The Catholic Comunità di Sant'Egidio NGO signed a one-year protocol with the Italian ministries of Foreign affairs, Interior and Labour to allow 300 migrants to enter Italy for work purposes.
The fresh initiative refers to the opportunities as "work corridors" while are to be promoted alongside the "flow decrees to meet the demand of many Italian entrepreneurs looking for manpower, especially in non-EU countries."
The experimental project is also designed to foster connections between entrepreneurs and workers based on training in the countries of origin.
The president of Sant'Egidio, Marco Impagliazzo, explained that the scheme "concerns 300 people who will be distributed across three Italian regions - Veneto, Lazio and Calabria."
"Naturally, the importance of this protocol is that it is a legal pathway in addition to humanitarian corridors, and it was conceived based on the strongly positive experience of hosting and integration," he added.
The countries of provenance will likely include Lebanon, Ethiopia and Ivory Coast, Impagliazzo said, highlighting that the most in-demand jobs were in nursing and in tourism as well as road transport.