The African Migration Observatory, a study platform launched by the African Union (AU) to improve migration governance on the continent, was on Friday inaugurated in the Moroccan capital, Rabat.
“Today, Africa will have its own data, this will allow us to disprove several myths about migration,” said Moroccan Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Nasser Bourita at a ceremony he cochaired with AU Commissioner for Social Affairs Amira El Fadil.
The observatory’s mission will be to collect, analyze and exchange data across “an interconnected system” linking African countries to improve migration policies that are “often ineffective due to a lack of data,” the inauguration document showed.
Bourita called the observatory’s establishment “a strong message to the international community on the determination of Morocco and Africa to establish better migration governance on the continent.”
It would help “demystify” migration issues, he added, deploring the politicization of the subject.
The inauguration “marks the beginning of our efforts toward generating data that is balanced and relevant to the needs of Africa in the field of migration,” Fadil said.
Migration in Africa is essentially intra-African, with 80 percent of migrants from African countries remaining on the continent, and only 12 percent entering Europe — the remainder traveling elsewhere — according to figures released by Rabat in 2018.
South Africa topped the list of intra-African migration destinations, with 3.1 million arrivals, followed by Ivory Coast at 2.1 million and Nigeria, which recorded 1.9 million.
The launch of the platform was announced in December 2018 in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh, on the sidelines of the adoption of the UN Global Compact for Migration.
Fadil said that the AU plans to open two other agencies dedicated to migration: the African Centre for the Study and Research on Migration in Bamako, Mali and the Continental Operational Centre in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.
The regulation of migration, especially from Africa, has become a major concern of the EU after the influx of more than 1 million migrants in 2015. The tightening of EU border controls has led to a sharp drop in irregular entries.
They were down 92 percent last year, compared with the peak in 2015, and down 14 percent over the first eight months of this year, compared with the same period last year, according to the European agency Frontex.
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