnings potential. We want to put in place a flow process mechanism with the right players
that absolutely does this the right way. You can see what we call the usual suspects up
there. You know them all: it’s the international community; it’s countries; academia; talent
itself, which suffers sometimes and benefits sometimes from this; international institutions;
corporations; and countries. We have analysed that actually none of these players work very
effectively together. There is no binding organisation that provides a platform for
a dialogue and policy development to implementation process. There was a chance during the WTO,
in the services directory, that we might have got some standards for this, but that went
right out of the window when it wasn’t finalised. We think, as a global agenda, we need to take
this forward to provide the right kind of platform, to move people decently around the
world and then to ensure that they provide the right skills when they arrive in a particular
country. That’s what this real proposal is about.
So, where are we up to? What we’ve tried to do is to work out what kind of dialogue
you would need between those players – essentially, what are win-win situations, because if you
marginalise any of the players that we highlighted before, then the whole thing will not work.
We need a result-oriented, practical platform to give governments, corporations, individuals,
international organisations and NGOs something to work with. We are already trying some experiments
with this, but we know we need to scale the whole process and scale it rapidly. So, you
can see the kind of brainstorming that we’ve been through, from ‘we need a holistic view’,
though to ‘how do we solve this supply and demand situation?’ We’ve done a lot of
work in putting data together in the background with the World Economic Forum and various
academic organisations. So, we know we know what we’re talking about. We know the flows
– who is going from where to where. We know what happens to people when they’re
treated the wrong way. We know that the criminal community fills the void of international
governance when it is not there. This is a huge industry worldwide – trafficking people,
labour is being bartered around the world in an absolutely disgraceful way.
So, we need to engage policy makers, essentially. We need your help to do that. In the IdeasLab
today, when we go to the back, we would like some practical ideas of, ‘Okay, great vision,
fantastic idea to have a platform, but how on earth do we make it work?’ There is enough
expertise in this room to help us come up with some ideas to make it work. Currently,
we are forecasting bringing together a number of nation-state governments, along with academia
and global corporations to say: let’s wipe out the past, let’s write something new,
let’s implement a new policy, get it out there, and get global governments to adopt
it. It’s like putting the international organisation of migration on steroids. That’s
what we want to do by getting everyone involved. We need your help, and we need your ideas.
Thank you.