From Bossaso to Kampala: East Africa Is Rewriting the Rules on Labour Migration

A Coastal City, a New Office, a Bigger Idea

Picture a migration officer in Bossaso, Puntland — one of the busiest and most precarious transit points on the Horn of Africa — sitting down at a newly delivered desk, opening a laptop, and logging into a system designed to track and protect the workers passing through her city. On 10 November 2025, that moment became real. The ILO formally handed over IT equipment and office furniture to the Bossaso Migration Response Centre, a small act with an outsized meaning: a government institution built to protect migrant workers was, for the first time, properly equipped to do its job.

That handover was not an isolated event. It was one thread in a much larger fabric being woven across East Africa — a regional push, funded by the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) through the Better Regional Migration Management (BRMM) Programme, to transform how governments, workers, and communities manage the movement of millions of people across borders.

Data First, Policy Second

Before any law can protect a migrant worker, someone has to count them. That's the unglamorous but essential work that took centre stage in Addis Ababa from 13 to 17 October 2025, when technical teams from the Somalia National Bureau of Statistics (SNBS) and South Sudan's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) gathered for a five-day hands-on training workshop. Their focus: designing and implementing the Labour Force Survey — the foundational tool that tells policymakers who is working, where, under what conditions, and for how much.

Without reliable data, migration policy is guesswork. With it, governments can negotiate bilateral labour agreements, set minimum wage protections, and identify where exploitation is most likely to occur. The Addis Ababa workshop was a direct investment in that evidence base — building the national capacity that makes everything else possible.

Governments Getting Serious

While statisticians were crunching methodology in Ethiopia, diplomats and policymakers were convening across the region. On 13–14 October 2025, Kenya's Ministry of Labour and Social Protection brought together government institutions, social partners, and development partners in Nairobi for a high-level roundtable on labour migration governance — a chance to take stock of progress and sharpen priorities.

Days later, Tanzania took a significant step of its own. From 23 to 24 October, the Tanzanian government convened a Technical Consultation in Morogoro to review a national gap analysis related to two landmark ILO conventions: the Migration for Employment Convention (Revised), 1949 (No. 97), and the Migrant Workers (Supplementary Provisions) Convention. Ratifying these conventions would bind Tanzania to internationally recognised standards for protecting workers who cross borders — a move that signals intent to the world and accountability to its own citizens.

Uganda, meanwhile, was consolidating years of institutional work. On 29 October 2025, the ILO and Uganda's Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development convened the Fifth National Technical Working Group meeting on Labour Migration in Kampala. Five meetings in. The word "fifth" matters — it signals that this isn't a one-off workshop but a sustained, evolving institution embedding migration governance into the fabric of the state.

Reaching Beyond the Conference Room

Policy frameworks matter. But they can feel distant from the lives of the people they're meant to protect. That's why, on 30 October 2025, the ILO took its message to Makerere University — one of Africa's most storied institutions of higher learning — for a public lecture on labour migration governance. The same day, a Media Breakfast Meeting at Kampala's Fairway Boutique Hotel brought journalists into the conversation.

Young people and reporters don't just amplify policy — they shape it. When a student at Makerere understands her rights as a potential migrant worker, or when a journalist in Kampala knows how to tell the story of a returning worker with dignity and accuracy, the ecosystem of protection grows stronger.

That spirit drove a remarkable three-city workshop series held from late October to early November: Kampala on 27–28 October, Nairobi on 30–31 October, and Addis Ababa on 3–4 November. Co-organised with the ITC-ILO, these multi-stakeholder gatherings were designed to translate the technical language of labour migration governance into advocacy, storytelling, and action. Policymakers, civil society leaders, and communicators sat in the same room, learning to speak each other's language.

Protection Where It Matters Most

None of this institutional work means anything if it doesn't reach the person walking off a boat in Bossaso, unsure of their rights and afraid to ask. From 11 to 17 November 2025, the Bareedo Platform — working alongside the ILO under the BRMM Programme — ran a week-long community awareness campaign in Bossaso, meeting migrant workers where they were: in neighbourhoods, community spaces, and transit zones. The campaign focused on the protections available to workers and the risks of irregular migration, delivered in plain language by trusted local voices.

It was the human face of everything happening in the conference rooms.

A Region in Motion

Across six countries and dozens of events compressed into just two months of late 2025, a coherent vision is emerging: that safe, fair, and governed labour migration is not a luxury for wealthy nations but a right that East Africa is actively building the infrastructure to deliver. From a new desk in a Puntland office to a ratification debate in Morogoro, from a university lecture in Kampala to a data workshop in Addis Ababa, the pieces are clicking into place.

Migration will not stop. Across the world, economic necessity, climate disruption, and the simple human desire for opportunity ensure that. The question is whether it happens in the dark, leaving workers vulnerable, or in the open — governed, documented, and protected. East Africa, right now, is choosing the light.