Fleur Heyworth
Hello, I'm Fleur Heyworth from the International Gender Champions Secretariat in Geneva, and today I am delighted to speak to gender champion and IOM Regional Director for the East and Horn of Africa, Mr. Mohammed Abdiker. As Regional Director Mr. Abdiker spearheads the IOM formulation, promotion and implementation of strategic responses to migration issues and trends in support of Member States and migrants in the region. His office covers a vast number of countries including Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Prior to being appointed Regional Director in August 2019, Mohammed Abdiker led the IOM worldwide response to migration crises as a director of operations and emergencies at the IOM headquarters in Geneva for nine years. Today's podcast is going to focus on the intersection of migration, gender, and climate. And so I'm delighted to have you with us, Mohammed, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you taking the time to record this podcast.
Mohammed Abdiker
Thank you for having me today, really grateful for this podcast today.
Fleur Heyworth
So could you start by providing us with an update on the situation of migrants, including migrant workers, refugees, asylum seekers and IDPs in the region, and we're particularly interested in the most pressing challenges they face and how they impact women and girls specifically. And if you see the impacts of climate change, or anticipate impacts of climate change on this situation.
Mohammed Abdiker
First, I want to say we're in a region where the three main drivers of migration are: political instability, we can see a large number of people being displaced and on the move same situation in Ethiopia, in northeastern Kenya, the same situation in Djibouti. But climate change in our region isn't just about drought and famine. It's also about flooding. We're getting a whole city in South Sudan underwater now for close to 11 months. We have Burundi, for example, where we have the rising waters of Lake Tanganyika that is displacing thousands and thousands of civilians in Burundi, so we can see the impact of migration and climate change in the region. Just to give you numbers, for example, we have about 13.8 million forcibly displaced people in our region, that is by July 2022. And this includes also 10 million IDPs, and about 3.8 million refugees and asylum seekers. So you can see the number of people displaced inside their countries is so huge (about 10 million people). And about 3.8 million refugees also cross the borders seeking asylum in neighboring countries themselves. If you talk about the drought, and the farming that is impacting our region, 6.1 million people, as we speak today are in need of assistance, including in Ethiopia, where we have about 24 point 1 million or about 67% of the people that need assistance because of drought. In Somalia, we have about 7.8 million people or 22% of the people who are in need of assistance because of the drought situation. In Kenya, 4.2 million people or about 12%. But figures are all been revised every day because more and more people have been displaced or in need because of the climate induced migration that we're seeing in our region and food insecurity as well. We're still looking at the numbers for Djibouti, and in the next few weeks, we'll have a number of people impacted in Djibouti alone. Just because of drought, we have more than 1.5 million IDPs in Somalia. That's 1.1 million. So far, Ethiopia about 533,000 because of drought, and Djibouti, close to 606,000 people impacted. The Somali Region in Ethiopia hosts almost the highest proportion of IDPs in the three countries, about 25% or about 411,000 people, followed by the idea that in Somalia, and also we have more in the governmental areas of Somalia, but I'll come to all that later on. But let me answer your first question which is regarding the situation of migrants in the region. In the last year, we've seen a significant increase in the migrant movements in the region. For example, we've seen a 40% increase in movement along the eastern route in 2020, following a drastic decrease in movements in 2019, due to the COVID 19 pandemic. And the eastern route, asI just explained to the audience, is the road between the Horn of Africa, bridgeable Somalia, the Red Sea, going to Yemen and Saudi Arabia trying to leave the Gulf countries. The Eastern road is the largest migratory route out of eastern part of Africa and one of the riskiest in the world. It is mostly used by Ethiopian and Somali labor migrants headed to the Gulf countries in search of employment. And all this happens because of the widespread poverty, rapidly increasing populations, and environmental and climate shocks and high levels of unemployment which shape the social economic landscape, leading to international migration in my region. Migrants in this region face a plethora of challenges along the migration journey. Other risks faced by irregular migrants or detention, which is happening in many of the countries they transit through, which is particularly long along the southern roads. That is the route where we see Horn of Africa citizens moving from Horn of Africa trying to hit South Africa. So we have the two main roads. The eastern route began in Saudi Arabia, and you have the southern route, which is mostly to South Africa itself, and they also get stranded during the journey itself. Migrants also face serious challenges while transiting through Yemen, for example, where there is a dire humanitarian crisis, and migrants face a severe lack of access to basic services and risk getting caught up in conflict. We've seen many of them who have been killed during the conflict in Yemen, or kidnapped. Some of them are tortured by the human trafficking gangs and the smugglers themselves. Around a quarter of those traveling along the eastern route, for example, are women and girls. We're seeing more and more feminization of migration. A few years ago, we've seen more and more men on the move, because there's this traditional way of doing things where the men who go out and the women stay back home to take care of kids or anything else. But now we've seen the feminization of migration where more and more women and girls are on the move. And women and the girls on this face a wide range of gender specific challenges including sexual violence, and unwanted pregnancies. There are many disadvantages and risks that women face as compared to men during their migration journey. Women and girls continue to be the most vulnerable. For example of all identified trafficked persons in eastern Horn of Africa. 