African road map for migration

2006-04-05

Africa accounts for 17 million emigrants, scattered across the world looking for a better life. Nearly 4 million graduates have settled in Europe, and almost as many have settled elsewhere in the world. Every year, 23,000 university graduates leave their home country for the West. Such as landscape was described by a conference in Algiers on migration and development.

By Lyes Aflou for Magharebia in Algiers -- 05/04/06

[File] Bedjaoui is worried about African university graduates leaving the continent.

Experts from around 50 African countries attended a meeting Sunday (2 April) in Algiers on migration and development. The three-day meeting aimed to set to define the reasons underlying the current emigration in order to arrive at a common approach to control it alongside western partners.

At the start of the proceedings, Algerian Foreign Affairs Minister Mohammed Bedjaoui, set out the full scale of the problem.

Natural disasters, exodus to urban centres, unemployment, poverty, political instability, poor governance and armed conflict are the motivating forces behind the flow of uprooted people. He stated Africa accounts for 17 million migrants, which is 2 per cent of the population. One African in ten will be a migrant by 2025, if the current trend continues. In 2050, 9 per cent of migrants will be African, making the population the most mobile in the world. In 2002, African migrants made up nearly 5 per cent of foreign populations living in Western countries. Nearly 4 million university graduates have settled in Europe and almost as many have settled elsewhere in the world.

Every year, the exodus drains away more than 80,000 people, of which 23,000 have university degrees. They are encouraged by "selective admission policies for migrants, sometimes covered by talk of chosen migration by a growing number of developed countries", Bedjaoui said.

According to Bedjaoui, the search for a solution must take in an overall examination of the development framework. The experts felt that poverty and exile are not a fate that African countries should face forever.

African Union Commission President Alpha Oumar Konaré, noted, "Quite unilaterally, they decide to pillage, to drain Africa of its brains. Every year, more than 25,000 graduates, across all fields, leave Africa". He compared this new "brain trade" to that of African slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries. "We are not against the free movement of people, which is in itself something enriching, but the reality today is that Africa, once deprived of able bodies, is now being deprived of brains," he added.

Konaré revealed that Africa is currently calling upon thousands of foreign co-workers in the areas affected by the brain drain, which is costing the continent "more than $4 billion a year".

The meeting agenda was centred on two themes: "Migration and Development" and "A Common African Position on Migration and Development". Participants worked on the basis of a document put together by the African Commission with the aim of arriving at an African road map for migration, before a ministerial level meeting with the EU on the subject, which is set to take place before the end of the year.