This article explores Ethiopian girls' narratives of risks and vulnerability during their migratory journeys to, in and from Saudi Arabia. It discusses how risks of deprivation and abuse that drive girls to leave their homes are sustained during the migration process. The research primarily draws on interviews with 35 deported girls from Saudi Arabia to analyse intersecting structural, sociocultural, gendered and personal factors that force them to take these risks. It argues that although Ethiopian girls migrate to escape childhood poverty and vulnerability, these conditions are not averted but reproduced during migration. By foregrounding the experiences of deported girls, the article further discusses how the desire to support familial livelihoods engenders their circular migration and how multiple actors of migration take advantage of their labour and bodies against the backdrop of limited institutional support systems.

This article is an analysis of the role of human smuggling practices and of the transnational social relations of Eritrean refugees exiting and transitioning through Ethiopia. Based on two years of multisited ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how smugglers, aspiring migrants, and former migrants, settled en route and in diasporic spaces, try to minimize the risk of violence through communities of support and knowhow. In so doing, I argue that smuggling is a socially embedded collective practice that strives to facilitate safe exit and transitions of Eritrean refugees despite the criminalization of migration, the militarization of borders, and the potential and existing criminal activity along Eritrean, Sudanese, and Ethiopian migratory corridors. The facilitation of irregular transits by migrants themselves reproduces a collective system of migratory knowledge that aims to bring refugees to safetya community of knowledgein which smuggling emerges as a system of refugee protection from below.

On the basis of the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sweden, Italy, Sudan and Ethiopia during 2013–2015, this study examines the motivations, organizations and impact of overland migratory journeys from Ethiopia and Eritrea across the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea to Sweden. The analysis involves the exploring of how migrants strive to prepare, manage and survive the multiple risks and structural barriers they encounter: the exits from Eritrea and Ethiopia, negotiations and contacts with various brokers and facilitators, organized crime and violence, restrictive border controls, passage through the Desert and high Sea and finally, ‘managing the asylum system in Sweden’. Further, it maps how the process of contemporary refugee mobility and multiple transitions is facilitated by the entanglement of transnational social relations and smuggling practices. The study argues for a perspective wherein migration journeys are embedded in and affected by the process of dynamic intergenerational, translocal and transnational social relations, material practices and knowledge productions. It depicts how practices and facilitations of irregular migratory mobility reproduce collective knowledge that refugees mobilize to endure risks during their journey, establishing a community and creating a home after arriving at the destination location.

This study is about the developmental challenges and adversities to children and the youth in Arba Minch which is one of the emerging towns of Ethiopia. Primary data for the study was collected through case stories, in-depth interview with key informants from families, experts in concerned organizations, FGD and observation methods. The purpose of the research was to explore how the emerging risk situations in the family, community and school environments are threatening the socio-economic and intellectual developments of children and the youth in the town. It is identified that there are adverse situations for thousands of children and the youth in the family, school and community environments. Risk factors in the community include high rate of substance abuse, crime and violence, unemployment, idleness and absence of children and youth recreational centers. The presence of shops that show pornographic and action video, drug centers around schools, shortage of educational inputs or teaching-learning facilities, absence of variety of learning styles, students’ misbehaviors, and low academic achievements have made schools ineffective. The family environment is also not comfortable for positive child development due to the prevalence of child abuse, child neglect, poverty and family disorganization.