Behind the research: Dorte Thorsen

Over the course of the last 10 years, the Migrating out of Poverty consortium has drawn on the enthusiasm and expertise of many people across the globe. This blog series focuses on the people behind the research, who have kindly shared personal reflections and learning from their experience of working with the consortium.

Dorte has led the programme’s work on gender analysis and qualitative research for five years, working with partners across the consortium to integrate questions about gender dynamics in migration from research design, to analysis, to developing evidence-based material for policy-making and programming.

During this time she has also worked with partners in Bangladesh, Singapore, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal and Zimbabwe to understand the different processes of social change that lead to new categories of migrants and, in turn, the social changes generated by the absence of migrants, remittances and return migrants. For the past three years, she has led the Gender and Generations theme, focusing on bringing new angles to the study of migration by looking the impact on family relations, empowerment and equality issues in rural areas of four African countries.

I have truly appreciated working with long-time and new partners across the consortium, developing working relationships that thrived on the sharing of insights from all the research sites.  

Together we have learned a lot about how people deal with absence, and sometimes loss, and about the diverse ways that remittances can change everyday lives and social positions not only of migrants but also of the people back home. We are now sharing our findings with policy makers and civil society in each country as well as international organisations.

The Migrating out of Poverty programme has been a true team effort, and we appreciate the role each individual has played in producing and disseminating the research.

Thank you for all your hard work with the Migrating out of Poverty programme, Dorte!

Migration as a route out of poverty in Zimbabwe: remittances and gender

by Julie Litchfield

This year on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2016, I will be speaking at a conference on migration at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare, presenting some of the Migrating out of Poverty research undertaken in collaboration with the Centre for Applied Social Sciences (CASS) at the University of Zimbabwe.[1]

Colleagues at CASS have carried out extensive qualitative fieldwork in migrant-sending communities across the country and one of the observations they have made is that families often describe women migrants as the “saviour of the family”, less likely to forget their families at home and more likely to send a range of cash and goods than male migrants.

Just over a year ago in April 2015 we carried out a fairly large survey of households to probe deeper into migration and remittances. We have been able to collect data on the type of remittances sent home by individual migrants, the frequency and value of remittances as well as data on each household’s living standards, and I have been using this data to investigate the belief that women are the saviours of the family.

First I wanted to explore if families regard migration as a positive or a negative development. We asked households several questions about their perception of migration as a route out of poverty and were surprised that only around half felt that households with migrants were generally better off than those without. Digging deeper, I found that migration is seen as a good thing by those households who receive remittances, especially among female headed households.

Looking at who remits, I discovered that what migrants remit differs. Male migrants are slightly more likely to remit cash than female migrants, a large proportion of whom send goods, such as food, clothing and school items. Interestingly however, proportionately more women than men migrants send both cash and goods, and while the cash they send is lower in value, the value of goods is higher. This resonates strongly with findings of our CASS colleagues in the qualitative research. Perhaps this mixture of remittances suits households’ needs better and that is why women migrants are described as saviours.

To explore the idea deeper, I estimated a simple econometric model of remittance receipt. This helps me to explore what factors affect the probability that a household receives remittances. As my independent factors, I included variables on the household size and composition, whether the migrant has left behind children at home and also variables that capture the household’s assets and current living conditions. The theory behind this model is that remittances might be motivated by altruistic reasons (concern over aging parents, younger siblings for example) or for exchange reasons (for example the need to continue to contribute to the household and protect inheritable assets, or to maintain a certain social standing within the home community).

My results suggest that the independent factors that affect whether or not a household receives remittances differ between male and female migrants. Remittances to households from male migrants depend heavily on the assets of the household: households with bigger houses or a higher standard of living are more likely to receive remittances than those households we might regard as poorer. In contrast, remittances from female migrants are unaffected by these factors. Instead, female remittances depend almost entirely on the demographic make-up of the household: older heads of households, larger households and households where the migrant has left children behind are the only factors that appear to play any role in the remittance model. These factors also affect remittances receipt from male migrants[2] but what is striking is the absence of any relationship between female remittances and household wealth and living standards: female migrants remit regardless of whether the household is rich or poor. 

What does this tell us? We need to be careful about jumping too quickly to the conclusion that women care more about their families than men. One interpretation is that what underlies these differences is a complex set of rules and norms that are highly gendered and work at numerous levels within the household and the wider community. Male migrants may need to send remittances home to maintain their social standing not just within their own household but also in the community. Perhaps more is at stake the better off their household, both in terms of what they might inherit or the role they might be able to fulfil when they return.  A preference for sending cash might help with this aim. Women on the other hand may be seeking only the approval of their household as a caring, dutiful daughter for example, and thus send goods which they believe the family needs and demonstrates thoughtfulness and concern.

Understanding this complex set of rules and norms is difficult and warrants further research, especially when designing policy. Policies to reduce the transaction costs of sending formal cash remittances for example may have little effect on remittances from women if they continue to place value on sending remittances in the form of goods. A so-called diaspora bond may only be attractive to male migrants. What is clear is that policy on migration in general and on remittances in particular needs to be informed by a deeper understanding of these gendered patterns of behaviour.

Julie's presentation slides can be accessed here.

---

[1] I would like to thank the National Gallery of Zimbabwe for their kind invitation to speak at their conference and the British Council (Zimbabwe) for generously funding my visit.

[2] Their remittances are very responsive to whether they have a child at home, much more so than female migrants. 

Dr Julie Litchfield is the Theme Leader for Quantitative Research for the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium (MOOP) and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex. The Working Paper discussing aspects of the findings of the Zimbabwe survey is now available. See also Eva-Maria Egger's presentation of the preliminary findings of MOOP's household survey conducted in Zimbabwe  and her related blog discussing the context:  Migration in Southern Africa: A Visit to the City of Migrants.

After the Migrant Leaves Home

By Kudakwashe Vanyoro

“I came here with the hope of a better future, nothing more than that. I couldn’t study because of poverty”. These are the exact words of Ram, a young male Nepalese migrant working in Japan, in the short film ‘After Ram Left Home’, which was screened at Migrating out of poverty’s gender conference in Singapore, 30 June – 2 July.

The film managed to capture some of the most powerful dynamics at play in the process of the migration of young males in Asia. These included the sacrifice of borrowing money - up to US$20,000 - to pay recruitment fees required to secure work in a restaurant; the tribulations of the left-behind wife and parents; and the promising yet lonely and uncertain life of the migrant seeking a better life elsewhere. The migration of Ram was undoubtedly informed by gender roles and expectations based on what I perceived to be the instinct to provide for his family and himself in order to make the statement “I am a man”. In many ways, Ram’s migration symbolised a rite of passage, of a sort.

Yet that social statement was underpinned by certain presumptions about how Ram was behaving in his host country, particularly on the part of his wife. She was very suspicious and convinced that he may be cheating on her with a more beautiful and younger girl (because that is ‘how man roll’). In as much as Ram felt that his manhood could be qualified and asserted through economic prowess, the migration that this entailed produced certain household challenges that were not easy to deal with.

Ram’s dad, on the other hand, felt that if only he had been a better man financially, his son would not have had to go through the process of migration that brings with it insurmountable debt and uncertainty. He must have thought that his son’s migration was a challenge to his own gender ascribed role: providing for his own kin and maintaining his nuclear family intact. In the film, he lamented over this and his sentiments, which  many sons growing up in nuclear families would also get from their dads, resonate with me. Ram’s wife, besides being continuously insecure about her husband’s degree of faithfulness, also had to grapple with adjusting to her new role of heading the house and supporting her in-laws which was not an easy task as it had previously been Ram’s role.

In as much as migration yields benefits as seen in Ram remitting money here and there, it is clear that it challenges the concept of family life as we are raised to understand it. Migration questions norms, brings us out of our comfort zones, and presents us with potentially newer ways of understanding and negotiating gender roles and the family. This is not limited to male migration as in Ram’s case. It is also a similar challenge in female migration.

In Zimbabwe for example, female domestic and cross-border labour migration were traditionally associated with prostitution. I’m certain that this is not unique to that context alone. Predominantly, women on the move are seen as deviant and are often ostracised and labelled as incorrect. However, I have seen many instances where female ‘cross-border’ migrants lift families from poverty and increase the family’s upward social mobility. During Zimbabwe’s economic crisis from 2000 to 2008, it was the women that dared to pick themselves up, challenging the status quo by migrating to sell baskets in South Africa. Leaving their children behind in the care of their grannies and fathers, through their agency these female migrants both challenged societal, cultural and economic structures, and facilitated household subsistence and development. Nonetheless, this migration presented challenges to the nuclear family as some men ended up taking up female-ascribed roles of caregiving and cooking.  

Evidently, both male and female migration is equally problematic. So the end question is; given the challenges that migration presents to the domestic setup is migration necessarily a bad thing? I don’t think so.

Through migration, individuals are able to shape their own lives beyond the scope of the conventional. We begin to understand gender and family in nuanced ways, if we allow ourselves to, that is. Poverty is one of the greatest challenges facing mankind today. It incapacitates families to an extent where there is ultimately no gender or family to talk about. So if migration can help with this, what should take precedence: the order of things or livelihood? I would argue that livelihood should come first. I think that the evidence speaks for itself.

So, what are the key lessons from all this? Migration is not without its challenges. But what does it challenge predominantly? It challenges how we do things, what we tell ourselves is the domestic order of things. But interestingly, it questions our gender ascriptions about who should be cooking and caregiving against who should be working outside the home; who should be making decisions in the household and who (if anyone) should be subservient. More importantly however, by challenging the status quo, it illuminates. It does so by showing us that daddy is actually a good cook after he cooks the food that mummy sent from her income using the cross-border bus (and that that food still tastes the same). It shows us that women are equally good decision makers in the family when daddy is working in another country. Most of all, migration is key to development in contexts where there is not enough on the table. If we adequately harness it and allow ourselves to see the family beyond traditional gender roles, norms and expectations, there are more victories in store for us in the fight against poverty.  

 

*Acknowledgements: ‘After Ram Left Home’ by Dipesh Karel (University of Tokyo) was screened at the Gendered Dimensions of Migration Conference held at the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore as part of his presentation to the conference.

Kudakwashe Vanyoro is a Research Assistant at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He was an intern under the Migrating out of Poverty RPC Research Internship Scheme from April to November 2014. His internship involved supporting all ACMS communications work, preparing and packaging policy briefs, research data capturing, undertaking desktop research and blogging on contemporary issues related to migration and poverty in Southern Africa.

Migration and changing intra-household gender roles and power relations

By Collins Yeboah

In Ghana, both young men and women migrate internationally and internally. Young, single men who migrate internationally dream of a better life, for example as construction workers in Libya or as professional football players in Europe, but early research on Ghanaian women migrants going abroad focused on those who migrated to work as commercial sex workers in neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire. Analysis of internal migration focused on migration from Northern to Southern Ghana due to the relative impoverishment of the north vis-à-vis the south of the country. Such migration initially involved young men who moved down to work on cocoa farms or as tenant farmers and more recently as scrap metal dealers. Since the economic downturn of the 1980s however, young, single women have begun to migrate internally, usually from the poorer northern part of the country to the south, and have been the subject of much scholarly interest. 

 

The Centre for Migration Studies, under the auspices of the Migrating out of Poverty Research programme, is currently undertaking a study, “Migration, Intra-Household Dynamics and Youth Aspirations in Ghana” which examines the ways in which migration can move people out of poverty. As I reflect on this, I remember my encounter with Asana in a commercial vehicle in my recent trip to Tamale in the north of Ghana, which epitomises the experiences of female migrants from the North to the South. 

 

Asana sits next to me in a bus from Tamale in the Northern Region of Ghana going to Accra, in the southern part of the country. She had spent several minutes on the phone. At a rest stop, Asana explained to me why she had had such a long telephone conversation.  Her husband, Fuseini has used the money she had left for the children’s school fees to buy seeds for the farm instead, something they did not agree on. She laments that her husband is only a subsistence farmer and the proceeds of the farm cannot fully provide for their needs and those of their three children (Abiba, 17, Musah, 15 and Moustapha, 11). With the help of a friend she migrated to Accra a year and a half ago to find work that would enable her to support the family. Since her migration she has consistently sent GHS 200 (approximately US $61) to her husband each month for the upkeep of the family which has improved their standard of living. As Asana is supporting the family financially, her husband Fuseini sees to the household chores and raises the children, tasks which, according to the society’s gender norms, would traditionally have been done exclusively by Asana. 

 

The conversation with Asana suggests that migration can change household gender roles. In Ghana, labour migration is socially constructed in accordance with idealised notions of gendered work and responsibilities. Men are often seen as “potential earners” and as household breadwinners, thus they are often favoured to migrate, while women are expected to stay behind to take care of the household. However, this structuring of gender roles is in the process of changing as evidenced by Asana’s migration to Accra in search of ways to enhance the wellbeing and survival of the household. 

 

Traditionally, women in Northern Ghana do not own lands but instead “borrow” them and are therefore excluded from agrarian decision-making. Studies indicate that a land crisis is leading to “deagrarianisation” or a societal moving away from agricultural production, and an increase in women’s non-farming activities, specifically in the processing of shea butter and groundnut oil as well as rice husking. Such non-farm activities do not provide enough income for the women yet they are expected to contribute towards the household’s food needs. As a result some of them migrate to the south in order to diversify their livelihoods. These migrant women provide financial support to their household through remittances.  It further brings to bear that household survival requires the contribution of each of its members irrespective of gender. Asana providing financial support for the family while Fuseini does the household chores and takes care of their children demonstrates the ways gender roles can change as a result of migration.

 

Asana’s story also illustrates how migrant remittances can have significant influence on power relations within household. Studies have shown that the sending of remittances may improve the position of women in their families and thereby enhance their participation in household decision-making. Despite receiving generally lower wages than men, research indicates that migrant women generally remit sums equal to those sent by their male counterparts. This can increase migrant women’s influence on household decisions while reducing their husbands' control over household resources.

 

Asana tells me that before her migration “I dared not ask what he used the money we got from the sales of the crops for. He used to tell me it was none of my business. I couldn’t even ask for the children’s school fees”. However she continues, “Now, I provide the money so I make decisions about what the money should be used on. You know something”, she explained “he wouldn’t have used the money to buy seeds if I were still there. I have told him to look for money to pay the fees else I won’t send him money again. I have done that before”, she concluded.    

 

This is a demonstration of how Asana has used migration as a means to increase her negotiation power within the household. She now has control over what the remittances she sends should be used for. Until her migration to Accra, such decisions were solely determined by her husband.

