Ethiopia: Community Dialogue to Help Sensitize Against Irregular Migration

	Email This Page Print This Page Comment on this article Visit The Publisher's Site

International Organization for Migration (Geneva)

PRESS RELEASE
29 July 2008
Posted to the web 29 July 2008

With 1,400 irregular migrants, mainly Ethiopians and Somalis, having perished in 2007 alone in the attempt to cross the Gulf of Aden using human smugglers, IOM is continuing efforts to sensitize rural and urban communities in Ethiopia on the risks and dangers of irregular migration.

A dialogue is being held today in the capital, Addis Ababa with community based institutions including the Ethiopian IDIR Association, a self-help group which helps members and families with financial and social help in the event of death, as well as religious leaders in a bid to reach out to a greater number of potential migrants.

Although the majority of Ethiopians using smugglers to get them to the Middle East and beyond via Somalia, the Gulf of Aden and Yemen, are from rural areas, there is little awareness of the perils and misery of the journey to Bossasso in Somalia's Puntland, the main departure point, and beyond.

The migrants are often abused physically and verbally, robbed and at times abandoned in the Somali deserts with no money, papers, food or water. Women and girls can often have the added ordeal of rape. Those who reach Bossasso live in squalid conditions until they manage to find the means to make the crossing to Yemen in the smugglers' usually unseaworthy boats. Many thousands of Ethiopians and Somalis have drowned over the years while trying to make the crossing, not least because they've been thrown overboard by the smugglers.

There is also little awareness too of the dangers of human trafficking. Last week, IOM, supported by the Ethiopian and Tanzanian governments, returned a group of victims of trafficking from Dar-Es-Salaam to their homes in Ethiopia. More than 1,000 Ethiopians are believed to be languishing in prisons in the east African country, most of whom had been either smuggled or trafficked into Tanzania via Kenya en route to South Africa and Europe.

The dialogue is intended to stir debate amongst community members so that local solutions are found to address the problem of irregular migration in addition to raising awareness of its dangers.

'Involving religious leaders and traditional institutions have been very effective and useful in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The same can be applied in fighting irregular migration in the country,' says Charles Kwenin, IOM's chief of mission in Addis.

The community dialogue will help establish informal and formal networks, sensitization through existing traditional institutions, and the setting up regular dialogue forums for a coordinated action, he adds.

The dialogue is part of a bigger information campaign funded by the Dutch government which will include radio shows in four languages and is intended to scale-up outreach efforts particularly among rural communities.

Read comments. Write your own.

AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.

Share this on: Facebook Digg Del.icio.us StumbleUpon Muti

Copyright © 2008 International Organization for Migration. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.

Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed Sign up for FREE daily 'top headlines' by email >>

Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | My Account

Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement.