Les enfants migrant es ne sont pas toujours en rupture éducative

Dorte Thorsen et Mélanie Jacquemin

Les programmes de protection de l'enfance portent l'idée selon laquelle éducation et migration de travail sont incompatibles ; or les adolescentes migrantes ont des profils diversifiés, incluant de multiples formes d'éducation. Une recherche menée au Sénégal dans le cadre du programme "Terrains partagés" du LMI MOVIDA dépasse une conceptualisation étroite de l'éducation en tant que scolarisation formelle pour explorer comment les adolescentes perçoivent les liens entre migration et éducation, et comment la migration exacerbe les différences de genre et affecte en pratique leur éducation.

Migrer pour continuer son éducation

Les enfants abandonnent rarement l'école parce qu'eux-mêmes ou leurs parents ont décidé qu’il leur fallait migrer pour travailler. La plupart quittent l’école en raison des dysfonctionnements du système scolaire, de l'incapacité de leurs parents à payer les dépenses liées à l’école, ou d'une désillusion envers la « rentabilité » des diplômes. C'est particulièrement évident au niveau du second cycle de l'enseignement secondaire, où l'enseignement devient nettement plus onéreux. Néanmoins, les adolescentes aiment apprendre, elles/ils connaissent l’importance de la scolarisation et de l'éducation au sens large, et cherchent à compenser le manque d'opportunités dans les zones rurales en partant pour la ville.

Nombre d'entre eux migrent vers les villes avec l’objectif de continuer leurs études ; certains cherchent du travail pour gagner de quoi retourner poursuivre leur scolarité, d'autres cherchent de quoi financer une formation professionnelle. Les membres de la parenté urbaine invitent fréquemment les adolescentes à venir travailler pour eux avec la promesse de leur payer les frais de formation professionnelle à titre de salaire. Même pour celles et ceux qui ne poursuivent pas leurs études au sens formel de scolarisation, leur trajectoire migratoire et professionnelle est souvent structurée par une forme d'apprentissage leur permettant de prétendre à des emplois urbains mieux rémunérés et de passer d'un travail non qualifié à un travail peu qualifié.

Les élèves migrants : “partir en vacances travailler”

Les migrations de travail pendant les grandes vacances scolaires sont de plus en plus fréquentes en Afrique de l'Ouest à mesure que la scolarisation et le maintien à l’école s'étendent aux zones rurales et incluent les enfants des familles les plus pauvres, filles et garçons. Cette pratique est également répandue en Côte d'Ivoire, au Ghana et au Togo. Les données de suivi démographique en pays sereer au Sénégal montrent aussi un changement temporel dans les migrations saisonnières de travail des adolescentes au cours des vingt dernières années : la majorité des filles qui migrent pour travailler comme domestiques à Dakar ne le font plus pendant la saison sèche, mais plutôt pendant les vacances scolaires en période d’hivernage, afin de gagner de quoi financer la poursuite de leur scolarité.

Un focus group mené à Ziguinchor à partir d’une cartographie participative des trajectoires migratoires des élèves migrants, a révélé que les enfants des régions rurales de Casamance commencent à migrer pour travailler pendant leurs vacances à partir de l'âge de 10-13 ans. Les garçons partent tout d’abord dans les régions du Nord (Sénégal central, Vallée du Fleuve) pour s’engager dans des travaux agricoles ou horticoles, puis se rendent dans les grandes centres urbains (Dakar, Thiès) pour travailler comme vendeurs ambulants et porteurs sur les marchés. Ceux qui sont venus à Ziguinchor ont été attirés par des informations circulant sur la facilité d’y trouver du travail comparativement à Dakar où la concurrence dans l’économie informelle est beaucoup plus forte. Le prix du voyage, les frais de nourriture et d’hébergement sont également moins chers hors de Dakar. Pour les filles élèves migrantes cependant, le choix n'est pas aussi libre. Les filles rurales émigrent presque exclusivement vers Dakar pour travailler comme domestiques, celles qui viennent de Basse Casamance ou de Kolda peuvent aussi venir à Ziguinchor. Outre les services domestiques, les élèves migrantes travaillent comme petites vendeuses ou dans les petits restaurants de la gare routière.

