The Impact of COVID-19 on Ethiopian Migrants and Their Households in Five Communities of High Emigration (July 2022)

Summary

In 2019, the IOM Regional Data Hub (RDH) for the East and Horn of Africa (EHoA) launched a multistage research project aimed at better understanding the experiences, decision-making, perceptions and expectations of young Ethiopians along the Eastern Route from Ethiopia to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, in particular the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, via Djibouti and Somalia. The project included conducting original research with individual migrants along the route (phase one and two) and in communities of high emigration in Ethiopia (phase three).

The third stage of the project was conducted in the first half of 2021 in communities of high emigration in Ethiopia. This stage’s aim was to gain a better understanding of the environment in which migration was taking place and investigate how it was lived and experienced at household and community level. Phase three was also designed to better understand how money, information, knowledge and ideas flow transnationally between communities in Ethiopia and migrants abroad, as well as to gauge whether the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) had changed the migration environment and impacted migration from and to these communities.

Given the emergence of new migratory trends of Ethiopians along the Eastern and Southern Corridor during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper looks at five communities of high emigration in Ethiopia using household and individual-level data collected by the RDH to explain how the health emergency has impacted mobility dynamics in these communities of high emigration and the households living in them.

Source: International Organization for Migration