Living in Burundi

Burundi pays among the lowest anywhere, and the cost of an ordinary life sits down there with it, so the two roughly cancel and a salary leaves only a little to spare. Tax is light enough that what you earn is mostly what you keep. The harder obstacle is getting in at all, since hiring rarely reaches someone without local roots and English carries almost nowhere, which leaves French as the language of work.

Burundi sends out somewhat more people than it takes in, and the regional churn runs both ways. About 576.5K Burundians live abroad, a diaspora up 30% over the decade, settled mainly in Tanzania, Rwanda, and DR Congo. At the same time, the country hosts some 351,000 foreign-born residents, most of them from DR Congo — a picture of dense movement across the Great Lakes borders rather than one dominant direction.