Bangladeshi migrant workers wait outside the Saudia airlines office in Dhaka, Bangladesh for air tickets to return to Saudi Arabia on September 24, 2020. — PA Images/ABACA/Suvra Kanti Das

Seventy-two per cent of migrants who returned home last year due to the coronavirus pandemic wanted to go abroad for jobs as 47 per cent of them are yet to find any source of income, according to a report published on Friday.

World’s largest non-government organisation BRAC made the report interviewing 417 migrants from 30 districts between March and April who came back from the Middle Eastern countries, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

The report unveiled that 98 per cent of the returnee said that they were worried about their future as many of them maintaining their family by borrowing money and doing odd jobs in their villages.

Among the participants, 95.68 per cent are male and 4.32 per cent female and 88.01 per cent are living in villages while 11.99 in urban areas.

BRAC conducted another survey on returnee migrants in the past year at the same time during which 87 per cent of the returnees said that they could not find any alternative sources of income.

BRAC migration programme head Shariful Islam said that 53 per cent of the returnees however manage to engage them in income-generating work.

BRAC officials said that they tried to reach 1,360 returnees but only 417 gave them detailed information while 207 of them again went abroad and the rest did not provide them with any information or could not be reached.

Bangladesh is one of the top labour-sending counties have 15 million migrants officially in nearly 70 countries of the world.

Due to the pandemic, over half a million migrants returned home after losing their jobs after the economic crisis gripped the destination countries.

Migration experts said that for the lack of proper reintegration many migrants suffer problems of social integration after returning home.