78% were female. That just gives the bigger picture of how the situation is for women and girls in the region. Human trafficking in the East and Horn of Africa region takes several forms, with the most common being trafficking for forced labor as well as trafficking for sexual exploitation. Majority of the victims of trafficking are female, which indicates that while men and boys are affected, women and girls are disproportionately affected and are at heightened risk of human trafficking. We want to talk to the authorities about this, the authorities in most destination countries. Treating women, migrant workers as workers with limited or no legal rights, something we're really trying to push the agenda that they need to be taken care of, and it must be legalized for them as well. In cases of exploitation and abuse, the judicial system is not always constructed to support the abused worker. In some countries, we've seen legal amendments have been adopted with regard to labor and human rights of migrant workers, but even so, some destination countries have yet to recognize the rights of women migrant workers and to take concrete steps to uphold those rights. As compared to men, most migrant women end up performing jobs in isolated situations with limited opportunities to build networks. They have limited access to information and social support. And during the decision to migrate, women tend to lack proper information on the migration process and the procedures on employment opportunities itself. They may also like to know how and their ability to cover expenses that they're going to face because every time they move they need to pay for those expenses. Thus, most of the women and girls are more likely to end up in irregular and exploitative situations. The return and reintegration process of migrant workers can also be more problematic for women than for men themselves. What we've seen also is that gender based violence and sexual violence in particular is a critical protection concern affecting women and girls in the course of their migration and also displacement. While the scale of the problem remains challenging to establish, there has been increased reporting of cases of sexual violence perpetrated by smugglers, by traffickers by other migrants themselves, and also by the host community authorities along the distant route, necessitating targeted protection interventions to address this problem. That's why we're putting up what we call migrant response centers in Djibouti, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Ethiopia, so at least they have come to the Migrant processing centers that are able to support them in moving forward. In a nutshell, that's the situation of migration in the region.
Fleur Heyworth
Oh, my goodness. So the climate crisis is happening now. It is not happening tomorrow. It's really impacting the drought. The pressures on the region and the movements. And you you said the word feminization of migration, and outlined really specifically how these challenges are making women increasingly vulnerable. You personally, Mr. Abdiker, have made some very strong personal commitments about how to address this, including a government commitment, a whole of government and whole of society approach that you're trying to encourage targeted outreach, media campaigns, conferences, workshops, really trying to raise the awareness of the crisis that is happening right now and unfolding. Could you expand a bit more on how this gender based violence social protections intersect? What are the obstacles in terms of your response? And how can we overcome them?
Mohammed Abdiker
I think just going back to the impacts of climate change, and this gives the audience a much bigger picture on this, if you look at the latest IPCC report, it tells us that the east and horn of Africa region is seeing the highest temperature anomalies on the planet. The fastest rising sea levels are occurring as we speak now along our coast. And for the first time Mount Kenya, which is in Kenya, is predicted to be the first mountain range in the world to completely lose its icecaps. Droughts will become more intense, as we're dealing with it now, longer lasting and more frequent. And we will see rains that will become shorter, more intense, and cause more damage to the population. And all of this has one common denominator: it forces people to move away from their homes, their communities, their livelihoods, their networks, it puts them in situations of vulnerability. There are many, too many, who have not survived. But IOM is not in a business of simply saying about survival, we are here to help people thrive. The climate crisis is obviously upon us. And this region is one of the worst affected as we speak now. This agency is well articulated. We had to bring in 15 African governments, to Kampala, Uganda in July this year. What can we do with the impact that we're having on climate change and mobility in the region? And we were very glad that not only did we have ministers of foreign affairs, we had ministers of internal security, we had ministers of interior, we had ministers in charge of climate and migration and also environment, joinining this meeting, and where they who came up with what we call the ministerial declaration called the Kampala Declaration on migration, environment and climate change. And just to show how serious this situation is, for the first time, we had two heads of state, sitting in that meeting, saying this is something impacting our people, we should do something about that. So we have the president of Uganda, the president of South Sudan, in the meeting room with all these ministers coming up with a declaration. And that brings up all these issues, including what do we do now? What and what we do in Cop 27 in Sharm el Sheikh in November as international committee, but most importantly, as in this region? How are we going to deal with that? at the Kampala declaration signed by 15 members to just shows that we want to see not just the situation of our civilians, the whole community's been impacted, but mostly also, we've talked about the most sensitive parts, including women and adults, how are we going to protect them with what we're facing right now. The member states have taken cognizance of the scale and urgency of the problem in this iteration and the importance of raising the topic of climate induced mobility at the very highest level. This is why we've pushed it out. It's already on the agenda now of discussing the Kampala declaration of Cop27 this year in Egypt. And we're also very hopeful that once leaders will get listening, we'll try to tell them you need to listen to this. It's not just about climate change, it is a bigger issue that the mobility and the impact it's having on people is really hard. On your question, just going back to your question about my commitments, and that's