Government's Assistance for Developers of Mobile Apps for Foreign Workers

Assoc Prof Daniel Goh Pei Siong asked the Minister for Manpower with regard to the partnership with the private sector to develop mobile apps for foreign workers (a) whether the content and information provided to the partners are publicly available; (b) if so, what concrete benefits are there for the partners; and (c) whether transactional e-services, such as the reporting of employment-related incidents, will be included in the apps and, if so, whether the Ministry will fund such app development.

MOM called for partnership with the private sector to jointly reach out to more foreign workers through existing or new mobile apps in January 2017. There is no payment involved as it is a win-win partnership for both parties.

To help foreign workers better understand their employment rights as well as responsibilities under the work permit conditions, MOM disseminates such information through various outreach platforms, including the MOM website, guidebooks and collaterals given out at our Services Centre, dormitories and roadshows. We also produce videos for use at our engagement events.

However, with the increasing use of smart phones and mobile apps, there is scope for us to leverage on this growing mode of communication to expand our outreach to the foreign workers. Instead of developing our own mobile apps which will only include Government contents, we are partnering with owners and developers of mobile apps to provide a fuller suite of services that may be more effective in meeting the needs of the various target groups of foreign workers.

On our part, we bring several benefits to the partnership. These include packaging and tailoring of information relevant to the needs of the foreign workers targeted by the respective apps; translating the information into native languages, such as Bengali, Tamil and Chinese; sharing our findings on the mobile usage behaviour of foreign workers as well as their online interests and preferences. In addition, given our extensive touchpoints and outreach channels with the foreign workers community, MOM can assist in creating greater awareness of the apps.

To enable foreign workers to send in comments on how to improve the app or to report on employment-related issues, our partnership requires the inclusion of a feedback module. However, our partners are not required to develop transactional MOM e-services as these are already available on the MOM website. Instead, they may provide the links to these e-services if they find it to be useful and attractive to their targeted users.

These commercial apps are fully owned by our private sector partners. The partnership is not exclusive. We have signed MOUs with two app developers who saw the mutual benefits of such a partnership. Since June, we have received more than 30 enquiries from interested parties. Among them, eight have submitted proposals which we are currently evaluating.