Question

• What are the concepts of migration and how does migration affect national development in African countries?

Answer 1

Migration can be defined as the change of the place of usual residence for a conventional minimum duration (6 months or 12 months depending the country). Internal migration is a migration that takes place within the borders of a country or territory. External or internationale migration refers to changes in habitual residence between countries. Lifetime migration is defined by relating the place of birth and the place of residence to a reference date. The migrant "life-time" is any individual who resides in an administrative entity other than his or her place of birth.

Like fertility and mortality, migration is a demographic phenomenon that is part of the population dynamics. It is part of human history and is the first means of contact and cultural and economic exchange between peoples.

One of the major difficulties in the study of migration is that there is no standard in the definition.The criteria for duration, boundaries and residences vary from one country to another, from one study to another. In the same country these elements may vary over time. The comparability of indicators between countries is an often insurmountable obstacle. The comparability of indicators over time in the same country is problematic when the administrative division changes. There is a need to be very careful in interpreting migration indicators and comparing these indicators.

In Africa, the opportunities may include free movement of the population, expanded trade, widened employment opportunities, and international remittances. The challenges may include the scarcity of standardized relevant international migration statistics; lack of human resources and institutions to handle international migration; security concerns; the spread of diseases such as Human Immuno-deficiency virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS), tuberculosis and malaria; trafficking of women and children; management of labour migration; the brain drain; and the adoption and implementation of appropriate policies on international migration in cooperation with other nations.

According to the International Organization for Migration (2003), in 2000, the number of international migrants in Africa amounted to 16.2 million (2 per cent of the total population) compared to the world total of 175 millions (3 per cent of the world population) and 5.9 millions in Latin America and the Caribbean (1 per cent of the total population). These proportions may be considered small compared to regions with the largest proportions of migrants, notably Oceania and the Pacific (19 per cent), Northern America (13 per cent) and Europe (8 per cent).

Sub-Saharan Africa has seen critical progressions of constrained vagrants, counting inside uprooted individuals and survivors of dealing. Be that as it may, harmony forms in various African nations recommend consideration needs to be turned direly towards encouraging economical return

The large number of refugees and internally displaced persons in Africa is attributed to conflicts, human rights violations, lack of democracy and strong democratic institutions, and natural disasters. Labour migration and related international remittances continue to raise a number of questions regarding benefits to sending and receiving countries.

International remittances appear to be much smaller in Africa than in any other world region, representing just 10 per cent of external finance in 2001, compared to 63 per cent in South Asia, and 56 per cent in the Middle East and North Africa. However, this is partly because almost two thirds of sub-Saharan African countries simply do not report any data on remittances, suggesting that investment in monitoring systems would be of some value.

Data on the mobility of professionals in Africa remains poor, and might be best collected through cooperation with institutions in destination rather than sending countries. The complex relationships between international migration, training and labour market change also remain relatively underexplored.

There is extension for the improvement of progressively successful territorial strategies on constrained movement, which focus on the issues of long haul extended exile emergencies, the related monetary, security and insurance issues and the absence of answers for some populaces. The connection to jobs is significant here as well, with an overall deficiency of information about powerful employment methodologies that are available to uprooted populaces.

There are assessed to be somewhere in the range of 20 and 50 million vagrants in Africa, albeit factual information on movement streams are deficient and regularly obsolete, and there are huge undocumented streams. The most significant nations of migration are Côte d'Ivoire and South Africa, while Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Cape Verde, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Gambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa are for the most part huge nations of displacement.

Internal migration involves men, women and children, and includes rural-rural, urban-rural and urban-urban flows as well as rural-urban movements. Links between rural and urban areas developed by migration are significant in promoting remittances, encouraging community level initiatives for the construction of public facilities and infrastructure, and linking rural producers to urban markets.