Dans l'esprit de ces jeunes migrantes, « partir en vacances pour travailler » traduit leur situation socio-économique subalterne, étant donné qu'ils ne peuvent pas, à la différence des enfants de familles plus aisées, suivre les cours de vacances qui pourraient soutenir leur réussite scolaire. Les revenus dérisoires que les élèves migrants des deux sexes parviennent à gagner pendant les vacances, les conditions de travail difficiles et les mauvais traitements infligés par certains employeurs ajoutent à leur frustration, mais elles/ils s'accrochent néanmoins à l'idée que ces efforts les portent progressivement vers leurs projets futurs d’achever leur scolarité, de soutenir leurs parents et d’atteindre un meilleur statut social et professionnel.

Adolescentes migrants hors-de-l’école : vers d’autres formes d’éducation

À Ziguinchor, parmi les adolescentes migrants non ou dé-scolarisés, nombreux suivent une formation professionnelle en tant qu'apprentis tailleurs/couturières ou chauffeurs. Les garçons mentionnent également l’apprentissage dans des métiers typiquement masculins tels que maçon, mécanicien et soudeurs. Très souvent, les conditions d’apprentissage sont négociées par de proches parents, mais tous les apprentis ne sont pas certains du contenu de l’accord. Les trajectoires des adolescents, garçons et filles, mettent en évidence des différences de genre et de classe quant aux possibilités et à la capacité de se concentrer sur l'acquisition d'un métier spécialisé. De nombreuses filles ne travaillent comme apprenties qu’à temps partiel (quelques heures quotidiennes en après-midi), parce qu'elles travaillent aussi à temps partiel comme petites domestiques, soit contre salaire chez une patronne, soit sans rétribution monétaire au service de la parente-tutrice qui les héberge.

Bien que les normes sociales relatives au genre, au travail, à la reproduction et au statut des enfants évoluent, et que les filles accèdent à différentes formes d'éducation, les normes concernant le travail adapté au sexe et à l'âge déterminent fortement leur trajectoire. Le travail domestique reste un domaine féminin. La mise au travail domestique de filles migrantes issues des familles les plus pauvres peut émanciper les filles (et parfois aussi les fils) des familles qui les emploient ou les hébergent. Ainsi, alors que la migration peut ouvrir la possibilité d'apprendre un métier, la distance géographique et sociale avec leur famille d'origine que produit la migration, ne garantit pas aux filles la possibilité de dépenser la majeure partie de leur temps et de leur énergie à une activité de formation.

On observe pour les garçons, une acceptation sociale plus grande concernant le temps nécessaire à une formation pendant leur expérience migratoire ; ils rapportent volontiers tous les conseils reçus avant leur départ : se concentrer sur une activité, ne pas se disperser à travers des fréquentations non connectées à ce travail ou apprentissage, etc. Parce qu’elle les éloigne des sollicitations parentales directement portées sur leur force de travail (notamment pour les travaux champêtres), la migration peut leur offrir cet espace-temps ouvert à l’acquisition de nouveaux savoirs.

Does anti-trafficking policy protect against forced labour and exploitation or harm? The ban on migration for domestic work in Ethiopia and Ghana

By Priya Deshingkar

Domestic workers who number at least 67 million adults worldwide, according to the International Labour Organization, have been in focus recently as a particularly vulnerable group of workers. These workers are often hidden from the public gaze and not covered adequately by labour laws leaving them vulnerable to abuse. Indeed a number of rights organisations and prominent photographers including Steve McCurry have highlighted the horrendous abuse that they can suffer. The occupation is highly gendered – most migrant domestic workers are female due to stereotypes and cultural norms related to men’s and women’s work and their capabilities in both source and destination societies.

There are now high-level efforts to protect domestic workers against exploitation but our research shows that the outcomes of this protective legislation may not be what was intended. Two of these processes are worth mentioning. First, the focus on domestic work by the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Urmila Bhoola, in her report to the Human Rights Council highlights the plight of “marginalized women workers in the global domestic economy” (para 11). The same report notes that 11.5 million domestic workers are international migrants, or 17.2% of all domestic workers and 7.7% of all migrant workers worldwide (para. 31). Bhoola notes that the domestic work sector accounted for 24% of all forced labour in 2017 (para 43). Labour market intermediaries or brokers and private employment agencies as well as other parts of the migration industry such as pre-departure training centres, transport companies, travel agencies, medical testing centres and visa offices have also been implicated in creating an “enabling environment for abuse and human rights violations” (para. 58 and 60).

