IOM will hold a series of eight national workshops on the
protection of vulnerable people on the move in the Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS), beginning next week.

The IOM-convened workshops will gather a range of national-level
actors involved in child protection, women's rights, and migration
and refugee issues. They will discuss the inter-agency referral of
migrants, asylum-seekers and victims of trafficking, all using the
same migration routes in a mixed migration flow, in a bid to
improve the protection of such groups.

The national workshops will be carried out in Benin, Burkina
Faso, Ghana, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Togo from 22
November until 9 December.

The one-day events follow up on regional trainings on the same
theme, held in Accra and Ouagadougou in April and May 2010, and
which form part of the ECOWAS Common Approach on Migration and the
Ouagadougou and ECOWAS Action Plans on Trafficking in Persons.
These trainings focused on harmonizing knowledge and best practices
on protecting people on the move in the region.

"These workshops are an important opportunity for those working
on protection-related issues to really lay the foundations for
stronger referral systems and partnerships," says IOM Regional
Representative for West Africa, Abye Makonnen.

West Africa is characterized by a high level of migration,
particularly intra-regional migration with an estimated ten times
more people moving within the region than towards Europe or other
destinations. In addition to this movement, West Africa is
receiving refugees and migrants from other regions of Africa and
the wider world, while environmental degradation is aggravating the
pressure for people to move from poorer to relatively more
prosperous areas within the region. West Africa was also witness to
massive forced displacement in the 1990s and early 2000s.

As a result, protection concerns and needs in the region include
adequate reintegration support for displaced people returning home,
minimizing the effects of growing xenophobia in destination
countries, reducing migrant vulnerability to human trafficking, and
improving integration for those wanting to stay in their adopted
country.

The workshops are organized in cooperation with the ECOWAS
Commission, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and
the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and are funded by the
US State Department, Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration
(PRM). IOM has worked with the ECOWAS Commission since 2000 through
the Migration Dialogue for West Africa (MIDWA) to address
problematic migration issues such as the differing protection needs
of mixed migration flows.

For more information, contact:

Lamine Daffé

IOM Dakar

Tel: +221 338696239

E-mail: "mailto:ldaffe@iom.int">ldaffe@iom.int

or

Elina Saaristo

IOM Dakar

Tel: +221 778197250

E-mail: "mailto:esaaristo@iom.int">esaaristo@iom.int