BUJUMBURA September 12th (ABP) – One (1) person in seven (7) is a migrant. Migration is both internal and international. Various reasons are behind migration including work, studies, climate change and insecurity, according to data on migration in the East and in the Horn of Africa, which is available to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Burundi.
That organization clarifies that migration is a generic term not defined by international law, reflecting the common understanding of a person moving away from their usual place of residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently and for various reasons.
Migration reasons are distinguished from each other by their ultimate causes. Those are international migration, forced migration, mixed migration, internal migration, and labor migration and so on.
Forced migration consists of internally displaced persons, refugees or asylum seekers as well as victims of trafficking, while internal migration refers to persons internally displaced for work reasons or those linked to climate change, and the movement of people from rural to urban areas. Mixed migration refers to a group of people who move together but for different reasons, it was explained.
Internationally, 25.5% of international migrants live in Africa, while 6.2 million of them live in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, including 49.6% men and 50 .4% women. Uganda has 1.7 million international migrants, while Ethiopia and Kenya have 1.1 million respectively.
Burundi has a positive net migration rate of 2.6%. International migrants in Burundi come mainly from the Democratic Republic of Congo with 167,768 migrants, followed by the Republic of Rwanda with 64,363 and the United Republic of Tanzania with 28,008. Other international migrants come from the Republic of Kenya 1,032 and the Republic of Uganda with 891 migrants.
In the case of migrant workers, 3.6 million are in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, including 54% men and 46% women.
As for internally displaced people, the migration data available to the IOM in Burundi specifies that until March 2023, Somalia had 3.9 million, Ethiopia 2.7 million, the South Sudan 2.3 million, and Burundi 75,300. For refugees and asylum seekers until June 2023, Uganda had 1.6 million, Ethiopia 824,000, Kenya 540,000 and Burundi 87,030.
As a reminder, IOM Burundi organized, on August 25, 2023, in Bujumbura, a press café for media professionals on the theme “Covering migration in East Africa and the Horn of Africa”, as part of discussing the concept of “migration”, often used in the negative sense. “The term migrate can in no way be taken in the negative sense because we can migrate to another country and invest there or for work reasons,” underlined Prosper Aobe, one of the journalists who had already participated in a regional media workshop on migration, organized by IOM.
IOM Burundi took that opportunity to call on journalists to use correct terms in relation to migration. For example, the illegal migrant and the climate refugee should be replaced by the irregular migrant and the environmental migrant respectively, according to Mrs. Laëtitia Romain, communications officer at IOM in Burundi.
Thus, the IOM focuses on the regional strategy which consists of ensuring better regional migration management (BRMM: Better Regional Migration Management). That project aims to improve the governance of labor migration and the protection of human and labor rights of migrant workers and their family members, through intra and inter-regional cooperation on a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society” approach.
Note that this regional project is based on four pillars, namely mobility, regional integration, social cohesion including the common market protocol of the East African Community, the Intergovernmental Authority for development (IGAD), and others (African Continental Free Trade Area); ethical recruitment, bilateral and multilateral agreements on labor migration, consular cooperation, migrant workers and the rights of their families; vulnerabilities of returned migrant workers and their family members, protection needs and risks, return and reintegration in the East and Horn of Africa; as well as gender-responsive migration governance in the Eastern region and the Horn of Africa.