Second, the Trafficking in Persons report of the US Department of State which ranks countries based on their performance in combating trafficking lists domestic work as an occupation to watch. It ranks both Ghana and Ethiopia as tier 2 countries and has pressured them to criminalise migration for domestic work as well as the people who facilitate such migration. Non-compliance carries the threat of withdrawing millions of dollars of aid. Domestic work is mentioned as an occupation requiring action to curb trafficking and forced labour. Both countries had introduced bans on migration for domestic work to the Middle East. While Ethiopia lifted the ban this year, it has replaced that with heavy regulation of employment agencies which still illegalises informal agencies. Both have introduced a number of measures to control trafficking and smuggling: Ethiopia has Anti-Trafficking Task Forces across the country. A number of checkpoints have been set up along the Wollo to Galafi route on the Ethiopia-Djibouti border. Additionally local leaders have been co-opted into forming anti-human trafficking committees to police migrants. Similarly Ghana passed The 2005 Human Trafficking Act, amended in 2009, which criminalizes sex and labour trafficking. Here too a number of well-known brokers have been arrested and imprisoned and the business has been driven out of view.

In 2009 the Ethiopian government arranged for the evacuation of 160,000 migrants from Saudi Arabia. Rather than alleviating the hardship and reducing the vulnerabilities of these women, the step appears to have precipitated remigration to the Middle East. As one evacuated migrant observed “Our government, through its embassy in Saudi, was promising to facilitate different things for us. But the promise was not on the ground when we came here. I do not have a job right now; I am using the money I brought from Saudi. If the condition continues like this, and if I do not get any other alternative here, I will migrate again. The government has not given us the working area; the rent for a small shop is very high. I am paying 2,000 birr for a single room to live in.”

Perhaps this is why despite the criminalisation of both the migrants and the people they rely on to make migration possible, it continues unabated. If anything, it has grown and the country that has been named most often for the worst cases of abuse, Saudi Arabia, seems to be the destination of choice. What has changed is that the process has become far more risky.

Agencies and brokers that once traded openly have now become clandestine actors. Routes and travel methods have changed to avoid detection. In Ghana those wishing to travel to the Gulf counties must now travel overland to other West African countries before they fly to their destination. This increases the journey time and costs and can bring new risks if the overland journey is in cramped vehicles through hazardous territory. In Ethiopia large groups do not cross the desert with a broker (a “trafficker” in the popular discourse) as visualised in the popular imagination and instead split up and this can increase risks for women travelling on their own.

Furthermore, the delegitimisation of brokers appears to have spawned smuggling networks with more nefarious practices such as deception related to the terms of employment and placement without ensuring adequate protection; long journeys through virgin territory with few facilities and “safe houses” across the border (or detention centres as they are called in the press) where migrants are kept while they wait for their relatives to transfer money to brokers. Travelling without work permits and papers creates another set of vulnerabilities for migrants as they are often employed informally, without legally recognised contracts. This places them in a situation of hyper-precarity where threats of deportation and imprisonment can be used by employers to extract forced labour.

What is needed is a system of educating aspiring migrants about the possible risks of working without a proper contract, the provision of support services along the way and at destination. Blanket bans and criminalisation will not protect people against forced labour and exploitation. A serious rethink based on research-based evidence is needed.

Child migrants are not always out of education

Dorte Thorsen and Mélanie Jacquemin

Child protection programmes evolve around the idea that education and migration for work are incompatible but the profiles of adolescent migrants are diverse and include multiple forms of education. Research in Senegal under the auspice of MOVIDA’s “terrain partagé” programme moves outside the narrow conceptualisation of education as formal schooling to explore how adolescents see the linkages between migration and education, and how migration exacerbates gender differences and affects their education in practice.

