Cities on the climate front line

By Priya Deshingkar

Extreme weather has displaced around 26 million people from their homes every year since 2008. Yet climate migration has failed to make it on to the negotiating table at major climate change summits, and COP 21 could be no different.

The draft agreement gives short shrift to climate-induced migration: the word is used just twice in the 54-page document, and the only other mention relates to a “displacement coordination facility” to support those displaced. Campaigners and major migration agencies fear that even these will be axed from the final treaty. This matters because without momentum at global level, governments may fail to put in place policies and infrastructure to address links between climate and migration.

Extreme weather events and sea-level rise will displace people. But evidence shows this is unlikely to result in the ‘tides of people’ swamping Europe that scaremongers often speak of. [1]

Rather, cities in the global South are likely to bear the brunt of climate migration — or, to be more precise, their slums.

This is certainly the case in South Asia, which has some of the world’s fastest growing megacities. In Dhaka, capital of disaster-prone Bangladesh, roughly 350,000 migrants arrive every year, adding to the city’s 14 million inhabitants. Most are displaced from the delta region where storms and sea level rise have made farming less viable.

One way of viewing such migration is as a way to adapt to climate change. But government attitudes and policies around rural-to-urban migration are increasingly hostile. [2] Many governments refuse to provide services for fear of encouraging further migration, which they link to worsening crime, filth and disease. Research from Ghana and India shows the extent of government inaction.

This inaction keeps in place awful systems of waste disposal. Take the notorious ‘flying toilets’ of Accra and Nairobi, where waste is put into plastic bags and flung as far away as possible. Or open defecation, which plagues cities such as Delhi and Mumbai.

For cities to cope, local governments must recognise the inevitability of climate-induced migration, and take action to upgrade infrastructure and services.

This will be tough. The high density of informal settlements coupled with insecure tenancy can make it impossible to improve sanitation. Virtually every inch of land in informal settlements is in use, making it difficult to dig trenches for drainage. Many people live in tenements under constant threat of eviction, meaning landlords are reluctant to improve toilets.

Not only that, but many informal settlements develop in marginal areas of the city that are vulnerable to flooding and destruction due to severe weather.

There are more enlightened, imaginative approaches to improving urban settlements. In Mumbai, the NGO SPARC gathered feedback from local people and built community toilets that 20,000 people use every day. In Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, the Human Needs Project NGO developed a clever system of wastewater recycling for unplumbed neighbourhoods. Often these ideas come from local people themselves: the Global Initiative on Community-Based Adaptation is compiling and sharing information on what people are doing to adapt — and these ideas are likely to be more effective than top-down formulas.

But governments must also act. And cities shouldn’t only see newcomers as a risk or burden: often migrants are the most resourceful of their peers, providing cheap labour, trading and manufacturing goods for urban consumers. A more enlightened attitude to migrants will benefit cities and all who live in them.

Priya Deshingkar is Research Director of the Migrating out of Poverty research consortium. Her interests include precarious migrant occupations, exploitation in labour markets, informal settlements, gender and poverty. 

This blog was originally published by Sci.Dev.Net on 3 December 2015 under their Focus on Migration series and is also available at: 

http://www.scidev.net/global/migration/analysis-blog/migration-cities-climate-front-line.html.  

References

[1] The Government Office for London Migration and global environmental change: future challenges and opportunities (UK government, 2011)

[2] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs World population policies 2013 (UN, 2013)

Migration and Remittances will be Critical in Post-Earthquake Reconstruction in Nepal

With nearly 30% of its GDP owed to international remittances, and a significant proportion owed to internal remittances, Nepal is already heavily dependent on migration and remittances. If the experience of other disaster-affected countries in Asia (e.g. Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the Tsunami) is anything to go by, migration will probably increase in the aftermath of the recent earthquakes a) because opportunities for local employment will have been badly affected b) because remittances will be needed to rebuild lives and c) because there will be a need for labour in reconstruction. This increase in migration will be both internal and international.

There is ample evidence to show that remittances are counter-cyclical, peaking after disasters and providing much needed finance directly to those who need it. We could see an increase in both national and international remittances flowing into Nepal in the coming months. There were between 2-4 million Nepalis working abroad before the earthquake hit and hundreds of thousands circulating between rural and urban areas working in construction and other low paid jobs. Newspaper reports suggests that many workers returned home after the earthquake struck; roughly a million people in Kathmandu returned to their villages and many of these were circular migrants who were temporarily in the city to work.  There were also reports that contractors and agents had taken teams of workers back to the rural areas that they came from. But this will probably be short-lived - it is very likely that there will be a spurt in people migrating internally for construction work once the pace of reconstruction picks up.

