How many Seychellois live abroad?

The primary source, and what it actually says

The authoritative dataset is the United Nations DESA International Migrant Stock, whose 2024 revision covers 1990 to 2024. We did not take a summary of it. We downloaded the official origin and origin-by-destination workbooks and extracted the Seychelles figures ourselves, so we could see exactly what they contain.

The headline UN number is clear enough: about 22,191 people born in Seychelles were living abroad in 2024, up steadily from 10,497 in 1990. Women have been the majority throughout, 54.8% in 2024.

Then you look at where they supposedly are

The moment you open the country breakdown, the number stops being trustworthy. The UN places 17,655 of the 22,191, four in every five Seychellois emigrants, in Mozambique. There is no Seychellois community of anything like that size in Mozambique. No history of mass migration there, no clubs, no record of it in any account of the diaspora. It has every mark of a mirror-statistics artifact, a number that entered the estimation decades ago and has been carried forward through revisions.

At the same time, the UN series records zero Seychelles-born people in the United Kingdom, in Canada and in France. Those are the three most documented hubs of the entire diaspora. London is routinely described as the largest Seychellois community anywhere. The UK's own 2021 census counts Seychelles-born residents directly. A dataset that shows tens of thousands in Mozambique and none in Britain is not describing the diaspora we know.

So we reconcile, in the open

This is why the Atlas does not simply reprint the UN bilateral figures. For each hub we show the UN number beside the destination country's own census, and where the UN figure is a clear gap, we say so plainly rather than treat a zero as a count. This table is the reconciliation, and it is a work in progress, honest about what we have confirmed and what we are still sourcing.

What about the famous 36,788?

Many articles, and an earlier version of this very site, state that 36,788 Seychellois live abroad, 37.4% of the nation, attributed to UN data. We could not reproduce that figure from the current UN DESA 2024 revision, which gives about 22,191. The 36,788 appears to come from an older revision or from the World Bank bilateral matrix, both of which carry the same Mozambique inflation. We have corrected our own pages to lead with the current primary figure and to show this uncertainty rather than hide it.

The honest answer

The number of people born in Seychelles and living abroad is probably in the low tens of thousands, but the single most-cited total is inflated by a large questionable figure, and the real hubs are undercounted or missing. The wider diaspora, the children and grandchildren of emigrants and everyone of Seychellois descent, is larger still and counted nowhere. That uncounted diaspora is the reason this site's own registry exists. Every person who joins it makes the real picture a little clearer than any global dataset currently manages.