By Elizabeth ADENUGA
The African Development Bank (AfDB) says 70 per cent of African migration occurred within the continent while Africans accounted for 10 per cent of the 258 million people who migrated worldwide.
Mr Aristide Ahouassou, Communications Officer of the bank, said this in a statement in Abuja on Tuesday.
Ahouassou quoted the bank’s Senior Vice-President, Charles Boamah, as making the remark during the third annual Africa Resilience Forum (ARF) in Abidjan.
Boamah explained that understanding migration was, therefore, important for the bank because it helped to provide options to support programmes that would reduce migration flows at the same time as increasing yields.
”Most of the discourse on African migration focuses on the Mediterranean, it is important to stress that general intra-African migration accounts for 70 per cent and this percentage rises to 80 per cent for sub-Saharan Africa.
”A plenary specifically dedicated to innovative solutions in the field of migration, including financial solutions, will highlight how poverty and low employment prospects become powerful drivers of migration and instability.
”This year’s theme, fragility, migration and resilience, could not be more pertinent, because we are going to focus on several issues, including the relationships between migration, humanitarian issues and security.
”Others are youth and job creation; migration and gender; and climate change and the impact on the environment,” he said.
According to him, the debates held at the forum will benefit from the new Country Resilience and Fragility Assessment (CRFA)’s tool, which uses the concept of the internal and external pressures on countries and their capacity to address these.
He said that migration challenges required bold responses, in this regard, the bank had developed tools to address that.
”The CRFA is an excellent tool to build resilience in our regional member countries and the bank is also working on migration in collaboration with the African Union, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), African civil society and African businesses,” he said.
He said that in 2011, the bank provided substantial assistance to Libyan refugees in Tunisia; in 2015, it extended its aid to refugees in Djibouti, as well as similar projects in Burundi, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe.
He disclosed that the bank had also launched the ”Jobs for Youth in Africa” programme, which offers young Africans employment, particularly in the agricultural sector, and to prevent youth from succumbing to the temptations of migration.
He said that more than 400 participants from around the world were taking part in the forum, which would propose concrete actions to address the challenges posed by migration and to help build resilience within the 21 African countries classed as fragile.——NAN
