Remittances and unchanging livelihoods in Zimbabwe

A migrant sending household

By Vupenyu Dzingirai, Kefasi Nyikahadzoi, Byron Zamasiya, Providence Warinda and Julie Litchifield

Especially after the collapse of the economy in the early 2000s, migration has become big in Zimbabwe. The cash strapped government continues to craft policies - the Zimbabwe Diaspora Policy comes to mind - that facilitate migration which it views as a source of national development. For their part, non-migrant households in rural areas do all they can – from kukwereta (borrowing) to selling goats and chickens – to get at least one young person out of the country. There is a silent hope that migration is a route to yekusasarira – ensuring one is not left behind in poverty.

But there is a different sentiment, at least among those rural households that send children.“Migration is all useless,” remarked Mildred, a poor widow in Chivi District during an Income and Remittances’ Survey in Masvingo Province in the first half of 2018. She added that she, “Had nothing to show for children in the diaspora.”

Mildred’s pessimistic sentiments are supported by Mereki Chisauka in Hurungwe District, 600 km away in northern Zimbabwe. He too complained that migration inguva yekurasha (wasted time). Both parents have at least one son or daughter in South Africa, the most popular destination for Zimbabwean migrants. Among this group, there is undoubted pessimism around migration.

Preliminary evidence from the University of Zimbabwe researchers seems to lend credence to this growing pessimism. Migrant-sending households - whether their member is overseas, local or in the region - have roughly the same number of assets and the same consumption score as non-migrant sending households.

Migrant-sending households have no better access to health and education than their non migrant-sending counterparts. When the puzzled team asked for a general comment about migration and household improvement, survey results were also shocking: Only 39% of the households reported an improvement (kushanduka koupenyu) now, compared to before their household member migrated. 47% of the respondents denied any sort of improvement in their daily life; and, the remaining 16% of the respondents even said migration had worsened their lives.

If these findings are true, and complementary work by the Gender and Generation study also suggests this could be so, then questions present themselves. For example, is it the scale of remittances or their management by migrants and sending household that might explain continuing poverty among those left behind? With an eye to advise government and households who are interested in migration, we will hold several research indaba (community learning workshops), to figure out why migration is not moving, at least some people, out of poverty. 

Reducing the potential of migrant women: Abuses of male privilege

By Adamnesh Atnafu Bogale

Migration is an alternate strategy for diversifying income for poor families in the Kombolcha area of South Wollo, Amhara. In Kombolcha, anecdotes about men seeking financial security through marrying women who plan to migrate to Middle Eastern countries or through sending their wives to these places are increasingly common.

At the age of 22, Zebiba hatched an escape plan from the lifelong poverty in her household. She decided to go to Saudi Arabia to take a job as a domestic worker to support herself and her family. First, she went to Addis Ababa to work as a domestic worker to save money for the journey. She got her passport for 300 ETB ($15). However, because the cost of her migration was much higher than expected, she was obliged to work in Addis Ababa for longer than she had planned initially.

When she went back to Kombolcha to visit her family she unexpectedly met her future husband. He soon proposed for marriage and tied Nikah with her with the permission of her uncle. Shortly afterwards he offered his assistance in facilitating her travel to Saudi Arabia by paying the 4000 ETB ($200) for brokers, which she could not afford at the time. What she did not know was that this was a clever plan for securing a constant income through the remittances that she would eventually send from Saudi Arabia.

In a desire to be the right type of wife, Zebiba accepted that her full salary in Saudi Arabia was paid into her husband’s bank account. Like many other women who abide by the norms outlining how married women should ideally behave, she gave up her financial power with the assumption that her husband would spend her hard-earned money to their mutual benefit in the future.

However, upon her return, when she wanted a say in the spending, he prevented her from acquiring the money and controlled what she could and could not buy. In spite of living off her migrant earnings and never contributing to household expenses, he filed for a divorce when she was nine months pregnant with his baby. As we never had the opportunity to interview Zebiba’s former husband, we can only speculate about his justification of this move but we know that she felt misused. She believed that in her husband’s eyes the pregnancy had rendered her useless because she would not be able to return to Saudi Arabia to earn money for their household. Zebiba was bitter. In accordance with the local norms, she had supported her husband and not her natal family as initially planned before marrying, and now her natal relatives were angry with her. She felt alone.

Family legislation only helps women like Zebiba partially. Although the divorce settlement in court ruled that she should get half of the money she had remitted, the court ruling supported patriarchal privilege, in that it allowed for a deduction in the sum of remittance. Her husband had spent part of her earnings building a house and the court ruled that the property would be considered that of the husband, because it was built on his family’s land.

The state needs to do more for women to ensure that social change is to their benefit. It has been the norm in the Kombolcha area that men controlled resources because they were bringing money and other resources into the household, but with the increase in women’s international migration, many women have become breadwinners in their household. However, this change has not resulted in a shift locally in the control over household resources. If normative ideas and values about male privileges are left unchallenged, the likelihood of economic abuse of women is immense. Zebiba’s story shows that as it is currently, the legal system in Ethiopia does not support women’s quest for parity in resource control within marriage sufficiently. Changes in legislation and legal practices are necessary to protect women from being caught in similar situations as Zebiba.

