President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has called for stronger international cooperation and solidarity to fully materialize the benefits and potential of human migration.
He made this call during the opening session of the Kofi Annan Peace and Security Forum in Accra, a high-level multi-stakeholder program hosted by Ghana, supported by Germany and Norway. The forum brought together representatives from the United Nations, the European Union, and the West African Regional bloc, ECOWAS, among others, to discuss topics such as climate change and migration in West Africa, community resilience to climate change and conflict, irregular migration, and transnational organized crime.
“Migration represents one of the most important and pressing issues in the contemporary world, and there can be no doubt that it will remain the center of global development for the security agenda of the following decades.”
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo
According to him, the ability to use migration as a catalyst for prosperity and growth necessitates a rigorously objective evaluation of the underlying causes, motivators, advantages, and drawbacks of migration movement. Only a portion of the issue is shown, according to President Akufo-Addo, by the biased attention on immigration laws and the difficulties facing African nations.
President Akufo-Addo stated that the opaque and unbalanced nature of globalization, which includes the prevailing contradictions in the global trading system, had limited the policy options and choices available to African countries, which had made their development efforts worse and closed off their institutional viability to address the issues related to migration and insecurity.
The President urged the attendees of the forum to engage in a thorough discussion of “what global corporation must enhance the mutual benefits of migration for both countries of origin and destination and under what conditions must population movement transform into threats and insecurity and what preventive mechanisms exist.”
The President said that immigration has evolved into a very delicate and emotional topic that is occasionally distorted and used as a springboard for hysteria and fury. President Akufo-Addo asserts that population movements have always been an essential aspect of the human experience, frequently presenting huge opportunities and acting as a crucial catalyst for the growth and shared prosperity of both the states and societies of origin and destination.
Nevertheless, he added that movements are not without their challenges, which have grown more numerous and intricate in light of globalization and the development of new communication technologies.
The President revealed that the consequences of food insecurity, water scarcity, droughts, and climate change have become even more severe. According to the data available, 3.5 billion people, or 40% of the world’s population, who reside in regions including Africa are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
“In effect, population movement involving the citizens of African countries are both the outcome of the same capacity deficit on the continent and a product of the interaction between African states and the global political economy.”
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo
African nations are primarily affected by the development and insecurity caused by climate change, despite being the least accountable for greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, the connections between climate change and its capacity to expose people to various types of insecurity demonstrate that the majority of population flows have both local and global injustice as their root causes.
Migration is still a major global issue with profound social and geopolitical ramifications. Despite the establishment of protocols by international and regional organizations such as the UN, AU, and ECOWAS, which recognize the significance of migration, obstacles to its implementation still exist.
These consist of a lack of knowledge of protocol, inadequate border security, corruption, and inconsistent regional immigration laws. KAPS 2024 therefore seeks to address these issues directly. Broad thematic discussions on migration, sustainable development, African migration drivers, conflicts, and societal resilience in the multipolar world order and their effects on peacebuilding and conflicts will all be featured at the forum.
The president’s address highlighted the necessity of global collaboration to address migration issues objectively for the benefit of humanity, acknowledging the increasing necessity of migration over the next decades for countries of all income levels.
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