African Human Mobility Review

Gaps in the Implementation of the Non-Prima Facie Refugee Status Determination in Uganda

Rachel Chinyakata, Cletus Muluh Momasoh , Glynis Clacherty, Filippo Ferraro — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Refugee status determination is an important initial step in protecting people seeking asylum and in determining who is entitled to international and national protection under refugee law. Refugee status determination gives access to the individuals/groups seeking asylum protection under international or national laws, grants legal certainty, protects them from refoulement and provides a pathway to integration—not just as a humanitarian act but as a human right. Uganda offers refugee protection to millions of refugees, most arriving in large numbers having fled conflict in neighboring countries. The majority of these asylum seekers are assisted at reception sites along the borders through a prima facie process. This process is accessible and largely efficient. Although much smaller in number, there are also a significant number of refugees whose applications are processed through a non-prima facie status determination. Such asylum seekers arrive as individuals or small family groups and often in urban contexts. Despite legal frameworks that provide for individual applications, the non-prima facie process faces significant barriers or gaps in its implementation. This is further exacerbated by the fact that the non-prima facie process is mostly invisible in both national and international research and in the government agenda. This article explores the barriers and the gaps in the non-prima facie refugee status determination process in Uganda.

African Perspectives on South-South Migration

Ayodeji Peter Adesanya — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Corrigendum

Editorial team — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Editorial

Mulugeta Dinbabo — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Urban Refugee Protection and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda in Ethiopia: Challenges and Missing Links

Chalachew G. Desta, Gülcan Akkaya, Samuel T. Alemu — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Urban refugees in Ethiopia face persistent challenges despite progressive legal and policy reforms, including the 2019 Refugee Proclamation, the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework, and some alignment with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. This study examined the gaps between policy commitments and lived realities by integrating desk reviews, key informant interviews with government and humanitarian actors, and in-depth interviews with 21 refugees from diverse nationalities in Addis Ababa. Findings reveal partial successes in economic inclusion, education, healthcare, documentation, and social participation, yet structural, administrative, and legal barriers constrain meaningful access to livelihoods, housing, services, and social networks. Social capital mediates refugees’ ability to navigate these challenges, while disparities in documentation, language, and market access exacerbate vulnerability. The study concludes that Ethiopia’s urban refugee protection system exhibits implementation gaps that undermine Sustainable Development Goal-aligned outcomes and emphasizes the need for coordinated, inclusive, and context-sensitive policies that translate formal rights into substantive capabilities and equitable integration opportunities.

Cross-Border Solidarity: Migrant-Led Associations as Spaces of Epistemic Resistance and Food Security Innovation in South Africa

Perfect Mazani — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the midst of closure and securitization of border regimes, climate-change displacement, and entrenched inequalities, migrant communities are not just surviving but creating new sites of resistance, creativity, and adaptation to their worlds in crisis. This paper explores how migrant-solidarity organizations function as epistemic spaces of invention and resistance in South Africa among Zimbabwean, Pakistani, and Cameroonian migrant communities in Parow Valley, Summer Greens, and Kensington (Cape Town). Based on 250 household surveys and 12 qualitative in-depth interviews, the paper explores how migrant-led social movements become sites of agency, social resilience, and resistance to marginalization habitually employed by state policy and academic scholarship. These forms of solidarity networks, which are essentially national in scope, maintain food security at a household level, access to livelihood, and socioemotional well-being. Group savings, mutual support, and rotating credit associations enable these networks to build adaptive capacities to deal with uncertain migration status and socio-economic risk. They constitute resilient, informal social safety nets for food, income, and affective resources that go beyond what formal mechanisms can provide. By situating migrant practice and epistemologies, the paper challenges hegemonic discourses that position migrants as passive. Instead, it positions everyday solidarities at the site of politicized invention and resistance. It situates where these practices intersect with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 (zero hunger), SDG 8 (decent work), and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities). It establishes a decolonial, plural migration knowledge positioning migrants as co-producers, policy entrepreneurs, and change agents.

