Migration is one thing that has become ubiquitous among young people in many countries in Sub-Saharan African. Day in, day out many of them continue risk their lives in search of better opportunities elsewhere due to the enormous challenges they face and limited opportunities available to them in their own countries. According to statistics from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the percentage of young people living outside their home country reached 28 million in 2017. Additionally, the percentage of migrants between the ages of 15-24 among all international migrants is highest among Sub-Saharan Africans. One striking thing is the fact that the issues that compel many young people to migrate in Sub-Saharan African are homogenous in nature.
In the last decade alone, about a million people have migrated from the Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe (Pew Research, 2018). Net migration in Sub-Saharan Africa was pegged at -1.8 million (World Bank, 2017). Majority of these migrants are young people who were either fleeing harsh economic conditions or conflicts in their home countries. It is imperative to note, that young people in that part of Africa are not just in a haste to satisfy an insatiable quest to migrate to Europe or North America, as there’s ample data that affirms the fact that majority of migrants from Sub-Saharan African stay within the African continent. So why do many young people within Sub-Saharan African continue to migrate?
African migrants being rescued in the Channel of Sicily, Italy. Photo: IOM / Malavolta
Unemployment remains one of the greatest challenges that confronts, young people and many governments globally. Unemployment rate among young people is at 13.1%, which is 3 times the rate of joblessness among adults, (ILO, 2015). This problem is worse in developing countries. According to the International Labour Organization, out of 38.1 percent of the overall working poor population in the Sub-Saharan Africa, a whopping 23.5 percent are youth and girls often are at a disadvantage than young boys in finding decent employment in this part of the world, (ILO, n.d). More than 200 million young people in developing countries are uneducated and as a result do not have the necessary skills needed for work (UNDP, Empowered Youth for Sustainable Future, n.d). This directly constricts majority of young people to the informal sector, which is rarely regulated, giving employers the laxity to underpay them perpetuating them in poverty. The only viable window of opportunity out of poverty that these young people see is migrating from their countries to elsewhere to improve their living conditions.
That notwithstanding, skills mismatch is a key setback in Sub-Saharan Africa that continues encourage many youths to migrate. According to Obonyo (2018), many employers in Kenya declined employing several college graduates in Kenya due to the poor quality of programs they studied in school. This is a common trend in Sub-Saharan African countries, because many universities in these countries have failed to update their curriculum to reflect the skill sets demanded by most employers. There is a wide fixation of these universities on liberal courses with some producing up to 90 percent graduates from liberal arts relegating stem courses and others that will provide young people with skills they need for the job market. So many of these young people complete universities and are unable to find jobs and look to migration as their most potent option to make ends meet.
Conflicts is equally another significant factor that promotes migration in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries on the Africa continent have become a hotbed of political instability due to violent conflicts ranging from the desire of autocrats to remain in power in perpetuity, abuse of power, and violent attacks from extremists groups. Figures on violent conflicts within Africa is not just alarming but egregious. In one of the most unstable countries on the continent, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Reuters News Agency estimates that over five million people have been killed in the Congolese war which started more than 2 decades ago. Nearly 740,000 people were displaced in 2019 due to conflicts in DRC, in South Sudan more than 2 million people were compelled to flee their homes following the 2013 civil war that killed about 380,000 people, in the Central African Republic 600,000 people were displaced with thousands killed in a conflict that started over 6 years ago, the Libyan conflict is reported to have displaced more than 128,000 people while Boko Haram’s insurgency in Nigeria has displaced over 2 million people (Igbohor, 2019). No young person can fully realize their potential is such hostility and instability, and thus many of them would rather choose to flee from their homes to a completely new and stable country, that will provide them with the congenial atmosphere to succeed.
Remittance from African migrants in the West to the continent also contributes to migration. 48 billion dollars remittance flows to Sub-Saharan Africa were captured in 2019 (Ratha, 2021; Brookings Institution). The actual figure is predicted to be higher and Nigerian alone received half of this amount in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many families in Sub-Saharan Africa depend on relatives who live abroad for their survival. As a result, most families either encourage young ones in their family to migrate or sometimes even pile pressure on them to move out of their home countries to seek for better livelihoods in order for them to be able to provide for their families back home.
Due to these factors, many young people use legitimate and illegitimate means to leave their countries in search of better prospects. For many of them, they do this at the peril of their lives using the Sahara Desert where some die of starvation, exhaustion and eventually on the Mediterranean where many lose their lives on the sea or get arrested and deported back to the troubles they were trying to escape from.
Photo Credit: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images
Some efforts made to reduce illegal migration
One organization that has been instrumental in trying to reduce migration on the continent, is the International Organization for Migration. The organization has been working in Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1970s to date, helping African migrants who need to flee dangers in their countries and others who need assistance to settle back in their home countries.
The IOM has been working in the last 3 decades to provide assistance to internally displaced persons in some of the conflict prone areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. They have assisted young people in Mozambique, Angola, DRC and Somalia. They have partnered the UN Secretary General for Internally Displaced persons to support programs geared towards helping reintegrate displaced persons back into safer communities. In addition to that they continue support efforts for demobilization of former combatants to help them return to civilian life and integrating them back into their communities (IOM, 2000).
The organization is a key leader in spearheading emergency assistance during humanitarian crisis in several parts of the world. It has been instrumental in this instance in helping evacuate millions of Sub-Saharan Africans from conflict zones. The IOM repatriated Sub-Saharan citizens during the Persian Gulf crisis, and from Yemen and Eritrea. More recently, it assisted the Ghanaian government in evacuating nearly 20,000 Ghanaian migrants at the peak of the Libyan crisis following the overthrow Muammar Al Qadhafi (IOM, 2019).