 

Migration has increasingly become a significant driver of transformation within the family and household and a significant livelihood strategy adopted by many to move out of poverty. However, there are relatively few studies on how the migration process affects intra-household power relations and gender roles. Thus the Centre for Migration Studies project “Migration, Intra-household Dynamics and Youth Aspirations in Ghana” will result in an in-depth understanding of the dynamics that surround internal migration and household relations. More so, as a society with gendered roles and rights, it will examine how migration is changing these roles and provide insights on how gender roles and ideologies are contested, reinforced or renegotiated within Ghanaian society.

 

 

Collins Yeboah is the Communications Officer for the West Africa hub of the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium, based at the Centre for Migration Studies, University of Ghana.

The impact of migrating for domestic work: The experience of Hawa and Adiata

By Collins Yeboah

 

In the migration literature, greater attention is paid to migrant workers than to the households they leave behind. I have come to the realisation, however, that to fully comprehend the impact of migrant domestic workers, in addition to understanding the problems associated with their work, it is essential to examine the changes they bring about for their households of origin.

 

I recently conducted field work for the 'Livelihood Strategies and Wellbeing of Migrants in Low-Paid and Insecure Occupations in Urban Ghana' project, part of the Migrating out of Poverty programme in West Africa. The research team tracked the origin households of migrants engaged in domestic and construction work in Accra via an earlier quantitative survey carried out in Tamale in Ghana's Northern Region. A selection was identified for the in-depth follow up discussions of the qualitative research.

 

We carried out the fieldwork during the scorching sun, dry winds, low humidity and dust of the harmattan season, arriving later than promised one night at the home of Hawa (46) in Walewale, a small town on the road between Bolgatanga and Tamale in Ghana’s Northern Region. Hawa sat behind her sewing machine with pieces of cloth she had cut earlier. She had already finished the two school uniforms brought by her customers that morning and looked tired after the day’s work.

 

Hawa used to be opposed to female migration because of its association with a high level of unwanted pregnancies. But her husband’s death left her alone with six children, in a region with few employment opportunities, so she had to allow her primary school educated daughter Adiata (24) to go to Accra to look for work. The decision to migrate was taken by both Hawa and her daughter. As Hawa noted: “We all decided one evening that she should go to Accra and look for job so she can support the rest of us here.”

 

Studies indicate that women migrant workers often remit a greater proportion of their earnings than low skilled men migrant workers and are often more stable and consistent remitters. Since leaving Walewale Adiata has remitted at least GHc 120 ($34.85) a month to her mother. Hawa said that her daughter sometimes also sends the family clothes and foodstuffs via friends travelling to Walewale. Hawa appears to be doing better than her neighbours. She and her children live in her late husband’s house. Its three rooms are roofed with zinc while the other homes in the neighbourhood are thatched. 

 

“Look at my roof… Hawa said, proudly pointing to her house...she continued “It was thatched previously before by husband died. The little money I receive from Adiata, my daughter in Accra was used to roof it. She has helped a lot. I want to build one house over there from the money she sends before she returns” (Hawa, Walewale).

 

Adiata is one of the many domestic workers in Ghana. Estimates from Ghana’s 2010 Population and Census data indicate that about 66,570 Ghanaians between the ages of 15-64 years are employed in this sector. They work in private homes outside their places of habitual residence. Often referred to as modern day slavery, their duties include cleaning, cooking, looking after children, trimming lawns, and driving cars. They usually lack familiar or community support mechanisms and are often exposed to poor wages, delayed or non-payment of wages, very long hours of work, and no break periods or rest days.

 

However, Adiata is one of the few domestic workers employed under better conditions. When she first arrived in Accra she had a difficult time and slept in a slum shack in Agbogloshi shared with four other female migrants. She became a Kayeyei - a form of manual employment carried out almost exclusively by females in Ghana involving the transportation of goods on their heads to and from markets - in Agbogloshie market. While in this role she met a woman who first became one of her regular customers, buying food stuffs from Adiata in the market. She later employed Adiata in her home as a domestic worker and Adiata now lives in her home. For Adiata, employment as a domestic worker is far better than the situation she found herself in when she first arrived in Accra.

 

Many studies portray the kind of work done by domestic workers as demeaning, dirty and exploitative. Yet as I listened to Hawa and other mothers like her, I realised that the story of Adiata, the domestic worker, provides a powerful illustration of migration as a means of moving out of poverty. Adiata has contributed to the upgrading of her family’s home and money she sends every month is used by her mother to cater for the needs of her other children. It is evident that migration has been pivotal in shaping the family’s lives. Like Adiata, most of the domestic workers from this region have become the breadwinners of their families left behind.

 

Collins Yeboah is Communications Officer at the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Ghana

Indonesian migrant women: Present 'here' and 'there' via ICTs

By Lucia Zerna


Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Xyza Cruz Bacani 

In the image above, the boy on the right has his faced pressed against the glass. While we see his face clearly, the face of the photographer is hidden by the camera. Who is she?