Intersectionality of Gender, Culture, and Identity Politics in Migrant Women’s Integration in Africa

Charity Mawire, Dikeledi Mokoena — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Migration in Africa is a complex, multifaceted issue shaped by diverse factors such as conflict, economic challenges, environmental change, and political instability. The International Organization for Migration and African Union’s World Migration Report indicates that the latest available data shows that approximately 21 million Africans were living in another African country, and about 47.1% of these migrants were female. The intensity of migration flows in African countries has given rise to anti-immigrant populism, increased anti-migrant hostility manifesting through anti-migrant attitudes,
violent xenophobic attacks, migrant discrimination and marginalization as witnessed in various countries around the world. All these, in one way or another, are indications of a lack of or hindrances to migrant integration in host communities. This study explored how the integration of women in host communities is shaped by complex interacting influences of gender, cultural norms, and identity. Issues of gender, migration status, ethnicity, and socio-economic factors intersect to influence migrant women’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion in host communities. Drawing on intersectionality theory and existing academic research and policy documents, this study explored how identity influences public perceptions, legal rights, and social belonging among migrant women. It also analyses the role of cultural norms in either facilitating or hindering integration, particularly in relation to gender roles, community expectations, and institutional barriers. Findings show that intersecting challenges of gender roles and expectations, cultural norms, and identity increase the vulnerability of migrant women, complicating their integration pathways. However, despite these vulnerabilities, migrant women actively exercise agency, creating opportunities for their integration in the host communities through community-led initiatives. These insights call for a gender perspective in developing and improving migrant integration frameworks, policies and strategies to address specific realities of migrant women across the African continent.

The Middling Citizenship Trap: Belonging Denied Through Neoliberal Exclusionary Inclusion in South Africa

Yvonne Zama Sibaya — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This ethnographic study examines 26 first-generation professional middle-class naturalized South African citizens, using purposive sampling from 2019 to 2022. These citizens experience racial violence and sociocultural exclusion despite legal inclusion. The research investigates “middling citizenship,” which has become a liminal space where naturalized professionals navigate between legal legitimacy
and cultural foreignization in post-apartheid neoliberal governance. Despite state naturalization granting legal belonging, participants struggle with integration, as racialized boundaries sustain exclusion, while economic capital permits only partial inclusion. The findings show how naturalized citizens use their economic power to resist marginalization. They do this by performing belonging through economic visibility while remaining culturally invisible. The study unmasks the neoliberal paradox of middling citizenship, exposing post-apartheid contradictions. Rainbow Nation rhetoric promises colorblind integration, but in practice, it perpetuates colonial racial hierarchies. The results show that merit-based citizenship creates conditional belonging, privileging economic performance over cultural acceptance. Postcolonial frameworks are needed to acknowledge authentic belonging beyond economic legitimacy in transitional democracies.

Necropolitics and Slow Violence: Revisiting Migrants’ Access to Healthcare during the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Africa

Paddington Mutekwe , Kenny Chiwarawara — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Migrants constitute a vulnerable group of individuals. Such vulnerability is pronounced during times of crises such as a pandemic. South Africa recorded its first COVID-19 case on 5 March 2020, and the cases kept on surging, prompting the government to announce a nationwide lockdown on 23 March 2020. The COVID-19 lockdown engendered socioeconomic, protection, and health challenges to the entire population but with a unique effect on vulnerable groups such as foreign nationals. This paper examines the health challenges foreign nationals faced in South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic. Theoretically, the paper uses Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics to argue that the exclusion of migrants from accessing healthcare resulted in the manufacture of a population who lived at the margins of society, where living meant continually standing up to face death in their everyday lives (slow violence). Methodologically, the paper draws on a qualitative study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, where data were generated through in-depth interviews and document analysis. The paper’s key findings are that foreigners faced medical exclusion in accessing healthcare and COVID-19 vaccines, and they also faced a lack of information and language barriers, which negatively impacted their access to healthcare services. The paper concludes that these challenges stem from a lack of political will to adequately include foreigners in health initiatives. The insights of this paper may prove helpful in considering inclusive health initiatives.

Rural-Urban Migration and Translocal Livelihoods in West Africa: Review of Literature

Edmond Akwasi Agyeman, Joseph Kofi Teye, Joseph Yaro — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper we review literature examining migration and translocal livelihoods across the West African subregion. Translocal livelihood is defined as the networks of interlinkages and interdependence that exist between mobile and non-mobile populations in the region. The paper focuses on translocal livelihoods between rural and urban populations. It adopted a non-systematic literature review approach. The literature indicates that rural-urban migration across West Africa has created various degrees of interdependence between migrants and their household members in the places of origin. Translocal networks diminishes the dichotomies between urban and rural spaces. During translocal relations, the movement of resources between migrants and their household members living in the places of origin is bidirectional. Moreover, translocal ties are sustained by the extended family system. However, there is limited understanding about how translocality leads to the sustenance of origin society cultural values such as language, beliefs, and family system among migrants and their children.