THE AFRICAN COURIER. Reporting Africa and its Diaspora! The African Courier is an international magazine published in Germany to report on Africa and the Diaspora African experience. The first issue of the bimonthly magazine appeared on the newsstands on 15 February 1998. The African Courier is a communication forum for European-African political, economic and cultural exchanges, and a voice for Africa in Europe.
A new UN study takes a closer look at who the migrants coming from Africa to Europe are – and why they left. One of the findings: Migrants are often more educated than their peers who stayed home.
The vast majority of African migrants who live in Europe come from the most developed sections of their own societies, the study conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has found. This shows that “migration is a reverberation of development progress,” the authors of the study said.
They surveyed more than 3,000 migrants and refugees from 43 African countries to find out more about their personal backgrounds and why they migrated. The UNDP’s “Scaling Fences” survey claims that its methodological approach is the only study of its kind to take a comprehensive look at “the biographic details of migrants’ experiences.”
The UNDP study describes irregular migration from the perspective of migrants as “an investment in a better future: embraced by individuals whose development trajectory is already in ascendance, enabling a radical rejection of the constraining circumstances at home in order to scale metaphorical and even physical fences to personal fulfillment and better opportunities.”
The myth of the economic migrant
So why do migrants leave their home countries, according to the study? Nearly 1,100 of those surveyed (36%) said that their primary motivation was to avoid war, conflict, persecution from the government, gang violence or violent extremism and terrorism. In short: They were seeking asylum.
After taking those whose main objective was asylum out of the sample group, two-thirds of the remaining migrants participating in the survey said that the prospect of having gainful employment in Europe was “not a factor that constrained the decision to migrate.”
Nearly the same number among the remaining migrants stated that their main motivation for migrating was the fact that they had been “treated unfairly by their governments,” especially with regard to their political views and ethnic affiliation, stopping short of calling this persecution. Yet many still expressed love and respect for their home.
This leaves roughly only about a quarter all the migrants surveyed by UNDP as potential ‘economic migrants,’ although few actually said that economic opportunities were their main motivator.
Nearly all of those surveyed said they had at least two or more reasons for embarking on their journeys.
Three additional years of schooling
One of the most important findings of the survey was the level of education among the majority of the respondents was relatively high. The study revealed that those who made their way to Europe had, on average, enjoyed three additional years of education compared to their peers of the same age whom they had left behind.
About 58% of the participants in the survey said that prior to their irregular immigration to Europe they either had a job in their home countries or were still enrolled in school.
However, questions relating to educational background were only asked to those who had not stated earlier that persecution was their main reason for migration.
Young, willing and able
About half the survey participants were aged between 20 and 29, with the overall average age among all respondents being 24. The vast majority (85%) reported that they came from an urban environment, and nearly half said that they were familiar with the concept of migration because a family member had moved to live elsewhere.
While more than half of the migrants highlighted in the study said their families had provided them with financial support to make their journeys to Europe, almost 80% of them stated that they were now sending money back to their families and communities.
In fact, 60% said that being able to send money back home and help their families financially this way was also one of the main motivations for them to migrate in the first place. But only about a quarter of the respondents who had migrated since 2015 stated that they were legally allowed to work in their host countries.
© InfoMigrant
