Around 5,000 people gathered in Rome to protest the treatment of migrants. Demotix/Stefano Ronchini. All rights reserved. If we do not get our needs met where we are, we will go elsewhere. This is called migration – and self-reliance. This is the story of thousands of migrants who have followed the African migratory routes to Europe in past and recent years, leaving their homes in order to seek protection, find jobs, and build lives for themselves. However, Amnesty International has reported that over 1,700 people have already died this year trying to leave North Africa’s coast for Europe’s shore. On 19 April, an estimated 800 migrants drowned at sea, prompting an emergency summit of European leaders. Although the majority of current migrants reaching North Africa have a strong claim to refugee status, others already are refugees – yet have found no ways to survive in their usually neighbouring, and equally impoverished, host countries. The lack of options compels many people to leave places in which, had assistance for livelihoods been available, they might have stayed.
Following incidents like the recent Mediterranean crisis, policy-makers usually ask, “how do we stop the arrivals?” Yet I believe a different question needs to be posed: “how do we help refugees access resources and build lives where they are?”
Throughout eastern Africa, I have seen how livelihoods-training and resources for small businesses – for refugees and internally displaced people – lead to the stable lives that an income and a sense of purpose can bring. People undoubtedly should have the right to freedom of movement, which includes accessing legal routes to migration and the ability to seek asylum in the global north. However, there are hundreds of thousands of refugees who have reached their first host country and not sought onward migration. Many refugees have found institutional support or independent ways to create livelihoods. I am now on a National Geographic grant in the small east African country of Uganda to talk to these people. I am here to learn how the refugees who have stayed survive.
