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Abstract
This paper focuses on the heterogeneity of female mobility and investigates whether human and social capital play different roles in women's independent versus spousal reunification migration. Using longitudinal data from a recent survey on migration between Africa and Europe, we compare the drivers of mobility of Congolese and Senegalese women. Based on discrete-time hazard models, we find that education and access to migrant networks are especially important in the likelihood of moving independently of a partner. Furthermore, different types of ties (excluding the migrant partner) are influential in the two forms of mobility. Female networks play a crucial role in independent migration but are less instrumental in triggering reunification. The differences between the two types of moves are however, more accentuated in Senegal than in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We relate this to the more rigid patriarchal norms restricting female autonomy in Senegal, both in terms of mobility and economic activity.
Notes
[1] The authors do make this distinction in their descriptive results, which show that about a third of the ‘wives’ migrated before marriage (Cerrutti and Massey Citation2001, p. 191). There is no indication whether they knew their future spouse at the moment of their migration.
[2] The Mexican Migration Project, coordinated by Douglas Massey and Jorge Durand and ongoing since 1982, has pioneered quantitative work on migration flows.
[3] The DHSs are nationally representative surveys on health and population conducted in developing countries within the Measure DHS international project. We used here the most recent ones in DR Congo (2007) and in Senegal (2006).
[4] A mix of various sampling strategies was used at destination: intercept points, random walking, snowballing, and contacts obtained through associations (for a more detailed discussion on the survey methods, see Beauchemin and Gonzalez-Ferrer Citation2011).
[5] There is no case in our sample of a woman migrating to another destination from that of the partner.
[6] For the Congolese, due to the low numbers of uneducated persons, no education is combined with primary level.
[7] Large shares of the active women in both countries are engaged in self-employed small-scale commercial activities (Adjamagbo and Antoine Citation2006).
[8] Additionally, the relationship to the respondent and the gender of each person mentioned are also recorded. As most previous surveys, the MAFE survey is limited in that it does not collect information on the structure of these networks – i.e. on the direct relations between the actors that compose them.
[9] The former two types are analysed together in the rest of the analysis since numbers for couple migration are too small, especially in the Senegalese case, to be considered apart.