Africa is currently in an era of high mobility, spurred on by steady economic growth in many parts of Africa facilitated by global revolutions in transport and communication. As a result, migrants of African origin have increasingly spread across both the continent of Africa and the world at large. While emigration to countries in Europe and North America has attracted the most attention among both policy makers and researchers, these movements have been outpaced by sustained increases in shorter and circular patterns of intra-continental mobility. Migrants in Africa have been moving between rural and urban areas and across borders in substantial numbers, contributing to the rapid growth of sprawling cities and fostering new patterns of urban settlement¹.

Africa is a continent where a considerable part of the population leads a mobile way of life. Mobility and migration in Africa is a significant part of livelihoods, where not only working professionals but also nomadic pastoralists, hunters, gatherers, healers, religious persons, traders, artists are known to be mobile and ubiquitous on the continent. Evidence shows that large numbers of people have been uprooted from their place of origin and have become part of a peripatetic category of wandering persons and these people are difficult to classify because they do not fit into perceived notions of what is deemed 'normal' in the administrative and legal logic of the sedentary world. Movement is also motivated by African cities being viewed as places of attraction for international migrants and also used as zones of departure for long-distance migration. The African cities are also viewed as attractive spaces for migrants and mobile traders for creativity, connections and exchange².

Migration in Africa south of the Sahara, as in the rest of the world, has always been an essential element in the historical processes of social, political and economic change. Development and migration have always been intertwined in a set of complex, heterogeneous, and changing relationships in which causality is never one way³. The experience of colonialism left an indelible mark on the political economy of Africa, shaping both the patterns of migration and their impact across the continent where the European powers created the boundaries of nearly all the modern States in Africa south of the Sahara, and these borders have had a profound effect on mobility. Moreover, in their attempts to marshal the labour of Africans to serve the colonial enterprises in the profit centres of plantations and mines while maintaining traditional ways of life in the rural areas, the colonialists established migration systems that remain important to this day; examples include the labour migrations to the coast of West Africa and the mines of Southern Africa. They also established an ideology of state control of mobility that continued after independence.

Across Africa, migration has always played an important role in sustaining and expanding people‘s livelihoods in many different ways. These include expansion into new areas to gain access to natural resources, such as land, minerals, water, game, and fish; the conquest of neighbouring groups to capture both their goods and their labour, either directly through slavery or indirectly through the payment of tribute; and the expansion of networks to gain access to new markets for both goods and labour.

Migration has also historically been driven by conflicts at different levels, ranging from family disputes to wars. Nineteenth-century travel literature abounds with examples of people moving around, miners in Southern Africa moved from country to country in search of jobs, poor people moved from city to city in search for charity in the West-African savannah states and pilgrims on their way from West Africa to Mecca.
Mobility and migration in the continent seem to be increasing and it is difficult to understand fully the processes underlying the phenomenon, partly due to problems with definitions and concepts and partly to a lack of reliable data.

Defining mobility (or migration) is not easy because of the many different types. The simple definition of migration is 'a change of residence, although this definition poses two problems: First, 'residence' implies a certain minimum length of stay. How long does a person have to stay in a certain place to be classified as a migrant, a sojourner or a non-migrant? Second, people who move regularly between two or more places may not even have a clearly identifiable 'place of residence.' This refers particularly to those for whom mobility can be considered as a way of life. Usually, 'migration' is also defined in terms of crossing a political or administrative boundary but questions arise about the nature and history of such boundaries. The word 'migration' covers a wide range of different types of mobility that could be broadly classified as follows:

(1) Based on a géo-administrative level, the usual distinction is between international (or inter-state) and intra-national migration,

(2) The rural-urban dichotomy, results in four types of migration: rural-rural, rural-urban, urban-rural and urban-urban,

(3) As with the previous criterion, a classification based on duration of migration can be put into a simple dichotomy: permanent versus temporary,
(4) The criterion of choice denotes whether migration is forced or voluntary,

(5) Based on the criterion of legality, it could be 'legal migration' and 'clandestine migration' , and

(6) the final classification criterion concerns the migrant's characteristics in relation to motivation: the reasons for migration differ as people differ, in particular in terms of gender, age and education.

