Mobility in Brief

Why human mobility..

Human mobility is on the increase worldwide. There is nothing new about this mobility: from the 1970s onward, the world migrants stock has constantly registered a growing trend. However, today’s main challenges stemming from mobility have more to do with the patterns and directions of the flows, the push and pull factors involved and the impact of these movements on people, markets and society as a whole.

What is new today is that mobility is  trans-national, creating a  new geographic and social dimension of relations and interactions, stretching over the borders of local, regional and international spaces.

Yet, and in spite of the above, internal mobility is the dominant pattern within regions and countries of the South, challenging the conventional wisdom of people moving mainly from the poorer countries of the south to the north.

In recent years, the international community has been paying greater attention to research and policy issues emerging from mobility. Questions around migration and its impact on development, both in origin and receiving countries are more frequent particularly given the link between an ageing population in the industrialised countries, increasing demographic pressure in many countries of the South and a rising volume of remittances and the growing importance of Diaspora communities.

In Eastern Africa, intra-regional mobility (the dominant pattern for volume and impact) is of a distressed kind and tightly linked to ecological, economic and political crises in the region. This poses significant challenges for regional authorities in the management of regional mobility and labour circulation, which are related to larger issues of  economic integration, trans-national capital flows, and the impact on nation, citizenship and governance.

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