Closing Remarks from IHRB's Sarah Mostafa-Kamel at the 2026 Global Forum for Responsible Recruitment

IHRB's Head of Migration Programmes, Sarah Mostafa-Kamel, delivers closing remarks at the ninth edition of our Global Forum for Responsible Recruitment in Kuala Lumpur on 1 July 2026.

I'd like to start – I'll offer just a few final remarks, and then everybody's free to go. First, I want to say how grateful we are to every speaker, participant, worker, worker representative, civil society, government representation, and partner who contributed to these two days, and who allowed us to make these honest and useful conversations possible.

I'd also like to thank the Walmart Foundation. This forum couldn't have happened without your support, and as Julia said in her opening, at a time when funding in this field is under enormous pressure, the decision to keep investing in this type of space really matters for us.

Thank you as well to all of the contributing organisations and partners in the room and online who couldn't be here with us today. I'd also like to thank Carmen, Rakesh, and Julia for everything they did to make the forum possible – for the care, the time, and the energy they put into this, the months of planning behind the scenes, the problem-solving, and also for leading so many of the sessions and workshops. I'd like to give them all a big round of applause.

And to Sam and Deborah, our communications team, the wider IHRB team, the Just Transitions team who supported us in making climate such a key part of this forum, and the Insights Pact team behind the scenes, I'd also like to give them a big round of applause. And to all of the hotel staff who took such good care of us, the cooks, everybody who made us comfortable so that we could have these conversations and focus on the content.

As Adrian reminded us this morning, we know that it's important to have worker representation in the room and to keep increasing that over the years to come, because that's the reason why we're here at the end of the day. So what I'd like to encourage us to carry forward from this forum is not just the honesty we've had in these conversations, but also the responsibility to act on everything we've heard.

We're not just here to talk and have conversations, because this work needs to move into practice. We're here to have the hard conversations, to also recognise the progress that's been made, but also, as Anna Triponel mentioned earlier, to lean in and really think through the risks, the hard realities that workers are still facing. We're here to take collective action after we leave the room.

So over these two days, we heard many things that were encouraging, but we also heard very clearly that the reality for too many migrant workers still hasn't changed enough. The employer pays principle is now part of the expected language of responsible recruitment. We should celebrate this, because ten years ago it was still contested in many spaces. But we also acknowledge here that language and policy are not the same as reality, and too many workers are still paying recruitment fees. We  heard again how, for example, for seafarers, workers can pay up to ten thousand or more dollars for a job at sea. 

Ben Bailey from Mission to Seafarers reminded us that debt isn't only carried by one person – it's often carried by a whole family: parents, children, siblings. So when a worker pays for a job, it affects a whole household, and that's why we have to keep asking the question again and again: is the worker actually having a fair and fee-free journey into employment and return?

We also heard something important about tools. A tool is still just a tool. Guidance matters, contracts matter, standards matter – of course, but none of them work without trust. If we're serious about worker-centered responsible recruitment, then, as William Gois reminded us, trust has to be the starting point. Workers must be able to speak honestly about what's happening to them without fear. Companies, recruiters, and governments have to be willing to hear the uncomfortable parts, not just what confirms progress.

We also need to understand recruitment chains much more clearly. We discussed this yesterday morning during the session on conflict. So, who is in your workforce? Who is the employer? Who is the recruitment agent? Who's carrying the cost? Who has responsibility? And under an Employer Pays model, what's the actual cost of responsible recruitment? Because if those costs aren't surfaced or planned for, then they often get pushed back onto workers, as Julia reminded us earlier today.

This is where collaboration and collective action really matter. Companies can't do this without suppliers and recruiters. Recruiters can't do it without buyers and employers. Governments can't do it without enforcement and practical implementation. And civil society and worker organisations, and workers can't keep being brought in after decisions have been made. Evans Kioko, one of our panelists yesterday, reminded us that the ones closest to the problems are also closest to the solutions. I hope we carry that with us. It's true for migrant workers, it’s true for seafarers, and communities and corridors that are often discussed from far away but don't often have the space to shape any of the answers.

I also want to come back to the theme of resilience, which was the key theme of today, and a word we've been hearing in a lot of rooms. Migrant workers are some of the most resilient people we'll ever meet – moving across borders, learning new systems and languages, taking on invisible work, supporting families, and carrying risks that many will never have to carry. But we should be careful not to admire resilience in a way that excuses the systems that keep asking workers to carry so much. Our job is not to celebrate how much workers can endure, but to build systems that ask them to endure less.

This year, for the first time, we also made space in this forum for climate and for disability. We spoke about how climate is already reshaping why people move, where they go, and what risks they face – and recruitment can't call itself responsible if some workers are excluded from the start, or if migrant workers are missing from the rooms where climate adaptation and resilience policies are being discussed.

As we look ahead – this was our ninth forum – for our tenth forum, our intention is to hold it on the African continent, at least that's our hope, hopefully in Nairobi. This forum has looked at many migration corridors over the years, including here in Asia and in other parts of the world, but we've not yet held one on the African continent. Every year, around ten to twelve million young Africans enter the labour market, but there are only three million formal jobs available. That's why we really want to have this conversation on the continent, where this is also very much shaping the future of work and migration.

So I hope we leave encouraged but clear-eyed. Encouraged, because we have seen very serious commitment in this room and a lot of good work already happening. But clear-eyed, because the real test is not what we've said over the past few days, it's what changes after we leave. Whether it's companies asking harder questions about their recruitment chains, governments seeing clearly where enforcement and implementation is missing, or worker organizations and workers being brought in earlier and being more visible, heard, and protected.

So that's where we end. Thank you for being here with us and for the work that many of you are already doing, and we look forward to continuing this work in the long run with all of you. Thank you.