We’re attending the ‘Migration and mobility – new frontiers for research and policy’ conference in Ghana

On the 5-6 October delegates from around the world will be gathering in Accra, Ghana for the ‘Migration and mobility – new frontiers for research and policy’ conference hosted by UNU WIDER and the African Research Universities Alliance. The organisers have brought together researchers and policy makers to share new knowledge on migration within the Africa region. They explain:

“Migration and mobility are key facets of our increasingly globalized world, posing challenges but also offering opportunities. For migrants, this may include economic and social mobility, as well as improved physical security and an escape from conflict, violence and persecution. While the impact of migration on both host and sending countries is a topic of considerable contemporary political debate, there is also ample research showing the benefits in terms of labour market outcomes, economic growth, as well as diversity and innovation.”

Migrating out of Poverty is delighted that team members from South Africa, Ghana and the UK will be attending the conference.

On Thursday 5 October:

• From 09.00-10.30, Ingrid Palmary will provide a keynote on ‘Global and local influences on policy making: An example of the South African anti-trafficking legislation’. She will discuss how global influences shaped the development of South Africa’s anti-trafficking legislation (Prevention and Combatting of Trafficking in Persons Act no. 26715, 2013). She has mapped these influences in terms of how they shaped the passing of the Act as well as the form that it took. In her address she will give attention to the case of migration policy-making which has taken place amidst complex and unequal global relationships.
• From 10.45-12.30 (Parallel 1.4), Mariama Awumbila will chair the session on ‘Migration within Africa: defining the governance challenge.’
• From 14.00-15.45 (Parallel 2.3), Ingrid Palmary will chair the session on ‘Gender.’ Julie Litchfield will present work from the counterfactuals study in Zimbabwe, ‘Migrant remittances and gender in Zimbabwe.’ This paper examines remittance sending behaviour of Zimbabwean migrants, both internal and international, exploring the nature of remittances and how remittance behaviour responds to the characteristics of the receiving family. Particular emphasis is placed on exploring gender differences in motivations to remit. The analysis draws on primary data collected by the authors in Zimbabwe in 2015 from a sample of 1200 households. 
• From 16.15-18.00 (Parallel 3.2), Eva-Maria Egger will present work from the counterfactuals study in Ghana, ‘Migration experience, the migration decision and its impact on household welfare: new evidence from rural Ghana.’ In this paper, she explores repeated migration within a household and consequent welfare outcomes. The paper provides evidence that households often have more than one migrant member and that they have different characteristics depending on who moved first. New migrants are more likely to be from a younger generation, they face lower migration costs, and only few of them remit. She finds no effect of sending a new migrant on the change in the asset index. The different nature of migration of new migrants implies neither an economic gain for the household nor a loss. The reason for the former is that the migrants remit less or not at all and the reason for the latter is that migration becomes less costly with prior experience. 

Do come along to our sessions and meet the team.

My PhD odyssey with Migrating out of Poverty

By Jon Sward,

In August, after five years of hard work, my PhD odyssey – which included a studentship with Migrating out of Poverty – came to a happy conclusion when I submitted the corrections to my thesis, following my viva voce exam in February.

When I started my PhD journey, I knew that I wanted to focus on the relationship between migration, poverty reduction, and the environment at migration destinations in low-income contexts. This was in October 2012, and I had spent a good chunk of the past half-year taking part in follow-up activities with key policy stakeholders in relation to the Foresight Report on Migration and Global Environmental Change. The report provided an overview of the state-of-science on climate migration, drawing on 70 working papers from scholars around the globe. Among the key findings of the report was that in future decades people were likely to be in increasingly moving into areas that are affected by dramatic environmental changes, and yet the nascent body of research evidence at the time on the ‘climate-migration nexus’ was mainly preoccupied with how environmental factors contributed to out-migration in migration ‘origin areas’.

I was interested in looking at how things were panning out for migrants at other end of the migratory chain, and how environmental change was part of this equation. These rather vague origins eventually led me to alight on internal migration to rural agricultural areas in Ghana’s Brong Ahafo region. One of my supervisors, Prof Dominic Kniveton, suggested I consider using ‘complex adaptive systems’ (CAS) theory as a way to frame my research – and I’m glad I did as this framework helped my re-think the ways I saw migration and climate relations, and led me to a set of questions I probably would not have encountered otherwise. CAS theory is based on the notion that human systems and the environment are co-evolving, and that the actions of agents underlie larger patterns and processes. Rather than staying in equilibrium, however, human and environmental relations are continuously being re-formed through feedback processes and non-linear relations. CAS theory invites a thorough analysis of the positioning of social actors within wider structures, and an understanding of the ongoing dialogue between these social actors and the environment.  

As part of my PhD, I conducted qualitative research with three communities in Brong Ahafo, which were mainly comprised of migrant farmers from Northern Ghana. CAS theory gave me a framework to explore the relationships between in-migration, changing land tenure norms under which farmers were acquiring land, and the impact of environmental change (especially rainfall variability and bushfires) on these migrants’ livelihoods. Their  livelihoods were embedded in larger agricultural supply chains that link rural Ghana to global markets, while also being mediated by varying social, monetary and other types of capital on the local level and weather patterns which migrants claimed were becoming increasingly erratic.

