Human Mobility

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.

Our work programme

Through the human mobility programme, SID aims to leverage its expertise – built on previous work on migration and development which dates back to an initial partnership with CeSPI  in 2006 – in order to facilitate knowledge generation and critical reflection on the main challenges, policy gaps and to propose possible policy paths to address emerging and future human mobility issues in Africa. The opposite poles of economic integration and fragmentation, political participation and marginalisation, social security and insecurity, legal harmonisation and standardisation are some of the main dichotomies which need to be addressed as multiple challenges posed by mobility.

SID’s work is being organized around the notion of a ‘knowledge observatory’,  a space for strategic conversation on  related issues to inform research, policy making, and public awareness through an approach that is:

• Systemic: grounded into concrete and on going political processes.

• Inclusive: of different perspectives, through a multi-disciplinary approach and a multi-stakeholder process that includes all sides of the policy debate.

• Future oriented: exploring and representing future realities in order to define possible alternative solutions through the identification and combination of actual gaps and future opportunities.

Geographic focus

The geographic focus of the programme is primarily based on Eastern Africa (including East Africa region, Great Lakes region, The Horn of 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 this 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.

The presence of two regional players – the East African Community (EAC) and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) – together with the on-going  preliminary efforts to include mobility in the political agenda, make the region a coherent space for a deeper process of policy dialogue and understanding.

Future expansion of the programme to other regions inside and outside the African continent is also envisaged in order to contribute to the process of political strengthening of South-South and North-South relations whose political agenda are overwhelmingly based on – and thus weakened by – unilateral needs and responses.

Click here to access opinion pieces and articles published on the SID Forum around the issues of human mobility