Ensuring Enabling and Supportive EnvironmentsHousing and the living environment - Migration
As younger people continue to move for employment older people often choose to join them to seek a better life. In many parts of the world, with younger people moving to urban areas, older people are left behind, often with grandchildren to care for. There are implications for both the communities they leave and those they join. The world community must direct special attention to those older people who move because of disasters or who are refugees. Others become migrants in their own communities for lack of housing. The homeless, refugees, and victims of disasters and wars of all ages deserve interventions that secure their safety, provide for their basic needs, and provide hope for resettlement. Often massive efforts by nations and international NGOs are required to resolve the complex problems to restore living arrangements, jobs, food and transport.
Research- Serious studies of the conditions that affect, indeed cause migration, from rural to urban areas, from poor countries to richer countries need tobe done to bolster the efforts of nations, communities, regions and UN agencies to change the perverse effects of migration forced by conditions and circumstances.
- Research into the conditions migrants face in new countries and urban areas need to be undertaken to inform strategies to alter the flow of migrants, as appropriate, and provide living conditions and to inform strategies to alter the flow of migrants, as appropriate, and provide living conditions and employment that will reduce the need for people to move, at risk, from places they know well to a new environment.
- Analyses of government policies and practices that affect migration are needed to identify changes that are needed, incentives that should be created, and play critical roles in the well-being of migrants.
- The need to prepare a talented cadre of administrators, researchers, teachers, and practitioners who are needed to manage the flow of migrants and refugees is huge. Efforts to prepare those key personnel to understand older people with the special needs and circumstances must be launched preferably through international programs created to fill this need.
- Current policies and practices and the consequences of apathy among nations has resulted in a world situation that causes thousands of people to cross borders, often a great personal cost; Until development plans succeed in enabling people to achieve their dreams for employment, education, shelter and dignity within their countries and communities, migration will continue to uproot people and lead to terrible conditions.