on labor migration in the Kyrgyz Republic

(Russian Government 2020). Many migrants who lost their jobs abroad could not return home, being stranded in the foreign countries without social protection. This disruption in the main destination countries also reduced the strength of the pull factors of migration. On top of these supply-side restrictions imposed by governments in the Kyrgyz Republic and migrant-receiving countries, citizens had also limited their mobility and consumption in a context of higher uncertainty and lower income.

The remainder of this report analyzes recently available databases to understand migrants’ vulnerabilities brought to light by the COvID-19 pandemic and corresponding policy actions through the temporary migration life cycle framework (see box 2.1 on data availability in the Kyrgyz Republic since the COvID-19 outbreak). In contexts where temporary migration is widespread, such as the Kyrgyz Republic, the migration life cycle can typically be divided into four phases (World Bank 2018; Ahmed and Bossavie 2021): premigration decision, predeparture, in-service (while migrants are abroad), and return (figure 2.1). The first stage is predecision, when a worker decides to migrate based on their

BOX 2.1

The limited availability of up-to-date data to assess the impact of COVID-19 on labor migration in the Kyrgyz Republic

The only nationally representative survey that provides information on different outcomes after the COvID-19 pandemic outbreak for both Kyrgyz emigrants and returnees is Listening to the Citizens of Kyrgyz Republic (2021). The largest survey postCOvID-19 to date is the one run by the National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic (National Statistical Committee 2020). This survey was implemented between October 15 and November 15 of 2020 and interviewed 4,954 households, representative of urban and rural areas in all regions of the Kyrgyz Republic. In terms of migration, the survey only includes questions on whether households had a family member who could not return from abroad, or if they lost their job overseas and had to return home. However, it does not provide information on the broader impact of COvID-19 on the labor market, or income and health outcomes of current Kyrgyz migrants abroad, nor does it shed light on the current situation of those who returned to the country. In 2021, the World Bank implemented the Listening to the Citizens of the Kyrgyz Republic survey, a nationally representative survey of 3,203 households (and more than 15,000 individuals), which covered questions on both current emigrants and returnees. The IOM and UNICEF conducted a rapid needs assessment of the challenges migrant workers and their families faced due to the COvID-19 outbreak (IOM and UNICEF 2020), although the reduced sample size (147 households) and sampling procedure limit the ability to confidently generalize the results for the broader Kyrgyz emigrant population.

In the Russian Federation, there have been several post-COvID-19 surveys targeted to migrants, including migrants from the Kyrgyz Republic, although they all have problems of representativeness. Perhaps the survey with the largest number of Kyrgyz migrants was run by vershaver, Ivanova, and Rocheva (2020), who used advertising targeting on the social media platforms vkontakte and Instagram to interview 2,074 migrants from April 23 to May 19, 2020, both across the Russian Federation and in Moscow specifically. Of those, 587 migrants were citizens of the Kyrgyz Republic. Denisenko and Mukomel (2020) surveyed 1,400 migrants in the Russian Federation as well as 1,300 potential migrants abroad both through social media and the telephone, although no specific results are disaggregated by country of origin. Finally, Ryazantsev and Khramova (2020) conducted a survey of more than 700 labor migrants from Central Asian countries in the Russian Federation in April 2020, of which about 10 percent were citizens of the Kyrgyz Republic.