Xyza Cruz Bacani is a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong whose passion for photography inspired her to buy a digital single reflex (DSLR) camera and photograph everyday life in the city. Since posting her black and white images online on Facebook, Bacani has gained international recognition. She currently has more than 7,000 likes on her page. Furthermore, she has recently secured a 2015 fellowship on the Magnum Foundation’s prestigious Human Rights programme, under which she will receive a scholarship that will strengthen her skills in visually documenting human rights. Bacani’s success exemplifies the ways in which migrant domestic workers utilize technology in order to pursue aspirations and connect with the outside world. While the majority of foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Southeast Asia do not achieve such visibility, many are just as active in using various types of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), such as cellphones.

From the results of the recently completed Migrating out of Poverty study on the ICT use of domestic workers in Singapore, it is apparent that use of such technologies form an integral aspect of the workers’ everyday lives. Handheld computing devices, particularly smartphones, are used by FDWs to establish a presence of both ‘here’ and ‘there’ through phone calls and short message services (SMS) to family members back home. The research found that eighty per cent of respondents in the study relied on SMS and regular phone calls to make contact with their family and friends in Indonesia.

Despite having to care for another woman’s children, FDWs also act as transnational mothers, keeping up with their own children’s wellbeing and education via ICTs. Furthermore, having a sustained line of communication is vital for preserving their mental health in environments that can be exploitive and isolating. As Rosita notes, “if I miss them I can SMS [or] Facebook. I feel happy and in high spirits.”

Additionally, the study shows that through ICTs Indonesian migrant women are able to access information on the global web. For example, Hera, a domestic worker living in Singapore, says: “[I] know more about life here… [About] Indonesian maids or the problems they have. They always upload stuff on Facebook.”

The use of ICTs is one lens through which we can see how power relations are shaped and renegotiated between the employer and domestic worker. As the study found, while ICTs help facilitate vital modes of communication for domestic workers, such devices are not readily accessible to all. Directly related to access are issues of trust, usage restrictions, and surveillance. Many domestic workers only receive a handheld device from their employer after a few years of service. Even then, FDWs are very aware of when and where they use their phones.

Yani, a 42 year-old divorcee, explains: “I know the limitation[s], I know when is the working hours and when is the time to rest. When I am eating or resting, I will call.”

Employers also monitor and curtail FDWs’ access to communication devices. Within the household they hold the password to the Wi-Fi network and may not share it with their FDW. Additionally, FDWs who do not have a phone are dependent on their employer’s devices to contact family back home. In such instances the FDW might limit herself to calling family on specific days and talking for a certain length of time.

It is clear from the research that access to and use of ICTs influence the daily routines of FDWs in Singapore in multifaceted ways. ICTs facilitate new transnational spaces where FDWs can maintain relationships with family back home. Smartphones and similar devices have become vital resources that sustain personal relationships and, in the case of Xyza Cruz Bacani, have been used as platforms for creativity and public recognition. ICTs have provided a site for her and other domestic workers to shape new trajectories and go beyond a singularizing identity of FDW. 

Lucia Zerner is currently an undergraduate spending her spring semester studying abroad in Singapore. She is particularly interested in topics related to labour migration and has most recently conducted an independent study on returned Tamil migrant workers to Madurai, India. 

'Labour trafficking' – What's behind the term?

By Dorte Thorsen

 

A new term - labour trafficking – has crept into the vocabulary surrounding migration facilitated by agents and other intermediaries. It is a timely attempt to shift attention onto the nexus between trafficking and labour migration and to move away from a narrow focus on migrant sex workers as the victims of trafficking. But is labour trafficking a good term? And does it have the same connotations for female and male migrants, and for younger and older migrants?

The definition of trafficking set out in the Palermo Protocol  makes it clear that for migration to be legally defined as trafficking, the migrant must have been recruited, transported or accommodated by another person. This person must have used force, violence, deceit, abuse of power or of the migrant’s vulnerable position and he/she must have been intend to exploit the migrant upon arrival to his or her own ends. As the Protocol is an instrument used by states to combat organised crime, state measures to combat trafficking focus primarily on preventing the movement of persons perceived to be at risk of being exploited and abused for the benefit of the trafficker and on prosecuting people perceived to broker the movement of others to their own financial benefit.This focus tends to blur the distinction between trafficking and smuggling – the illegal transportation of goods or people - especially at a time when global mobility regimes have made it more difficult for many people in the global South to migrate legally.

The tightening of border control, not just in the global North but across the world, has opened a space for migration brokers, who set up business to help potential migrants to go abroad. Brokers come in many shades and do not necessarily operate in a way that is illegal. Some provide guidance on form filling, the safest way to travel, and how to find work at the destination; others travel with the migrant workers they have recruited and facilitate employment for these workers at the destination; others again help procure fraudulent papers and air tickets to expedite the visa application process. Some enrich themselves on the back of migrants, sometimes being unscrupulous about the risks they impose on them; others become brokers just to scrape by or to consolidate their social status. The processes of facilitating migration, smuggling and trafficking people thus overlap in the early stages of migration.

While brokering businesses have proliferated alongside tighter border control, the use of intermediaries is not a new phenomenon, nor is it tied to international migration. It is the commodification that is new, for in many places it is considered strange and, indeed, risky to travel alone, especially for women and girls. Apart from the very real risk of sexual abuse, their respectability may be undermined by suspicion and scurrilous rumours about intimate relationships if travelling by themselves.

On this point local ideas of appropriate behaviour for women of different ages converge with one of the main concerns that has shaped the anti-trafficking discourse, especially in the beginning: the persistent myth that the destination of trafficking is sex work, and that sex workers are women and that these women are trafficked. The overlap is not about appropriate behaviour but about women’s perceived inability to fend for themselves and make good – read sensible and well-considered – migration decisions. Over time, trafficking has come to include a much broader range of concerns - including child labour, domestic servitude, forced labour, forced marriage and child soldiering - and it has become as much of an issue for internal migration as for international migration.

 

This brings us to the question of how to distinguish between trafficking, smuggling and the facilitation of migration and migrants’ insertion into the labour market at the destination. In principle, the relationship between the migrant and the smuggler ends once the migrant arrives at the destination, while the relationship with the trafficker continues. Reality is, of course, much more complex for the migrants and for authorities dealing with them. The distinction is shaped by moral, economic and political concerns.

 

When the focus is on migration management – whether international or internal – the division of migrants into ‘innocent, possibly passive, victims of trafficking’ and ‘irregular or unruly, street-living migrants’ is also a distinction between those, who deserve help because they are perceived as victims, and those who don’t, because they have gotten themselves into trouble through risky behaviour. From this perspective, migrants are seen either as having no choice or as having had near-to-full information about all risks involved in migration and to have ignored them. Only, women and children are rarely seen to have such a high level of information.

 

As a matter of fact, very little empirical evidence exists on the recruitment processes and the continuation of relationships between brokers and migrants at the destination. While some women are forced into sex work, others choose this occupation because they can earn more and can control when to work and when to rest. If they are all treated as victims of trafficking, important questions about unequal labour markets and gender inequity are overlooked.

 

Similarly, when the focus is on child migrants moral concerns about the right kind of childhood is at its heart of the discussion. Images of lost childhood, unhappy children, very heavy work and, in case of adolescent girls, sexual abuse, are invoked in the name of trafficking and the worst forms of child labour. The youngest children are foregrounded despite the fact that the majority of children migrating in their own right are teenagers over the minimum age for taking employment. For them, migration is a rational strategy to earn money and acquire skills. That they are frequently exploited and deceived by employers is not evidence of trafficking but rather of generic problems in the labour market.

 

Currently there is a push to work on regularising certain migrant workers and the labour market for migrants to minimise exploitation and unfree conditions. Our panel debate Labour Trafficking? Understanding the use of brokers in women’s and girls’ labour migration in the global South on Friday 6 March in Jubilee 144 at the University of Sussex contributes to the discussion. We outline the realities for women and girls of using brokers and intermediaries in their migration; examine how anti-trafficking interventions have affected female migrants; and explain why these interventions have changed over time. See http://migratingoutofpoverty.dfid.gov.uk/newsandevents/events?id=29299 for full details.

 

 

Dr Dorte Thorsen is the Gender Theme Leader for the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium. She also teaches Anthropology at the University of Sussex.

 

This blog was originally published as 'Labour Trafficking' - What is behind the term? at http://sussexglobal.org/blog/labour-trafficking-what-is-behind-the-term/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dirty jobs but a brighter future? Migrant domestic workers and the discourse on slavery and forced labour

by Priya Deshingkar

Domestic workers  are often described as “modern-day slaves” because of their working conditions which bear many of the hallmarks of forced labour and also because of their intersecting disadvantages of race, gender and poverty.   But listening to the stories of migrants working as domestic workers reveals that the choices they have made, to work as domestic workers are precisely to escape degrading situations and contexts. The realities of the lives of many poor rural women are more dirty, dangerous and demeaning than domestic work, which offers women the chance to earn and be independent. 

After two years of planning with her husband how the household would be managed without her, 34-year-old Arini (name changed) has finally managed make the trip from her remote village in West Java all the way to Singapore to work as a domestic worker or maid.  There are many like her from Indonesia working as domestic workers in other countries including Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia.  The numbers are vast, nearly five million by one estimate, and they seem to be growing.  Like many others, Arini migrated through an agent who found her a job and paid the costs of her migration up front, costs that she must repay by working without any salary for the first eight months of her assignment. 

Across the globe in Ethiopia, the story is somewhat different for Abeba (name changed) who ran away from her village in the drought-prone Amhara region at the age of 15. First she went to the nearest town, worked there as a cleaner until she had saved enough to try her luck in Addis Ababa. Her plan was to save money to migrate to Djibouti or the Middle East where thousands of women and girls have migrated to work as maids. Abeba first got a job in Addis Ababa working for a distant relative but left after they refused to pay her. She found another job through an agent, in a house where she was groped and harassed until she left. In the city she had to live by her wits, continually searching for a place to live and a job that was safe and fair, where she could work and save. The work was hard and payment was poor; sometimes she did not even get paid. She eventually saved enough to pay an agent to migrate to Djibouti.

Both Arini and Abeba are working as domestic workers. ILO research shows that the 53 million domestic workers worldwide are predominantly female and from poor and socially excluded communities.   The working conditions are tough – limits on personal freedom, long working hours and being unable to leave because of debt-bondage. The ILO identifies domestic work as one of the sectors that is most likely to involve forced labour and slavery.  The public discourse on slavery and domestic work imagine domestic workers with almost no agency; their minds are controlled and their bodies are enslaved and the conclusion seems to be that they must be rescued from this awful fate.

But a look at the process from the perspective of migrant girls and women tells another story altogether. Arini wanted to migrate so that her family could enjoy the material comforts that her migrant neighbours have. She wanted her daughter to attend the best school and to make sure that her family did not want for anything. This was a choice she and her husband made together to raise their standard of living. Like many others, she comes from a subsistence farming household where incomes are not enough to provide for the family all year round and where material and educational aspirations have been fuelled and enabled by a history of migration. They hope that migration will enable them to escape the endless hard work and poverty associated with subsistence agriculture.

Abeba’s decision to leave the village, a place and a cultural context that she perceived as dead-end and degrading, was clearly a voluntary act; an example of agency in the face of limited choices.  She ran away from home because her family wanted her to marry at 15. Having been forced to leave school at 12 to work on the family’s failing farm, and with a marriage to a local man arranged for her, she could see how her future would be, and she didn’t like what she saw. To her, life in the city meant freedom, offering her choices of how she lived, dressed, ate and where she worked, despite its many risks. Living in this way was preferable to having her destiny sealed by her parents.

The risks are clearly numerous for such migrants, but for many poor people, migration offers the opportunity to earn more that they would at home and the ability to invest in businesses, land, material security and education. For many women migration also offers them a rare opportunity to earn money of their own, achieve independence and take control over their lives. This is often overlooked in the international debate on migrant domestic workers. The importance of jobs such as domestic work to the social mobility, development and freedom of poor women is hidden under the preoccupation with ideal (and important) employment conditions.

Migration and employment in sectors such as domestic work are sometimes labelled as slavery and forced labour. However, they remain among the most important pathways of social mobility for many poor women and can be considerably less degrading than other alternatives.

Priya Deshingkar is the Research Director of the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.

The ‘Art’ of Research Communication

by Kuda Vanyoro

From my experience at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) and engagement with literature by other writers who have faced similar, it is clear that at times research findings and evidence on nationally contested issues like migration may prove the positive contributions of migration to development and poverty eradication prematurely, when the audience in question is not ready to hear the positions that researchers take. In other words, there may be socially entrenched stereotypical perceptions of migrants, as is the case in South Africa, which lead the recipients of the message to ignore it. In such instances, targeting a policy audience alone when communicating research findings and evidence is insufficient to impact or influence policy because of regressive societal attitudes which may also be held by policy makers.

 

There then arises, today more than ever, the need to tactfully disseminate research findings in a more decentralised, artistic and aesthetical manner. This may involve targeting a ‘popular culture’ non-policy audience through art and other forms of eye-candy such as film, exhibitions and storytelling in order to drive the facts home. The success of this process depends on creativity on the part of the research communicators tasked with coming up with a means of enticing and attracting this non-policy audience. Where this drive is led by the sole purpose of myth-busting and de-construction of shared societal misconceptions and stereotypes of migrants, such creativity may yield positive results, even in spite of the danger of further subjecting those whom we hope to emancipate with the research, to further stereotypes, which is a common pitfall.

 

Research communication is therefore in my view both a profession and an art. A good example of tackling a sensitive issue successfully is an ongoing research project at the ACMS titled Volume 44, which is a collaborative research project on migrant sex workers in the cities of Johannesburg and Musina. The South African National Aids Council has estimated that there are 153,000 sex workers in South Africa. A large proportion of these are located in Gauteng, the smallest but most populous province in South Africa, in which both Johannesburg and Pretoria are located. Sex work is popularly perceived as migrant dominated, and work conducted by Marlise Richter and Jo Vearey based on interviews with 1636 sex workers found that just over 85% of sex workers were migrants. Of these 39% were internal migrants and 46.3% were cross-border migrants. Volume 44 builds on a 2010 project which sought to highlight the experiences of migrant women involved in sex work within inner city Johannesburg through visual medium in the exhibition ‘Working the City’. At the time of writing, Volume 44 has staged 3 exhibitions: one in Johannesburg 21 May – 27 June 2014; a second in Amsterdam 25-28 June 2014; and the last one in Bogota in 14-19 July 2014. The exhibition was highly visual and its Johannesburg launch, for which I organised the publicity, attracted an attendance of nearly one hundred people from all walks of life: young students, media professionals, sex workers and academics.

Sex work in South Africa is not legal, and activist voices are calling for its decriminalization in a bid to combat the lack of access to health care, stigma, discrimination and criminalisation under the Sexual Offences Act faced by those engaged in it. While both migrant and local sex workers face stigma, particularly at grassroots levels, migrant sex workers are viewed with the utmost hostility. Therefore, it is only reasonable to assume that advocacy for the protection of sex workers in South Africa can only yield tangible policy results once social attitudes that result in stigma have been eliminated, or at least sensitised, from below. 