I found highly differentiated livelihoods among my interview participants across the three sites. This suggested that those who had arrived in the region when land tenure norms were comparatively good, or who had significant social capital within these ‘stranger’ communities, had sometimes been highly successful since migrating to Brong Ahafo. However, many of their migrant counterparts were – as they put it – ‘farming at a loss’, and were struggling to eke out a living through tenant farming.

One of the things that struck me about the tenant farmers I worked with as part of my PhD research was how invisible they were at the level of national policy, to say nothing of international donors’ agendas. Despite the repeated refrain that development policy should help ‘the poorest’, often those who are truly at the margins are left unheard. In a round-about way, these insights led me to my new post-PhD line of work, which while building on my focus on environmental change, doesn’t have a migration element, at least for now. In August, I started a new job at the Bretton Woods Project, a World Bank and IMF watchdog based in London. As the Environment Project Manager, I am developing a new environmental advocacy focus that will build on the Bretton Woods Project’s historical focus on monitoring the Bank’s role in climate finance and investing in energy infrastructure projects in developing countries. We are entering a pivotal global moment in terms of efforts to deal with the existential threat that anthropogenic climate change poses. Although the Bank has been quick to identify the problem of climate change – probably shouting the loudest about it amongst multilateral development banks – change on its operational side has not been swift, and between 2008-2015 it poured some $25 billion into investment in fossil fuels according to Oil Change International.

Like all big institutions, adapting to climate change for the World Bank will be painful but necessary if it wants to carry out its mission of poverty reduction that will reach the poorest, who are often most at risk of climate change’s impacts. Too often, the solutions to these problems have been linear, technical solutions – we’re entering a tough new world, and we need to understand the complexities that underpin it.

A doctoral student’s journey with Migrating out of Poverty

In the summer five years ago, while I was writing up my Master dissertation, I received an email from the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium offering me a studentship. I accepted gratefully and today I am looking at a completed PhD thesis on internal migration in Brazil and Ghana as well as on a long list of skills and experiences gained during my work with the team.

Migration forms part of life for many people in developing countries, but questions remain about modern patterns of internal migration beyond rural-to-urban movement and the impacts on receiving communities as well as on the households that stay behind. In my dissertation, I investigated these questions through the lens of an economist. The thesis comprises three essays that utilise household data and apply econometric methods for the analysis.

In the first paper, the focus is on Brazilian workers who move out of metropolitan cities to smaller towns. Documenting that as many people move out of the mega cities as into them, I find that high housing costs in the big cities appear to drive the migration decision. Migrants earn relatively more, or at least as much, in the small towns as in the cities once rent prices are accounted for and they prefer smaller destinations close to their origin and within their state of birth.

The high mobility of the Brazilian population raises the question of how the arrival of migrants in a new location affects economic and social factors there. The arrival of internal migrants is associated with an increase in local homicide rates, but only if the destination labour market has a small informal sector and/or if it had very high crime in the past. These findings point at the role that local labour market structures play for the integration of migrants, whether internal or international.

The third essay turns to repeated patterns of migration and their consequences for origin households. Together with Dr Julie Litchfield, Team Leader of the Quantitative Research in Migrating out of Poverty, we documented different migration patterns in rural Ghana using data collected there in 2013 and 2015 by the Centre for Migration Studies (CMS). Migration is a repeated event within these households, family members move and others move a few years later. We found that new migrants are more likely to be from a younger generation, they face lower migration costs, and only few of them remit. There seems to be no effect on a household’s asset index when a new migrant moves. We concluded that the different nature of migration of new migrants implies neither an economic gain for the household nor a loss. The reason for the former is that the migrants remit less or not at all and the reason for the latter is that migration becomes less costly with prior experience.

Aside the important financial contribution the consortium has made to my PhD, working as part of the Sussex team was an enriching experience filled with great opportunities. I was able to follow the process of collecting a household survey from the design of a questionnaire through the training of enumerators to the verification of the data. I was involved in the data cleaning and further data analysis for several working papers, for example in Bangladesh (RMMRU), Ghana (CMS) and South Africa (ACMS). During this process I grew in confidence thanks to the trust put in me by the team. For example, I was granted the opportunity to travel to the partners of ACMS in South Africa and CMS in Ghana to discuss the data and research results. Most of all, I appreciated to work in a multi-disciplinary team. The quality and diversity of research presented at the final conference this March summarized the importance of looking at the topic of migration through various lenses in order to understand it better. The consortium impressed and excited me to continue to do so.

Today I write this blog from Rome, where I have started a post-doctoral position in the Research and Impact Assessment Division of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a UN organisation. The Fund’s projects are geared towards rural development and the topic of migration is recognized as an integral part of this process. I get the chance to contribute the experience gained during these past years of my work with Migrating out of Poverty, and new topics await me, such as seasonal migration within the rural transformation process. Throughout all these new challenging research agendas, I look forward to future collaboration with Migrating out of Poverty and its partners!