Critical issues for the new Refugee Compact in Ethiopia

By Fekadu Adugna and Priya Deshingkar

“Imagine more than ten years without a job, moving nowhere. When we first arrived, we were young and energetic. Look at me now (displaying his arms and looking at his body in dismay). There (in Eritrea) the government took more than ten years off my life for military service. If I am given the opportunity to resettle they would take five more years for education and the like. When I am supposed to work, I am wasting my time. Does not it mean wasting my life? It is a taboo in our culture for a man to sit idle and eat. One has to work even if it is small. What you work and earn gives mental satisfaction…” An Eritrean refugee, interviewed by Mulu Getachew at Mai Aini refugee camp, September 2018.

On 17 January 2019 Ethiopia’s House of People’s Representatives approved a Revised Refugee Proclamation, which is believed to pave the road for the implementation of the “Ethiopia Compact”, part of the Global Compact for Refugees. Ethiopia has shown its readiness to respond to the UN Declaration on Refugees, which is regarded as a milestone for global solidarity on the protection of refugees. Indeed, the country’s investment commissioner announced that the new legislation was part of the Ethiopia’s “Jobs Compact”, which “allows refugees to work legally” - a $500 million programme which aims to create 100,000 jobs – 30% of which will be allocated to refugees. 

The proclamation provides refugees the right to engage in wage-earning employment, in the areas of agriculture, industrial parks (special economic zones), small and micro enterprises, handicrafts and commerce. It is a timely response to the global crisis of refugees, and is correctly welcomed by development partners as a paradigm shift in refugee policy. This is a welcome development given the fact that Ethiopia is the second most important refugee hosting country in Africa, after Uganda, with close to one million refugees accommodated in its 26 refugee camps.

However, policy makers and development partners need to consider critical socio-economic and political ramifications of the compact first.

Land scarcity and the politics of land

One of the Ethiopia’s nine pledges for refugees in the Job Compact, also included in the just enacted refugee proclamation, is access to land. This is expected to allow refugees to participate in agriculture which will give them a source of livelihood and add to the country’s GDP. Ethiopia is a country where the livelihoods of 85% of the more than one hundred million people depend on land. There is already irrefutable evidence that population growth coupled with sluggish rural economic transformation and climate change have resulted in unviable farm holdings and functional landlessness. Currently, more than one third of rural households dependent on agriculture are landless and the average landholding is around 0.5 hectares.

  

Simultaneously there are emergent multiple interests in land that exacerbate the pressure on farm land but also politicize issues related to land. These include large-scale agro-investments, intensive agri-businesses such as flori-cultures, aggressively expanding cities and towns and land grabbing. Thus, unless carefully managed and clearly communicated, giving land to refugees can easily become a political issue and endanger the initiative.

One way of diffusing these tensions is by using local socio-cultural networks and being sensitive to local inter-ethnic competition over land. Most of the refugees in Ethiopia are from neighboring countries with cross-border kinship (ethnic, clan) relations. While this could help local integration it could also easily be politicized unless the implementing bodies are sensitive to inter-group relations. This is particularly important in Gambella, where South Sudanese refugees are hosted and the Somali Region, where we find protracted refugee situations. 

Challenges of poverty and unemployment

Ethiopia is the hub of international migration in the Horn of Africa. Besides hosting refugees, Ethiopia is also a very important source and transit zone for international migrants. Annual emigration from Ethiopia is estimated to be around half a million, and two-thirds of these are irregular migrants who use different land and sea routes and networks. Much of this migration is driven by the lack of resources and employment opportunities at home.

Due to the dangerous journeys that poorer Ethiopian migrants undertake, it is common to hear worrisome news about their abuse and mistreatment en route to South Africa, Yemen and Libya. In the face of challenging socioeconomic factors such as rampant youth unemployment and poverty driven youth emigration, the new Job Compact has to be properly and clearly communicated to the citizens of Ethiopia. The fact that it is designed to benefit the citizens much more than refugees should be emphasized as its success depends on a positive reception by the Ethiopian people. Refugees should not be perceived as “grabbers” of opportunities when citizens are suffering from unemployment and landlessness. In other words, the balance between addressing the refugee problem and the problems that Ethiopia is already struggling with should be given due consideration.

Protracted IDP situation

Furthermore, there are more than two million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ethiopia, which ranks among the countries with the largest IDP populations in the world. Nearly 1.4 million of these are classed as “new” displacements caused by conflict and drought by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Regions such as Oromia have built temporary camps in peri-urban areas, some of them in the vicinity of the industrial parks.  There is widespread unemployment among IDPs and lasting solutions to their situation have not been found. It would be important that both these issues i.e., refugees and IDPs are considered together otherwise there is a danger of conflict over resources and employment.  

Viability of industrial parks

Industrial Parks in Ethiopia have failed to thrive. A study of Hawassa Industrial Park shows that the turnover of workers is high because of low wages, poor transport networks and insecure living and working conditions for women who form the bulk of the workforce. The obvious question is how these parks, which have failed to attract local workers, would attract refugees? Allocating 30,000 refugees to industrial parks should not be only a matter of quotas. The parks need to be attractive for foreign investors, local workers and refugees and be profitable and sustainable.   

Prescribed employment options

Finally, as the experience in other countries has shown, tying refugees to jobs that have been pre-specified runs the risk of defection. Refugees may reject such jobs in favour of more flexible options in the informal labour market. They may also reject them and opt for jobs that are better suited to their personal goals and qualifications.

All these potential difficulties suggest that it may make sense for the government of Ethiopia to undertake rapid pilots of the initiative, gather lessons on performance and adapt for a more effective programme.