Swept Up in Migration Surge, Children Struggle in Streets of Djibouti
Djibouti might appear to be an unlikely place to sustain a population of foreign street children. But not when you consider that it is a major transit location for migrants, especially from Ethiopia, who seek to cross over to Yemen, and ultimately to the Arab Peninsula.
Imagine if your top work prospects included begging, scrubbing cars or shining shoes, selling yourself on the street for sex.
Imagine too that one way of improving those prospects involved leaving your country and traveling hundreds of miles to work the streets of a teeming African city. Now imagine you’re 11 years old.
Except that there is no need to imagine any of this. These are the realities of the 1,137 children the International Organization for Migration helped survey to complete a study on street children in Djibouti.
The purpose of the study was to provide a diagnosis of the living conditions of these children in Djibouti city, the capital, and to provide recommendations. The study, Report On Street Children Living in Djibouti—”Etude Sur les Enfants en Situation de La Rue dans la Ville de Djibouti”-contributes to recent reporting by IOM concerning the robust movement of irregular migrants through the Red Sea region bound for Persian Gulf states including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.
Last month IOM reported seaborne irregular migration to Yemen in 2018 would surpass the volume of similar migration to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea.
Those findings were featured in the report Mixed Migration in the Horn of Africa and the Arab Peninsula.
In 2018, IOM recorded 150,000 migrant arrivals into Yemen, twenty per cent were minors. The long journey is often made by foot and exposes people on the move to dehydration, illness and human rights abuses, including trafficking.
Djibouti might appear to be an unlikely place to sustain a population of foreign street children. But not when you consider that it is a major transit location for migrants, especially from Ethiopia, who seek to cross over to Yemen, and ultimately to the Arab Peninsula.
The journey through Djibouti is grueling. Those with some money hitchhike. The rest might simply find themselves trapped, unable to get to the coast – for the cross-over into Yemen – through one of the driest and hottest places on earth.
IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix recent report documents trends on this mixed migration route from the first half of last year.
The population covered by the study was children aged 0 to 17 identified as living on the street. A total of 1,137 children were surveyed, including 633 children aged 0 to 9, including 195 girls (30.8%) and 504 children aged 10 to 17, of whom 64 (12.7%) were girls. One respondent reported working long hours in a restaurant—earning about USD 56 per month in the local currency—money he was able to remit back to family members in Ethiopia.
The survey was conducted by the Ministry of Women and Family Affairs and the Directorate of Statistics and Demographic Studies (DISED), with assistance from IOM, the International Organization for Migration.
A national consultant, Amina Saïd Chiré provided the literature review and the qualitative analysis, while DISED took charge of the quantitative survey and analysis. Providing technical support was an international consultant, Michel Poulain.
The purpose of the quantitative survey was to enumerate the street children, to understand how and why they end up on the streets and to identify their priority problems. It was conducted in the urban agglomeration of Djibouti which has the majority of street children in the country.
During the opening ceremony of the study’s validation workshop recently, the Minister of the Interior, Hassan Omar Mohamed Bourhan, thanked the European Union for supporting the study, and insisted on the need to identify all street children in Djibouti to better protect them.
Minister of Women and Family Affairs, Moumina Houmed Hassan, reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to tackling the issue head on through the implementation of five measures, namely: the creation a coordination platform; the reinforcement and development of reception facilities; the establishment of an identification system; the definition of basic minimum service; and the development of a national protection strategy.
| “When I was twelve, I walked for one month and two days from Ethiopia to Djibouti. I survived on the food that was given to me by strangers. I thought there would be more work in Djibouti. I am willing to do anything here – wash cars, clean windows – but I rarely find any jobs.” – 16-year-old boy “I came here four years ago when I was twelve. I was living with my grandmother in Ethiopia who had nothing and could not afford to send me to school. I heard from my friends that life is better here so I took the train the border. Then I walked for five days through open land. There were a lot of difficulties. I was beaten, hungry and thirsty. When I arrived, I found a family who I worked for four years, cleaning and cooking for them. When they stopped paying, I left to live on the street. I sleep on the beach and have not been able to find any work. I want out of this life. But I have nowhere to go” -17-year old girl “I came here with my mother, but when she moved on to work in Saudi Arabia, I stayed here. I have not seen her in eight years. She wanted to bring me with her but I was too scared to go. I wash cars to make money, but I dream of being a pilot one day and meeting my mom in Ethiopia. I don’t remember Ethiopia but I would like to go back one day.“ – 17-year-old girl |
Funding for the study was provided by the European Union through the EU-IOM Joint Initiative for the Protection and Reintegration of Migrants in the Horn of Africa.
The EU-IOM Joint Initiative facilitates orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration management through the development of rights-based and development-focused procedures and processes on protection and sustainable reintegration. The project, backed by the EU Trust Fund, covers and has been set up in close cooperation with a total of 26 African countries.
Head of Delegation of the European Union in Djibouti Ambassador Adam Kulach said the situation of street children was a tragedy that affected everyone. He said the problem would be the focus of the EU’s attention through the implementation of a EUR 2 million project for children in street situations in Djibouti.