Through its Migration for Development program, it afforded many Africans the opportunity of returning to their home countries through the Return of Qualified Nationals programs or Voluntary Return Programs which according to the IOM, offers significant motivation for reintegration and links migration directly to development. This program has successfully ensured the reintegration of African migrants from Kenya, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and thousands of other African migrants since 1983.
Furthermore, the IOM has been collaborating with Sub-Saharan African governments on technical cooperation to build their capacity to manage migration and also formulate strong policies on migration. These programs have underscored the role of the private sector, civil society and NGOs in job creation for young people in Sub-Saharan Africa to aid in reducing migration.
Through the IOM’s Assistance to Voluntary and Humanitarian Return program, the organization assists and tracks migrants who successfully reintegrate back to their home countries. According to the IOM’s Assistance to Voluntary and Humanitarian Return report, since May 2017, more than 1,000 Ghanaians have returned to Ghana through IOM support. About 35 percent of them are less than 26 years old. Nearly 60 percent of these returnees were from the Greater Accra region and the Brong Ahafo region, where high school directors noticed a trend of many students dropping out of school with the intent of making the perilous journey of migrating from Ghana to Europe through the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. The IOM equally engage some of these returnees as ambassadors, in High Schools now to sensitize students on the dangers and their own chilling experiences in trying to use illegal routes to migrate overseas.
Additional Efforts that can help reduce illegal migration
In spite of the programs being implemented by the IOM and other development partners, positive youth development domain frameworks including assets, agency, enabling environment and contribution can help to significantly reduce migration among young people in low resource settings like Sub-Saharan Africa (Olenik, 2019).
Assets, which includes formal education, skills building are key in development and shaping of youth policies and programs in low resource settings. This is a significant step in the youth development framework because beyond providing young people with lifelong skills, it provides a window out of poverty for many of them in low- and middle-income countries. This will encourage many young people not to migrate considering the dangers many of them have to go through in leaving their countries to elsewhere for a better life.
Agency is another essential framework in developing youth policies and programs in LMICs. There is no gainsaying the fact that young people have enormous potential and given the right assets that offers them the requisite education, skills, will provide them with a positive sense of identity and equally equip them to plan their lives now and for the future.
The importance of enabling environment in the development of any youth policy framework cannot be overemphasized. As the famous quote by C.J Heck notes, “we are all products of our environment”. Providing young people with opportunities, youth friendly services, a congenial and safe environment promotes their wellbeing and helps them to not only thrive but prosper. On the contrary, an unsafe and toxic environment can adversely affect the growth of young people and induce negative outcomes like risking their lives to flee their home countries.
What’s more, contribution is another essential tool in developing youth programs in LMICs. Mentorship, volunteerism, civic engagement and community mobilization are key in structuring youth-based programs (Olenik, 2019). This is owing to the fact that these programs not only prepare young people but instill in them good values that spur them on to lead and support activities that promote change and advancement of their own communities.
In a nutshell, there is no single approach to dealing with the issue of migration. A combination of these factors can help prepare young people to actively spearhead the transformation of their own lives and communities. However, countries that fail to provide a congenial atmosphere for their young people to thrive and prosper, will continue to suffer the negative consequences of migration like brain drain, illegal migration, civil unrest among others.
References:
Dovi.E. (2016) Young Ghanaians risk all for “better” life. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2016-march-2017/young-ghanaians-risk-all-better-life on May 7, 2021
Haas, H.., & International Organization for Migration. (2008). Irregular migration from West Africa to the Maghreb and the European Union: An overview of recent trends. Geneva: International Organization for Migration.
International Labour Organization. (n.d). Youth employment in Africa. Retrieved from https://www.ilo.org/africa/areas-of-work/youth-employment/lang--en/index.htm on May 2, 2021
International Organization for Migration (2020). Youth and Migration: Engaging youth as key partners in migration governance. Geneva: International Organization
International Organization for Migration. (2019). 10,000 Ghanaian youth learn about pitfalls of irregular migration. Retrieved from https://www.iom.int/news/10000-ghanaian-youth-learn-about-pitfalls-irregular-migration on May 6, 2021.
International Organization for Migration (2000). IOM migration policy framework for Sub-Saharan Africa. Retrieved from https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/jahia/webdav/shared/shared/mainsite/about_iom/en/council/80/MC_INF_244.pdf on May 5, 2021
Igbohor K. (2019). Work in progress for Africa’s remaining hotspots. Retrieved fromhttps://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2019-march-2020/work-progress-africa’s-remaining-conflict-hotspots on May 3, 2021
Olenik, C. et al. (2019). The Evolution of Positive youth development as a key international development approach. Global Social Welfare. (2019)
Pew Research Center. (2018). At least a million Sub-Saharan Africans moved to Europe since 2010. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/03/22/at-least-a-million-sub-saharan-africans-moved-to-europe-since-2010/ on March 24, 2021.
Ratha D. (2021) Keep remittances flowing to Africa. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2021/03/15/keep-remittances-flowing-to-africa/ on May 8, 2021
United Nations. (2021). SDG Goals. Retrieved from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-01/ on May 8, 2021
World Bank. (2019). Net migration-Ghana. Retrieved from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-01/ on May 2, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment