Migration

Participants in a workshop on child and youth migration in West Africa have called on governments in the sub-region to develop policies that would ensure the safety and welfare of domestic female workers in their respective countries.
Additionally, they called for special programmes to protect the rights and interests of children who migrated from their countries of origin to work in other countries.
The workshop was organised by the Centre for Migration Studies of the University of Ghana, Legon to disseminate findings of the studies conducted by researchers from selected universities and institutions and the Anglophone and Francophone countries in West Africa.
The purpose of the workshop was to bring together Francophone and Anglophone researchers and child rights advocates from research institutes whose main concerns are to understand and support mobile young people including children.
The Head of the Centre for Migration Studies, Dr Mariama Awumbila, said the migration of young people had been a neglected area of research, although recent work by the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and UNICEF had begun to change it.
She said the study was therefore aimed at asking child migrants about their motives and experiences to frame appropriate responses that simultaneously allowed them to participate fully in society and meet their specific needs as working migrants.
In a presentation by Dorte Thorsen, a researcher from the University of Sussex, she said despite the fact that young migrants became acutely aware of their marginalised position in the urban space within a very short time of their arrival, they learnt the necessary tactics and strategies to bypass some of the obstacles.
She said such child migrants were preoccupied with the goal of earning money and living like those in the informal economy but the problems they faced with kin and non-kin employers made them wary of patron-client relationships.
She said although these types of relationships operated on a low level in all informal employment relationships, such children constantly balanced the advantage of having paid work with the risk of being cheated.
Dorte Thorsen said such children were quick to move on in a new employment or independent petty services such as shoe-shinning or porterage, popularly known as ‘kayayoo’, at the least suspicion.
Melanie Jacquemin, a researcher from the Centre d’Etudes Africaines in Paris, also said temporary migration among young women and girls to undertake domestic work in West Africa was not a consistent trend.
He said the recent introduction of wage system for young domestic workers had given a market value to the work and price value to the person undertaking it.
He, therefore, highlighted the need to undertake in-depth, qualitative and quantitative research into the issue of child and youth domestic workers in order to know what had become of ex-young migrant workers and the reasons for the varying employment paths.