Prevention of mobility is common in Africa and its focus is on the control of ―unwanted foreigners at international borders. It can take formal means where countries have many different interests in facilitating, frustrating, or (re) directing human mobility. These include stringent immigration policies, high expenditures on border controls, documentation systems, workplace inspections, and detention and deportation measures. While in most cases countries in Africa adhere to the international rights of citizens to leave their country of origin, many have also developed a range of policy mechanisms to prevent certain categories of nationals from leaving their countries, whether this is in the interest of preventing capital flight or of limiting “brain drain.” There are also informal means of preventing mobility, such as the rise of populist xenophobia and right-wing anti-immigration groups. However these interests are not always realized in practice, since mobile populations invariably have interests of their own, and are therefore determined not to be stopped. One of the main problems of such measures is that they tend to reduce human mobility to the status of a problem, threat, or risk to be managed or mitigated, thereby marginalizing the various opportunities and benefits that mobile populations routinely generate.

Like prevention, promotion of mobility and migration routinely take a variety of forms⁴ and these forms can be usefully located on a continuum that ranges from legal structural reforms to direct acts of capture and coercive transportation. At one end of the spectrum, we have indirect and long-term measures to facilitate and/or regulate otherwise largely independent movements. At the other end of the spectrum, we have brutal measures defined by sustained levels of violent coercion, where states (and other actors) force people into motion for example to pave way for developmental projects. When states take steps to promote, and thereby profit from, mobility, they do not necessarily ask those involved whether they want to move or whether movement is in their best interests. Consequently, promotion has been regularly defined by violence and abuse and should, therefore, not necessarily be regarded as being more favourable than prevention. Promoting mobility should in no way be confused with “free" movement, since promotion tends to be a highly selective exercise.

Promotion of mobility and migration is can be fostered in a non-coercive and mutually beneficial manner. This would help realise the benefits of mobility and migration in Africa and also help to illegal movements. Such actions have been taken at regional and inter-regional levels and they include:

• Establishment of an African Institute for Remittances (AIR) to provide for cheaper, more effective and safer remittances transfer systems;

• Implementation of the Human Trafficking Initiatives to strengthen protection, prevention and prosecution of trafficking in human beings;

• Creation of a network of researchers and research centres at the Observatory on Migration to gather reliable, harmonised data on migration;

• Launch of the Decent Work Initiative extending social protection coverage in particular in the informal economy;

• Launch of a labour market governance and capacity building initiative, for strengthening capacity of labour market institutions in Africa, and organisation of regional and sub-regional fora on employment, labour, social protection and labour migration;

• Implementation of the Nyerere Programme providing scholarships to African students, scholars and academic staff;

• Launch of the Pan-African University, a network of African higher education institutions;

• Review of progress on mutual recognition of qualifications in Africa through African Higher Education Harmonisation and Tuning.

Mobility and population migration should be promoted in Africa as they are important human processes affecting a broad range of social outcomes and previous World Development Reports, for instance, explored the positive development impact of population mobility resulting from both remittance flows and the concentration of skills in geographical areas with the greatest economic potential⁵. Promotion should also focus on mitigating the perils of mobility/migration for example in case studies South African miners and East African truck drivers, where evidence shows links between HIV and mobility.

Courtesy: African Union.

References

1.van Dijk, H. , Foeken D. and van Til, K. (2001). Population mobility in Africa: An overview. Available from: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/9603/ASC_1268683_034.pdf?sequence=1 [Accessed: 8th March 2015]

2. Bakewell, O. and Jόnsson, G. (2001). Migration, mobility and the African city. International Migration Institute (IMI), Oxford Department of International Development (QEH). Available from: http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/pdfs/wp/wp-11-50-migration-mobility-and-the-african-city [Accessed: 8th March 2015]

3. Bakewell, Oliver (2011). Migration and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Available from: http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/pdfs/migration-and-development-in-sub-saharan-africa [Accessed: 8th March 2015]

4. Quirk, Joel and Vigneswaran, Darshan (2015). Mobility Makes States: Migration and Power in Africa. University Of Pennsylvania Pressphiladelphia. Available from: http://www.academia.edu/9500546/Mobility_Makes_States_Migration_and_Power_in_Africa_near_final_intro_and_toc_download_[Accessed: 8th March 2015

5. Deane, K., Parkhurst J. and Johnston, D. (2010). Linking migration, mobility and HIV. Tropical Medicine and International Health, 15 (12), p. 1458–1463. doi:10.1111/j.1365-3156.2010.02647.x