Migration for construction work is an important type of rural-urban migration, absorbing large numbers of poor and poorly educated people from lower social strata in rural areas. It provides a vital source of income in the agriculturally lean season and helps to sustain and augment rural incomes.  Research conducted under the auspices of the Migrating out of Poverty Consortium in Kathmandu and two rural locations (a typical “Hill” village in Kavre district and a “Plains” village in the Terai plains in Saptari district) shows how important migration for construction work is for rural livelihoods in Nepal. Interviews at destination with 150 migrant construction workers revealed that despite insecure and dangerous working conditions, a majority remitted money to their families which helped them to improve consumption, educate their children, fund marriages and ceremonies, buy durables and in a few cases, purchase land and houses.  In both villages households with migrants were better off than those with no migrants. Income and expenditure figures, as well as land and asset purchase, show that there is a clear correlation between migration and greater material wealth, as well as more spending on education.  The research also shows how cultural and gender norms determine whether or not women can migrate and who, within the family, decides how remittances are used. While Tamang women from the indigenous communities of the Hill village had no cultural restrictions on migration, very few women among the Hindu Madhesis in the plains migrated for work due to cultural norms and stereotypes about women’s work.  It was also reported that Tamang women have more control over how remittances are spent compared with Madhesi women, although the data were too limited to see any specific outcomes of these differences. 

These findings are useful to inform the current reconstruction and rebuilding effort. It is critically important that government and aid agencies work with migrants rather than against them first and foremost by not obstructing or trying to limit mobility. It also means providing complimentary and supportive services based on a sound understanding of 1) the importance of internal migration and remittances for rural households, especially the poor 2) the gender dynamics of migration and remittance use so that interventions target the right people. While official channels such as banks and money transfer companies are likely to be adversely affected by the disruption to their infrastructure and computers, personal and informal channels assume greater importance.  It is important that these mechanisms for transferring money are not penalised and criminalised as is the wont of the paranoid official financial monitoring systems.

For further information contact Priya Deshingkar, University of Sussex. p.deshingkar@sussex.ac.uk 

The full paper by Jagannath Adhikari and Priya Deshingkar (2015) How Migration into Urban Construction Work Impacts on Rural Households in Nepal. Working Paper 27, Migrating out of Poverty Consortium, University of Sussex can be accessed here: How Migration into Urban Construction Work Impacts on Rural Households in Nepal

Women migrants working in construction: shaking the foundations of the way they are socially constructed

By Benjamin Zeitlyn

The Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium (RPC) is conducting research on internal and regional migration in Africa and Asia. As part of our qualitative research we focus upon three areas of employment that attract a lot of migrant workers in several different countries. These are domestic work, construction work and manufacturing. The assumption many of us made when we began to think about these categories is that men work in construction and women in domestic work.

A conspicuous aspect of many cities in rapidly urbanising and developing countries is a vibrant construction sector and the rapid emergence of new buildings. Millions of workers work on construction projects large and small in cities across the developing world. Often a very high proportion of these workers are internal and regional migrants.

Along with my colleagues Priya Deshingkar and Bridget Holtom, I reviewed the literature on internal and regional migration for construction work to survey the current state of the evidence and identify themes and gaps in the literature. The review will soon be published by the RPC, here I report some of the results of this review of the literature for International Women’s Day.

One of the first things that struck me was that among the studies we found about internal and regional migration for construction work in developing countries, very few explicitly look at gender relations and/or the role of women. Those that do exist tend to be based in India and Bangladesh. We speculate that this is because it is common to have women working in construction in South Asia, but not in other parts of the world, our research in African countries aims to see if this is true.

Research in India and Bangladesh on women working on construction sites reveals interesting gendered divisions of labour and inequalities in wages on construction sites as well as gendered patterns of remittance sending. Many migrant women working in construction in Bangladesh had migrated with their husbands or families, but a significant proportion migrated alone or headed their household. They were mostly young (25-35), poor and from rural areas. Women workers earned less than their male counterparts and if they were alone had to pay more for their accommodation (Ahsan, 1997). Higher status and skilled jobs (which offer the most potential for genuinely transformational earning) are dominated by men (Pattenden 2012).

Poor health for women migrants and their families working on construction sites are a major concern in the literature. Conditions on many construction sites in developing countries are incredibly dangerous and social protection is often minimal. Poor health can lead to increased indebtedness and so reduce the positive outcomes of migration. Interestingly, Jatrana and Sangwan, (2004) find that women construction workers in North India perceive their own health to be better after migration, although poor health was a constant aspect of their lives. For these women construction workers, being relieved of water and firewood collection duties and having a constant supply of food made them feel healthier. The costs of accessing high quality medical attention were still prohibitive for them; so improved access to healthcare was not the deciding factor. Jatrana and Sangwan attribute the improved perception of health to urban lifestyles and social network support that the migrants come into contact with in cities. 

Emerging findings from our research in Ethiopia support this interesting observation. While conditions for women migrant workers in the cities of Ethiopia are hard at best and border on modern day slavery at worst, the conditions, which many women and girls have migrated to leave behind, are even worse. As Naila Kabeer (2000) described in her book on the garments industry in Bangladesh, the options available for many poor women and girls other than the exploitative conditions of work in the garments industry are very grim indeed.

Research on female migrants tends to portray them as victims, to highlight their health problems and the exploitation they suffer, without paying much attention to the exploitative or abusive conditions that they have left behind and the contributions they make to their families’ and nations’ development. Migrant women working in the construction industries of developing countries shake the foundations of the way women migrants are socially constructed.

 

Benjamin Zeitlyn is the Theme Leader for Qualitative Research within the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.