South Sudan’s out-of-country registration and voting process: Food for thought

by Mary-Sanyu Osire

Recently, The Sudan had a referendum to vote on South Sudan’s separation from the North.

Of particular interest to me was the 8 out-of-country registration and voting centers that the South Sudan Referendum Commission established in Kenya, Uganda, Australia, Ethiopia, United States of America, Canada, the United Kingdom and Egypt. These countries were selected owing to the large number of South Sudanese living there.

ABOVE: South Sudanese queue at one of the voting stations during the recently concluded referendum on cessation. Photo credit/Google images

I am a strong proponent of migrants being actively (not passively!) engaged in contributing towards the political, social and economic direction of their countries of origin. To this end, I believe that governments should go out of their way to foster relations with their citizenry in the Diaspora in a bid to propel national development efforts.

Statistics from 2009 showed that formal and informal remittances to developing countries are said to have been as much as three times the size of official development aid. In 2009, the estimated amount of remittances sent by migrants was $414 billion. In the same year, more than US $316 billion in remittances went to developing countries, a figure that represents 76 per cent of total remittances in 2009.

And this figure is set to grow. According to the International Organization for Migration’s recently launched World Migration Report, the international migrants could number 405 million by 2050 if migration continues to grow at the same pace as during the last 20 years.

The World Bank estimates that if countries with declining populations allowed their workforce to grow by only 3 percent by letting in an extra 14 million migrant workers between 2001-2005, the world would be $356 billion a year better off -- with the majority of these funds flowing to developing countries.

The maths is easy:

“Embracing emigrants = Propelling national development efforts”

I congratulate the South Sudan Referendum Commission for engaging their citizenry in the Diaspora and now encourage South Sudan’s policy makers to continue relentlessly engaging their emigrants as their new country works towards establishing its foundation.

Get it right, South Sudan! Then maybe the rest of us could learn from you.

The author is a humanitarian analyst and she writes on migration. Email her on: msanyu@yahoo.com