Guangdong wants to train 200,000 domestic helpers

The Guangdong government is seeking to cooperate with Macau and Hong Kong’s domestic helper service organizations in order to train as many as 200,000 domestic helpers across the province.

Recently, Guangdong province’s information bureau released a domestic helper plan to support the employment market. The project stipulates that the province will specifically enable Guangdong’s workers to enter the domestic help industry.

According to this plan, by 2021, Guangdong hopes to achieve the following specific goals: to build and to support 50 provincial level domestic help service training demonstration bases; to build and to support 100 leading domestic help service companies; to encourage and to guide 1,000 qualified and capable training organizations to participate in the province’s training of domestic help service providers; to carry out domestic help service training to 200,000 people; and to create more than 400,000 jobs.

The project, which presently consists only of general guidelines, is divided into three parts with a total of 22 polices, including organizing relevant entities to improve skills, starting entrepreneurship projects, developing brands, and protecting rights, among others.

In order to achieve its goals, Guangdong province officials believe it will be beneficial to further regional cooperation under the Greater Bay Area framework.

Ge Guoxing, deputy head of the social security department of Guangdong province’s human resources office, said that the two SARs had expertise to share in regard to the domestic helper market.

“Hong Kong and Macau have many different practices in domestic help services, have many good and qualified agencies, and have many domestic help service employees from overseas,” said Ge. “Their training, service standards, requirements towards the workers, among others, are examples for Guangdong to learn from.”

Through cooperation with the SARs’ organizations, Guangdong wants also to upgrade major provisions in the province’s educational institutions as well as standards and training course settings across the entirety of mainland China’s domestic help service training organizations.

In addition, any SARs’ domestic help service organization interested in starting a business in Guangdong will be supported by Guangdong province. No specific measures were mentioned in the plan.