Around 320 young people have migrated from Buhodle and surrounding districts over the past year, according to a survey conducted by university students in the northern Somali town.
Fifteen students East Africa University’s Buhodle campus interviewed 620 parents, relatives, community leaders and officials in their study.
Abdulahi Ahmed Mohamed, secretary of the university student affairs council, who was one of the researchers, said they found that the majority of those who migrated were young people with high school diplomas. Among them were 25 university graduates.
Their study concluded that unemployment is the major factor pushing students to contemplate making dangerous journey overseas to developed countries, where they believed living standards were higher.
“It is generally the destruction of social amenities and the rampant unemployment here that discourages them from investing in their studies, so instead they decide to move away to anywhere else,” Abdulahi said.
Ten students, including three women, migrated whilst undergoing courses at the East African University. The senior registrar, Dr Asad Ali Awil, believed they left because they had no hope of finding a job locally.
Large numbers of young people left from districts and villages surround Buhodle, which lies between Puntland and Somaliland and close to the Ethiopian border. The researchers found that migrants had come from Widhwidh, Horufadi, Egaag, Hamar-Lagu-Hid and villages across the border inside Ethiopia.
Interviewees told the researchers the young people wanted to reach places where other families have relatives sending them foreign currency remittances that they rely on for their living costs.
Sahra Mohamed Karshe said her son, who had just finished high school, was leading a miserable life in a detention centre in Switzerland. “I have not heard from him lately, but he is always weeping and regretting that he left,” she said. Her family had to pay $11,000 in May to get her son released from militiamen holding him in Libya. She borrowed $4,000 and raised the rest from relatives.
Buhodle’s deputy chief of police, Colonel Ibrahim Abdi Balayah, told Radio Ergo they had caught 120 young people embarking on what he called illegal trips. These included residents of the town and others from neighbouring areas.
Twenty young people were held in custody for between three and six months to prevent them from continuing on their journeys, while others were handed over their parents. Colonel Ibrahim said stronger police action was required to curb the flow of migrants and to prevent them illegally crossing borders. Parents sometimes request the police to detain their children.
However, the students who conducted the research advocated stronger awareness-raising about the dangers of migration through seminars and conferences as the best way of deterring migration. They also urged that parents should invest more in job creation strategies for their children, instead of agreeing to find huge ransom amounts, so they do not have to migrate.
