Jordan will recruit 12,000 skilled Bangladeshi workers for its readymade garment industry in a year, Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen said yesterday.

The recruitment will be processed through Bangladesh Overseas Employment and Services Ltd (BOESL), the state-owned recruiting agent.

"The employer and his team will visit Bangladesh for this reason in the coming days," Momen told The Daily Star.

Jordan is one of the few countries that recruit skilled workers in the apparel industry.

The news comes at a time when overseas jobs for migrant workers from Bangladesh declined significantly due to the coronavirus pandemic.

According to BOESL, 9,307 garment workers, 9,199 of them female, went to Jordan between July 2018 and June 2019.

The garment sector in the middle-eastern country employs about 69,000 workers, of which 75 per cent are women, said the IndustriALL Global Union last year.

About 16,000 of the workers are from Jordan, while 53,000 migrant workers from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, China, Cambodia, Madagascar, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Syria make up the rest.

Jordanian factories produce apparel items for international buyers, particularly those from the US.

The garment industry in Jordan is a $2 billion industry, said Sanal Kumar, chairman and managing director of Classic Fashion Apparel Industry, in an article on the Apparel Resources website in November.