Living in Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso turns more on whether you can get hired than on what the job pays. The pay itself is low, but tax is light and daily life is inexpensive, so the modest sum left at the end of the month stretches further than it looks. The real obstacle is access. The market favours people already known to it, and with French the working language, an outsider relying on English faces a steeper climb still.

Burkina Faso's diaspora has a single overwhelming home: Côte d'Ivoire. Of the roughly 2.1M Burkinabè living abroad, 1.8M are in Côte d'Ivoire alone, dwarfing every other destination — a corridor built on decades of cross-border labor migration. The diaspora has grown 16% over the decade. The country also takes in arrivals, mainly from that same neighbor, but it remains a clear net sender of people.