The Republic of Korea’s (RoK) Ministry of Family and Gender Equality On March 31 announced that it will hold a training programme on marrying foreigners and also on multi-cultural families.

The programme is scheduled to run from April to October in 16 major cities and provinces across the country.

The lecturers will introduce issues that relate to multi-cultural societies, gender equality, culture and the country’s laws on getting married to a foreigner.

The programme’s organisers expect that multi-cultural couples will gain a better understanding about each other by taking part in the programme.

The programme was run as a pilot study in 2008 and over 3,000 people took part in it in 2009. The programme was free to all the participants.

According to the RoK’s Immigration Agency, by June 2009, 126,000 Korean people had got married to foreigners. Of this figure 110,000 were foreign wives with 54 percent of them coming from China , followed by 29,000 from Vietnam , 6,200 from the Philippines , 4,900 from Japan and 2,800 from Cambodia./.