Behind the research: Julie Litchfield

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.

Julie has led the quantitative work of Migrating out of Poverty for 6 years, working with partners in Singapore, Bangladesh, Ghana, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe to understand patterns of migration and remittances, and the impact that migration has on household poverty.  

For the last three years she has led the Income and Remittances theme, focusing on generating robust evidence on the impacts of migration in three African countries, supporting partners to design and implement bespoke longitudinal surveys and to analyse the data using rigorous methods.

It has been an enormous privilege to work with partners across the Migrating out of Poverty consortium, both early career researchers and leading experts. I have learned a tremendous amount about the richness and diversity of migration experiences and how these are shaped by local and regional policy, economic and social contexts. 

Together we have been able to shed light on the complicated way migration affects households and also share our insights 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, Julie!

Behind the research: Eva-Maria Egger

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. 

Eva was a doctoral student at Sussex who worked on the quantitative data, and income and remittances research themes for Migrating out of Poverty during the period 2013 to 2017.

She went on to be a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the International Fund for Agricultural Development and, starting September 2019, will take up a new position as a research fellow for UNU-WIDER.

“Migrating out of Poverty shaped my profile as researcher and helped me to find my post-doctoral research position. The exposure to other disciplines and researchers from developing countries provided me with a valuable experience outside of the normal doctoral studies. The topics of migration and poverty continue to be relevant and in high demand. My work with Migrating out of Poverty proved rewarding not only during my doctoral studies, but also for my career after that.

I am most proud of the quantitative panel data in Ghana. Together with the team of CMS in Ghana, we managed to combine the first and second rounds of quantitative data. I then used this data for one of my PhD chapters and it got published in the IZA Journal of Development and Migration with Julie Litchfield as co-author.”

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, Eva-Maria!

Minding the Migration Data Gap: new data from the Migrating out of Poverty Consortium

By Julie Litchfield

Research on migration and development has seen a dramatic resurgence in recent years. As Michael Clemens, Çağlar Özden and Hillel Rapoport Michael A. Clemens, Çağlar Özden, Hillel RapoportMichael A. Clemens, Çağlar Özden, Hillel Rapoportoutline in their introduction to the special issue on migration and development of World Development in 2014[1], part of this renewed interest and increase in published research is due to long overdue[2] improvements in the availability and quality of data. Estimates of international migration and remittances are now published by the World Bank and the UN Population Division compiles census data to give estimates of migrants stocks.

This improvement in data quality and data availability allows us to make tentative statements about the extent of internal and international migration. One of the most serious attempts to estimate internal migration is underway by researchers at the IMAGE project who use census data to estimate that globally in 2005 there were 229 million people living within the same country but in a different part of that country compared to five years before. Estimates for lifetime internal migration are much higher, with 763 million people in 2005 living outside their region of birth.[3]  Combining these with UN estimates of international migrants of 232 million people living outside their country of birth, suggest that nearly a billion people live away from their region of birth. 

Census data is useful for providing insights into how many people are migrants and their demographic profile but is less useful for understanding the why and the how of migration. Understanding why people migrate and for how long, how that contributes to, or even changes, their and their household’s livelihoods and well-being are just some of the questions of great interest to migration researchers and policy makers. These questions can be answered with qualitative research and there are some impressive examples to draw on which provide rich and nuanced stories of migrant lives. Deirdre McKay’s ethnographic work provides new insights into the aspirations and experiences of Filipino temporary labour migrants;[4] Trond Waage uses visual anthropological tools to document the lives of young migrants in west Africa; and Migrating out of Poverty (MOOP) partners at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, have used qualitative methods to shed light on the recruitment of Indonesian domestic workers.

Complementing this qualitative work is a growing body of evidence emerging from quantitative research using household surveys. These offer the opportunity to include more people in the research sample than qualitative research typically allows, anything from a few hundred to a few thousand people is pretty normal, and to use more detailed questions that capture a wider range of data than is feasible to collect in a population census. There are a growing number of household surveys for developing countries which capture information on migrants. For example, the Mexican Migrant Project collects and publishes data on migration between Mexico and the United States, and a number of household and labour force surveys now contain supplementary modules on migration.[5]  These are encouraging signs that the migration data gap is closing but there is still some way to go.  

The Migrating out of Poverty (MOOP) consortium is contributing towards this by publishing open access micro data from a set of five comparable household surveys collected between 2013 and 2015, in five developing countries: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, and Zimbabwe.   The precise sampling strategy differs across countries, and we can’t claim that our samples are nationally representative. However because we adopt a purposive approach, selecting regions which are known to be migrant-sending and sampling quotas of households with and without migrants, we generate large enough sub-samples of households and individuals across different categories of migrants and non-migrants to make us confident that our findings are robust.

Our sample sizes range between 1200 and 1400 households, with data available on every member of those households. We adopt a near identical survey instrument in each country, which facilitates comparisons to be drawn across countries. Our household questionnaire includes a complete household roster collecting social, economic and demographic data on both migrant and non-migrant members of the household, and a specially designed module that captures interactions between migrants and their households in the form of remittances and social contacts. Our survey also explores perceptions of migration as a way of improving the living standards of households.

One of the important contributions the MOOP consortium hopes to make by collecting and publishing this data is to support more research into internal and intra-regional migration. As the figures of migration estimates quoted above suggest, three out of four migrants remain within their country of birth and much international migration is within the global South. Our data will help to shed more light on these movements and help to inform policies that respond appropriately to those affected by migration.

The full data sets from the first three of our surveys undertaken in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Ghana, are now available to download for free from www.migratingoutofpoverty.dfid.gov.uk. Data is available in both STATA and SPSS formats and users can access the questionnaire and a short user guide for each survey. Data for Ethiopia and Zimbabwe will be made available in 2016. 

We want students, researchers and teachers to access the data, and policy makers to use it. Feed back to us and let us know what you do with it.

Bangladesh internal and international migration destination maps

Remittances help fund improvements in housing

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[1] Michael A. Clemens, Çağlar Özden, Hillel Rapoport (2014) “Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances” World Development, Volume 64, December 2014, Pages 121-124.

[2] Read about the “century of ignored recommendations” on the “biggest blind spot in our view of the world economy” in Patricia Santo Tomas, Lawrence Summers and Michael Clemens (2009) “Migrants Count: Five Steps Towards Better Migration Data”, Report of the Commission on International Migration Data for Development Research and Policy; Centre for Global Development, May 2009.

[3] Details on methodology can be found in Bell, M, and Charles-Edwards, E. [2013]: ‘Cross-national comparisons of internal migration: an update of global patterns and trends’, Technical paper 2013/1, Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York. 

[4] McKay D. 2012. Global Filipinos. Indiana University Press.

[5] See Santo Tomas et al (2009) for a useful audit of migration data.

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. Working Papers discussing aspects of the findings of the Bangladesh, Ghana, Indonesia and Zimbabwe surveys are also available. A summary of key data from the Indonesia survey has also been published. 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.