In the coming years, researchers will need to learn to adopt popular packaging for their research communication if their voice is to be heard beyond the ivory towers of universities. This is especially true with contentious topics like migration where research positions are often not what receiving communities and policy makers may want to hear. Volume 44 is an attempt to use photography, real-life narratives, audio and other forms of exhibitory art to get ordinary people thinking in a different way about contested issues. The art, complementing the research findings about migrant sex work, can provide potent weapons to communicate unwelcome research messages for positive evidence-based policy making, social transformation and other envisaged policy outcomes.

Visitors to the Johannesburg Volume 44 exhibition view '"Letter to a young sex worker" - a wall of letters written by the project participants'

 

Kudakwashe Vanyoro has concluded his Research, Communications and Outreach Internship at the African Centre for Migration and Society(ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), funded by the Migrating out of Poverty Research Consortium. Read Kuda's profile.

Female migrant domestic workers and the families they leave behind

By Julie Litchfield

Female domestic workers are an important part of the story of the feminisation of migration, particularly in Asia. It is well documented that large numbers of women working outside their own countries are employed in domestic work and that Asian countries contribute large numbers of  female domestic workers (FDWs) both within the region, to the Middle East and to Europe and North America.

In the Migrating Out Of Poverty research programme consortium we are looking at gendered patterns of internal and regional migration and how these manifest themselves in poverty outcomes.  So far we have conducted three surveys of over 1000 households each in Asia and Africa, and we will add to this in 2014. Preliminary analysis of the data collected in 2013 by our partners in Singapore reveals that female migrants in Indonesia are overwhelmingly FDWs: 75% of all female migrants are domestic workers. We don’t see any such concentration of occupation amongst male workers:  the largest single category is construction with around a quarter of male migrants, the rest being spread across other activities including farming and manufacturing. We also see very different destinations for FDWs: almost 70% of FDWs are regional migrants, migrating to countries such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. Among other female migrants, the vast majority remain in Indonesia as internal migrants and among male migrants, over half stay in Indonesia.

This pattern of regional migration is reflected in how people actually migrate. An issue that is commonly raised in the context of international migration is the cost associated with finding work at the destination, not just the travel costs but the so-called “placement fees” which are often charged to find employment for the migrant, usually deducted directly from pay, and that can be several multiples of the average annual income a person might expect to earn if they stayed at home. Indeed, the UN Women 2013 report on international migrant domestic workers highlights this as a particularly exploitative feature of FDW migration: data from Taiwan suggests that FDWs from Indonesia are charged on average US$3500 as a placement fee. Among our sample of Indonesian female migrants, over half used a recruitment agent to help secure employment at their destination, whereas less than a third of men did so.  FDWs were however much more likely than other female migrants to report that this involved a cost, with almost half of them stating that they had borrowed from the agent to finance their migration. Only 10% of other female migrants had to do so, most likely using family and friends to help find employment. Male migrants appear to rely much more heavily on formal loans from banks when they migrate regionally.

What are the consequences for families left behind? Parreñas (2000), in her study of Filipina FDWs working in Los Angeles and Rome, writes extensively about the international division of reproductive labour and transmission of care-taking of children and elderly. Her study reveals a pattern of predominantly married women working in richer countries as domestic workers or care-givers, with their own children living in the Philippines, employing women back home to look after their own children. The Filipina FDWs tend to be relatively better educated than the women they employ back home, thus suggesting a three-tiered division of reproductive labour. The UN Women report goes further, arguing that that the increase in FDWs has led to a “care crisis at home” with concerns about the health, educational and social development of children left behind.

However, little is known about the experience of poverty of FDWs, or their households, relative to other families with migrants in other occupations, or for that matter, other households with women who work. Our preliminary analysis has not revealed such a care crisis in Indonesia, at least no more or less so for households with FDWs compared to other households.  Two-thirds of households with female migrants say that daily life is easier for them now compared to before their member left. Furthermore we observe little difference in the perceptions of poverty, as reported by the households themselves, either between households with FDWs and other female migrants, or between households with female and male migrants. One explanation for the difference in our preliminary findings and those of Parreñas is that female migrants from Indonesia may be different from those who migrate from the Philippines. Our data from Indonesia suggests FDWs are younger than other migrant women and non-migrant women, and are less likely to be married or to have children than women who don’t migrate. This is very different from the portrait of FDWs provided by Parreñas.  We also see little migration of Indonesian FDWs to very rich countries in the West.

That doesn’t mean to say that the experience of poverty among Indonesian households with migrants or with FDWs is not different and that there aren’t more nuanced differences still to be uncovered. Whether or not women migrants leave children behind, the age of the children, who they are left behind with, and to what extent they are able to send money home, might also be important differentiating features.   In the next phase of our work, we will be exploiting the rich data in our surveys on how life has changed for the households left behind in our attempts to unravel how migration shapes poverty experiences.

 

 

Julie Litchfield is the Theme Leader for Quantitative Research for the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.