Overseas Employment Programme

The Overseas Employment Programme is the Royal Government of Bhutan's framework for placing Bhutanese jobseekers in employment abroad, administered by the labour ministry (today the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Employment) through registered Bhutanese Overseas Employment Agents. Running since 2013, it has channelled thousands of young Bhutanese — more than 9,200 to Kuwait alone — into work in the Gulf states and beyond, against a backdrop of youth unemployment and low domestic wages.^[1]

The programme is also the site of the most serious labour-policy failure in modern Bhutanese administration: the Japan "Learn and Earn" scheme of 2017–2019, whose collapse produced Anti-Corruption Commission findings against the ministry, thousands of criminal counts against the placement agency, and prison sentences for senior officials.

The Gulf track

The programme's main stream has sent workers to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, mostly in hospitality, retail and services. The ministry's 2024-25 monitoring survey found more than 7,700 Bhutanese still employed in the region, with women outnumbering men among participants and workers citing career growth (47.25 per cent) and financial problems (46.02 per cent) as their main reasons for going. Wage issues — delayed and unpaid salaries — are the most common complaint the ministry's monitors record.^[1][2]

The Japan "Learn and Earn" affair

In 2017 the labour ministry launched the "Learn and Earn" programme with a private agent, Bhutan Employment Overseas (BEO): young Bhutanese would enrol in Japanese language schools and support themselves with part-time work, on the promise of well-paid employment afterwards. More than 700 youth took loans to join.^[3]

The promises did not survive contact with Japan. Participants reported working beyond legal hourly limits to service their debts while studying, and living in poor conditions; the death of a Bhutanese student drew attention to illegal labour practices within the scheme; and with no assured jobs at the end of the language course, more than 300 participants returned to Bhutan. A United States trafficking-in-persons report recorded some 200 students saying the Japanese jobs gave insufficient income and that they faced serious difficulties.^[4][3]

Investigations and prosecutions

The Anti-Corruption Commission found that the ministry had approved BEO's licence illegally — the agency was registered in 2016 without the required documents — and that BEO had collected unauthorised "translation fees" of Nu 3.832 million from 511 students.^[5] Parents and returned participants filed a criminal case against the agency, and prosecutors charged its proprietors with 2,887 counts of forgery and 730 counts of larceny by deception.^[6]

Accountability reached the ministry itself: a court sentenced the former labour minister and a former director-general to two-year prison terms in connection with the agency's registration, holding that responsibility for the lapses lay with the offices that approved it.^[7] Kuensel's editorial pages returned to the programme repeatedly as a cautionary tale about state-brokered migration sold on unexamined promises.^[8]

The programme today

Overseas placement did not end with the scandal — it was reorganised. Registered Bhutanese Overseas Employment Agents implement placements under closer ministry monitoring, with annual monitoring surveys and complaint channels for workers abroad.^[9] The structural pressures that created the programme remain: youth unemployment at home, wage gaps with every destination country, and — since 2022 — the far larger self-directed exodus to Australia that has overtaken state-brokered migration entirely.

See also

• Bhutanese in the Gulf States
• Youth unemployment in Bhutan
• Bhutan–Australia migration wave
• Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Employment

References

1. Overseas Employment Program Monitoring 2024-2025, Survey Report — Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Employment
2. Bhutanese workers in Kuwait raise concerns over delayed salaries — BBS, 2025
3. Parents, students threaten to sue Bhutanese employment agency after 'learn and earn' debacle in Japan — Global Voices, 22 June 2019
4. Japan: Death of Bhutanese student highlights illegal labour practices in exchange program — Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
5. Parents and youth of 'learn and earn program' file a criminal case against BEO — The Bhutanese
6. Bhutan-Japan Learn and Earn scheme agency charged with forgery — The PIE News
7. Court hands former labour minister and DG two-year prison term — Kuensel
8. On the "Learn and Earn" programme again — Kuensel
9. BOEAs to implement overseas employment program — The Bhutanese