This is the West African country from which most of the migrants who come to Italy by sea come and which has many problems
In the first eight months of 2023, 114,610 migrants arrived in Italy by sea. Of these, around one in eight, i.e. 15,484, come from Guinea, which is also called Guinea Conakry after the name of its capital, so as not to confuse it with Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea, two other African states south of the Sahara.
The flow of migrants from Guinea to Europe has been relatively stable since 2016 and only fell sharply between 2020 and 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic. From 2016 to 2022, 83,335 Guineans applied for asylum in Europe. In recent months, international organizations and those involved in reception have noted an increase in arrivals, particularly on the land route that runs from Guinea via Mali, Algeria and Tunisia, and whose first point of arrival in Europe is the island of Lampedusa.
In a text from the UN Agency for Migration, included in a report published in June 2023 by the Italian Ministry of Labor on the arrival of unaccompanied minors in Italy, we read that the Guineans landing in Italy in these months have a very low age have, between 14 and 20 years. The most common reasons given for their trip are the desire to join a relative already living in Europe, to improve their living conditions and to avoid forced marriages.
A UNICEF map reconstructing the migration route of Guineans
It is difficult to reconstruct the reasons that push a person to migrate thousands of kilometers away. Personal, social and economic factors that are difficult to separate are often intertwined, including, of course, violence and persecution based on ethnicity, religion or political affiliation.
However, we know quite well the conditions of the country that Guineans leave to reach Europe.
Guinea has around 13 million inhabitants, borders Senegal and Guinea-Bissau to the west, Mali to the north, Ivory Coast to the east, and Sierra Leone and Liberia to the south. It is a former colony of France, from which it declared independence in 1958. The official language remains French. By far the most widespread religion is Islam. In 2021, the army deposed President Alpha Condé in a coup and installed a military junta led by Colonel Mamadi Doumbouya, who promised a transition to democracy starting in 2025.
The name “Guinea” has an uncertain origin: we only know that it was given by the Portuguese to the coastal region immediately south of the Sahara. According to some, the name is derived from a word meaning “black” in the Berber language. According to others, it gets its name from a plant with a garlic smell that was widespread, especially in South America, and then brought to sub-Saharan Africa by Portuguese colonizers.
Like many countries in the region, Guinea has a predominantly agricultural economy: around half of the population is employed in the agricultural sector. This makes it extremely vulnerable to climate change. The UN migration agency recently told the story of an onion farmer who lost a lot of money due to the recurring drought. A few years ago her son decided to emigrate somewhere else. He managed to get to Libya, but she hasn’t heard from him since.
Guinea has a decades-long history of trade unions and peasant movements, but the central state has always remained quite fragile, as have its outreaches. The school system is very bad. UNICEF research conducted between 2016 and 2017 on unaccompanied Guinean minors who arrived in Italy by sea shows that a fifth of them cannot write and a quarter of them have never gone to school.
Some cows for sale at a market in Conakry (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
The health system is also very fragile. The African NGO ALIMA (Alliance for International Medical Action) reports that “the penetration of essential services is low while child mortality remains high.” In 2022, the mortality rate of women giving birth was 686 per 100,000 births, one of the highest in the world (in Italy it was 5 per 100,000 births in 2020). In the last few years alone, Guinea has been hit hard by epidemics of Ebola, measles, meningitis, monkeypox and of course COVID-19. It is also one of the countries where more people die from snakebites every year: around 3,600 people die from snakebite envenomation every year, according to a government health agency, a tenth of all deaths from this cause in Africa.
In addition to these structural problems, other, more contingent problems have recently been added. After the 2021 coup, ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, suspended Guinea, isolating it from a political and commercial perspective.
“From a political point of view, those who had the most hope for a return to democracy find it difficult to hope that they will be welcomed.” On the other hand, as in all African countries, it is southern, also due to very strong demographic dynamics the Sahara, difficult to fulfill the wishes of young people in the country,” explains Italo Rizzi, strategic director of LVIA, one of the few Italian NGOs active in Guinea.
Most Guineans who leave their country head for neighboring countries, following typical human migration dynamics. In 2015, the United Nations estimated that 22 percent of Guinean migrants went to Ivory Coast, the region’s richest country, 16 percent to Sierra Leone and 12 percent to Senegal. However, only 17 percent had reached a European country.
Col. Mamadi Doumbouya, head of the military junta that leads Guinea, during the last U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 21, 2023 (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Among those trying to reach Europe, Guineans are most likely to apply for asylum in France due to their knowledge of French and an already well-established network of compatriots. From 2018 to date, 31,170 Guineans have applied for asylum in France, while only 2,820 were in Italy during the same period. The other countries where they prefer to apply for asylum are Germany, Belgium and Spain (which they reach via Morocco).
Getting to Europe takes time and thousands of euros to pay the smugglers, and sometimes requires months or years of work to get the money.
For minors, the journey is even more complicated, explains the UN migration agency in its latest report for the Italian Ministry of Labor. At Conakry and Dakar airports in Senegal, unaccompanied minors are often not flown without an adult accompanying them. This forces them to reach the countries of North Africa by land: the journey “exposes Guinean minors and young adults, men and women, often to physical and sexual abuse”, “an element that is therefore special in the list of possible dangers involved “Requires attention with this special category of young and very young migrants,” the agency writes.
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