1. Migration to continue education

Children rarely drop out of school because they or their parents have decided they should migrate for work. Common reasons to drop out are school malfunctioning, parents' inability to pay school-related expenses or disillusionment with the effect of school certificates in the labour market. This is increasingly evident at senior secondary level when schooling becomes notably more expensive. Nonetheless, adolescents cherish schooling, and education in a broader sense, and they counter the lack of opportunity in rural areas by leaving for the city.

Many migrate to towns and cities with the objective of continuing education; some aim to save up to return to their previous school once they have the resources, others seek to raise resources to enroll in vocational training. Urban relatives frequently invite adolescents to work for them by promising to pay fees for vocational training instead of a wage. Even when adolescent migrants do not pursue education in the formal sense, their occupational trajectory is often structured by an element of learning that allows them to move from unskilled work to lowly skilled, urban work.

2. Secondary school students’ holiday migration to work

Migration to work during the long school holidays is becoming gradually more common across West Africa, as school enrollment and retention expands into rural areas and includes boys and girls of poorer families. The practice is also common in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Togo. Demographic monitoring data in the Sereer region of Senegal suggests that seasonal labour migration among adolescent girls has declined over the past twenty years and that there has also been a temporal shift. Nowadays the majority of girls who migrate from the region to work as domestic workers in Dakar no longer do so during the dry season but during the school holidays in the wet season to save up to finance their schooling.

A focus group discussion in Ziguinchor, stimulated by mapping student migrants’ migration trajectories, revealed that rural children from the Casamance regions begin to migrate to work during their holidays from the age of 10-13 years. Boys start by doing agricultural or horticultural work in central Senegal and the Senegal River Valley, and then move on to the main cities (Dakar, Thies) to work as street vendors and porters around markets. Those who come to Ziguinchor are attracted by information about the ease with which they can find work compared to in Dakar where the competition for income is much higher. The costs of transportation, food and accommodation are also cheaper outside Dakar. For female student migrants however, the choice is not as free. Rural girls are almost uniquely migrating towards Dakar to engage in domestic work, unless they come from the lower Casamance region or Kolda, in which case they may come to Ziguinchor. In addition to domestic work, female student migrants work in small restaurants or as petty traders in the bus station.

In the minds of these young migrants, holiday migration to work recaps their inferior socio-economic position in that they cannot attend Summer programmes to support their academic achievement, like children of better-off families. The paltry wages that student migrants of both genders can make from the work they can find during the holidays, and the harsh working conditions and the abuse metered out by some employers, add to their frustration but they nevertheless cling to the idea that these efforts gradually lead them towards their future plans to complete schooling, support their parents and achieve a better social and professional status.

3. Adolescent out-of-school migrants: towards other forms of education

Among the adolescent migrants in Ziguinchor, who are out of formal schooling or never were enrolled, quite a few engage in vocational training as tailor apprentices and drivers. The boys also mention typical male occupations such as bricklayer, mechanic and metal welding. Very often apprenticeships are negotiated by close relatives but not all apprentices know what to expect or are sure about the trade. The trajectories of adolescent boys and girls highlight gender and class differences in opportunity and ability to concentrate on their acquisition of a skilled trade. Many of the girls work only part-time in their apprenticeship (a few hours per day in the afternoon), because they are also working part-time as domestic workers, either in paid employment or unpaid for the relative or guardian with whom they live.

Although social norms about gender, work, reproduction and status are changing, and girls are now pursuing different forms of education, the norms about gender and age appropriate work determine their trajectories. Domestic work remains a female domain. The work shouldered by girls of poorer families may emancipate the daughters (and sometimes also the sons) of the families who employ or accommodate migrant domestic workers. Thus, while migration may open the opportunity for learning a trade, the geographical and social distance from their family of origin produced by migration does not guarantee girls the possibility of spending most of their time and energy in a training activity.

The accounts offered by migrant boys of the advice they received before their departure reveal that they were told to focus on an activity and not get diverted by friendships not connected to this work or learning, etc. This guidance highlights the greater social acceptance of migrant boys needing time for training during their migration experience. As this allows them to move away from direct parental demands on their labour (especially for work in the countryside), migration often affords boys space and time to acquire new, specialised skills.