really important for me now. Something we're pushing really hard is the social protection systems we're putting in place. And that's why, for the first time, we started what we call a ministerial meeting, a regular regional ministerial conference that meets quarterly every initiative chaired by the Government of Kenya, that looks at the whole labor mobility, climate issues and how we can provide the social protection that Kenya was fostering these for last two years. It just handed over the chairmanship to the government of Ethiopia, who would be hosting another ministerial meeting towards the end of this year, early next year to look at all these social protection systems we're dealing with. And these social protections do not address gender inequalities. And that's what we're trying to bring into this discussion, not just on the labor migration, not just on the migration management, not just on climate change, but by asking them "have you included gender inequalities, risks and the exile-related multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination against women and girls. And we see more and more ministers trying to talk about these issues and raise this in all the forum that we have. And among the many interventions which can be designed to mitigate these challenges that we're working on right now are the following. One is supporting local, national and international women's rights organizations and movements to articulate demand for improved design and delivery of social protection for all women and girls and to strengthen accountability. I mean, when I talk about accountability, it is asking the tough questions. When I meet the Minister of Justice for Djibouti, for example, or Uganda or Ethiopia, the first question is "do you have the legislation on trafficking, do you have legislation on smuggling, do you have legislation on gender discrimination, do you have led to legislation on gender based violence?". That's part of the overall work that we do to ensure that it's taken care of. Number two: increase demand for and facilitate linkages to education for the women themselves. Health, which is really important. We've seen women on the move and the health conditions and nutrition. And that also includes sexual and reproductive health for the migrant women, how can we ensure that they are included into all this? And also the whole list of gender based violence services and health insurance, which most of the migrants don't have? But how do we make sure that the're included into this? But most importantly, how do we strengthen women's livelihoods and economic advancement through the provision of quality care services and how do we provide sustainable infrastructure for them to be able to speak up and be listened to? And in what kind of livelihood programs and financial inclusion we can include the women themselves?
Fleur Heyworth
Thank you so much for your comprehensive asnwer. It's shocking to hear that ice caps are melting already, that you're likely to see in your region the worst impacts of climate change and, at the same time, the most vulnerability and least resilience to respond to the challenges that are being faced. You've given some really strong areas where action can be taken: legislation, protecting women's rights, supporting local organizations, ensuring education, health, nutrition, and these livelihoods. Mr. Abdiker, as many of our champions are heading to cop 27 in Egypt, which you've already mentioned as being a critical moment to bring together ministers, heads of state and representatives from across the system, what would be your message to them, and what needs to happen most urgently?
Mohammed Abdiker
Not just the message, but that we're trying to galvanize, not just the member states, but also the youth in our region, to speak up about this, but also, most importantly, the government's. And we tried to talk to as many of the governments in the region to include all these issues in their statements. As an organization as IOM, we have multiple experiences, studies and programs that identify, analyze and support vulnerable groups in the eastern part of Africa region. Of course, women and girls are amongst the most vulnerable, as we know that our region is dominated by very much what I call patriarchal societies, very much on the men's side. How to change that mindset is really important in the context of Cop 27. I will use the often cited term which is that climate change is a threat multiplier. It's really hard for everybody to understand that it's not just one area of threat. And this means that in societies where women and adults are already marginalized, like where I come from, climate change adds another layer of challenge, complexity and difficulty. And we want that message to go to Cop 27. But I say complexity because it is not a clear cut or simple relationship. Because while in some situations climate change may mean that more women are left behind in unsafe environments to care for children and elderly parents, while the male members migrate for work. In other situations, what we see now, as I mentioned earlier, is women that may have opportunities to also migrate for work and gain economic independence. That's when we talk about the feminization of migration that we see. But however, this also means that more women are put in situations where they could be trafficked. It is already happening. More women have been put in situations where they've been smuggled, been lied to by employment agencies that you'll get jobs in Yemen or Saudi Arabia, then trafficked and put into sexual exploitation on their way from the Horn of Africa to Southern Africa. But also we've seen where they will be sexually abused. And we've seen this in multiple migrant centers where sensitive protection issues are being told to our staff on the ground and what happened to them either in Yemen, what happened to them on their migration journey, how all this came up. My message for cop 27 will be very clearly: climate change is athreat multiplier, and is compounding a long standing systemic, social, cultural, political problem in our region. We should accelerate advocacy efforts on the whole of government, whole of society approach that no one is left behind, including our women and girls.
Fleur Heyworth
Mr. Abdiker, thank you so much for sharing such a comprehensive picture in such a short time of the multiple challenges you face and the action that needs to be taken now. I hope that this is a first step in raising awareness so that the issues are on the table, and that the voices that need to be heard or heard. Thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Mohammed Abdiker
Thank you for having me. And thank you for bringing up this very important topic.