The government has expressed its commitment to supporting and protecting Kenyan seafarers from exploitation by what it has termed as unscrupulous employers. https://shorturl.at/M45pT
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00:00wouldn't trust his money with his relatives, or even try to invest back home.
00:06But in many instances, when they come back, the investment is not there.
00:12And they end up being disillusioned, some go into depression.
00:16And so to avoid all that, HFC has come up with products
00:21that are going to encourage our seafarers to save
00:26and invest whatever money they will be making
00:30during their tour of duty with different companies.
00:35And as government we support this because we want to encourage the savings culture
00:41and we also want to encourage Kenyans who particularly work overseas to invest back home.
00:47And so seafarers being in that category, we believe,
00:52will be able to benefit directly from the engagement with HFC.
00:55Get recruited by either unregistered agents or scrupulous agencies.
01:01We had a case in Kenyans who got abandoned, seafarers who got abandoned in Oman.
01:06We successfully got them back home.
01:10Worked very closely with the Minister of Foreign and International Affairs
01:14together with our embassy in Oman.
01:17And you know that vessel was a foreign vessel.
01:23And it got abandoned there.
01:25Those seafarers haven't been paid to date.
01:27We are pursuing their claims with the ship owner.
01:32And we are hoping that they will be settled in due course.
01:35We have also had cases of seafarers who got stranded in Madagascar recently
01:43and also in Egypt.
01:45And working very closely with the Seafarers Union
01:48and the leaders of this particular sector,
01:51we have ensured that those seafarers are back home.
01:55In the process of doing a census, and we will be streamlining that,
02:00one of the important documents that will help us in getting the actual numbers
02:05is what is called an SID, a Seafarers Identification Document,
02:09which has never been produced.
02:11We as governments, especially the steady partnership in American affairs,
02:18working with KMA and the State Department for Immigration and Citizen Services,
02:24have been given a directive by the President to ensure that we get to produce SIDs
02:31as soon as it is possible,
02:34so that our seafarers can be properly identified wherever they are.