4 out of 5 children living on street - children of internal migrants

Four out of five children who live or work on the street in Kyrgyzstan are children of internal migrants. Such data was presented today to journalists at the office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the Kyrgyz Republic.

Head of the Office of the International Organization for Migration Bermet Moldobaeva spoke about the situation in external migration.

The main destination country for our migrants is still Russia, where 77 percent of migrant workers from Kyrgyzstan are employed. At the same time, the number of our citizens there is growing all the time. The second most important country is Kazakhstan, the third is Turkey. Today, there are 4 percent of our citizens. Another 2 percent work in South Korea, 3 percent work in other countries.

Bermet Moldobaeva

According to her, the peculiarity of migration is the departure for the work of both parents. «And the increasing problem is the children left by them. We do not say that these are abandoned children. They are temporarily left (for a year or two, five or ten years). Parents send them money for maintenance, education," Bermet Moldobaeva said.

The head of the UNICEF office in the Kyrgyz Republic, Yukie Mokuo, noted that the abandoned children of migrants are threatened with violence, neglect of their needs and lack appropriate guardianship and protection.

She noted the great dependence of the economy on remittances of labor migrants. «There is no big industry in Kyrgyzstan that would bring income. And in the next 5–10 years, this trend will continue, although we hope that mining and agro-culture will develop. We need to think about what we can do together with the government and civil society," Yukie Mokuo said.