The State of the Seychellois Diaspora 2026

1. The headcount problem

Start with the number everyone repeats. For years the figure of roughly 36,788 Seychellois abroad, about a third of the nation, circulated as fact. When we went to the primary source behind it, the UN's International Migrant Stock, and extracted the current 2024 revision directly from the official workbooks, that number did not survive. The current UN total is 22,191, not 36,788.

But the current figure has a deeper problem than being smaller. Of those 22,191 supposed Seychelles-born emigrants, 17,655, or 80%, are placed in Mozambique. There is no Seychellois community of seventeen thousand in Mozambique; the figure has every mark of a mirror-statistics artifact, a mismatch in how two countries' records are paired. Set it aside and the UN's own data describes about 4,536 people, a very different picture.

2. Where the diaspora actually is

Here the UN series fails a second time. It records zero Seychelles-born people in the United Kingdom, Canada and France, which is impossible: these are precisely the countries a Seselwa would name first as home to the diaspora. The truth has to come from the destinations' own censuses.

• Australia is the best-counted hub. Its census finds about 2,623 Seychelles-born residents, concentrated in Perth and Melbourne, and the UN figure agrees, which is how we know the method works when the records are paired correctly.
• The United Kingdom is widely described as the largest hub, and the 2021 census of England and Wales enumerates a Seychelles-born population in its detailed country-of-birth table. The exact figure is behind a query interface we are still extracting; until then we record the UN's zero as a gap, not a count.
• Canada counted roughly 740 Seychelles-born in the Montréal area at the 2016 census, against the UN's zero.
• France, despite the shared language and heritage, does not appear in the UN series at all, and we have no sourced French figure yet, so we say so rather than guess.

3. Who they are

Of the diaspora the data does count, 54.8% are women. The community is long-established rather than recent: the UN series is broadly flat across three decades once the Mozambique artifact is removed, consistent with the historical waves, the labour emigration to Britain from the 1960s and the political emigration after 1977, having settled into stable, multi-generational communities abroad.

4. The gap, and what should be done

The real finding of this first report is not a number. It is that no institution maintains an honest, current count of the Seychellois diaspora at all. The National Bureau of Statistics counts the resident population; no one systematically reconciles the destination censuses that hold the diaspora. The UN series, the one dataset that tries, is distorted for Seychelles by the Mozambique artifact and the missing hubs.

So the diaspora is governed by a figure nobody has verified. We make two modest recommendations. First, that the National Bureau of Statistics and the MFA Diaspora Unit maintain a standing diaspora dataset, reconciling the major destination censuses on a fixed cycle. Second, until that exists, we offer our own open dataset and this annual report as a starting point, free to use, correct and build on under CC BY. The honest answer to "how many Seychellois live abroad" today is: more than the 4,536 the censuses have found, fewer than the old 36,788, and not yet properly counted. Naming that gap clearly is the first step to closing it.

Methodology and how to cite this

The full method, the primary-source extraction and the Mozambique-artifact analysis are set out on how many Seychellois live abroad and in the methodology. The underlying figures are the Diaspora Atlas dataset. This report is a stable, versioned publication; its URL will not change and a permanent DOI will be added once deposited.