Purpose & Approach

The GPN adopts a “whole of government” approach and includes representatives of national and sub-national authorities, relevant ministries, departments, and public agencies. It is a vehicle for policy dialogue that: 

  • provides clear, practical guidance to promote policy coherence and good practice in recruitment regulation and migrant worker protection;
  • encourages operational and regulatory cooperation across participating jurisdictions; and
  • establishes a mechanism through which guidance and strategies can be tested and scaled, and actions taken.

To enhance the sustainability and impact of the Network, it adopts a multi-pillar approach to promote awareness and communications, capacity building, strategic advocacy, and data and research.

Levels of awareness and understanding about ethical recruitment vary across governments and regions. In some jurisdictions, expertise is deep and socialized across different agencies and authorities, while in other jurisdictions awareness is nascent, but political commitment is strong. To meet these different circumstances, the GPN implements a global awareness and communications campaign through the IRIS: Ethical Recruitment initiative, which serves to elevate understanding where needed, promote parity and consistency of understanding, and establish the intellectual and ethical foundations for public commitment and action.

Building on enhanced levels of awareness and commitment, the GPN will strengthen government capacity to develop better policies, action plans, programmes and services for ethical recruitment and migrant protection. Increased capacity will serve as the bridge between commitment and action and, in practical terms, will be enhanced through global resources, guidance material, online learning and modular training, which is tailored to meet the needs of regulators and practitioners. You can find more information about this on the capacity building page.

With greater awareness and capacity, the GPN leads a targeted campaign of advocacy and engagement, which serves to translate new commitments into actions and leads to the adoption and implementation of new policies, action plans and programmes. Strategic advocacy stimulates coherence, synergies and cooperation both horizontally and vertically across participating governments. A preliminary goal of such engagement is the adoption or revision of National Action Plans to promote ethical recruitment based on the Montreal Recommendations.

The global community faces significant gaps in data and knowledge related to international recruitment practices and trends. To address this, the GPN supports robust research to inform policy dialogue, decision-making, public commitments, policies, and action plans. This includes migration corridor-level reports, comparative research, and the creation of a global database to collect and maintain up-to-date data on recruitment fees, costs, practices, and trends.