Horizons of expectations and imaginings regarding life in the transnational marriages of Ethiopians in the Amhara Region

ABSTRACT

Transnational marriage involving urban women from the Amhara Region, Ethiopia, and migrant husbands from abroad has been common in the region since the 1990s. The purpose of the article is to analyse the causes behind the women’s marriage to migrant husbands. Triangulated data were collected through interviews, focus group discussions, observations, archive analysis, and questionnaires in Gondar Municipality and Bahir Dar Municipality, from which migrants husbands predominantly originate. The study approached multiple experiences as intersecting mechanisms and revealed transnational marriage as a multicausal process. The findings revealed broad effects, including how poverty was gendered and how gendered economy denied social prospect to induce women to enter into transnational marriage. As economic causes were considered, the phenomenon was not simply about poverty but about information concerning prospects abroad and the recognition of transnational marriage as a migration path without risky options. A further finding was that the ongoing patriarchal order and the pessimism of improved status of women were vital determinants of transnational marriages. The author concludes that given the fragile bargaining power of young women in the Amhara patriarchal setting, marriage to migrants also constitutes the agency and enactments of fathers.

KEYWORDS:

• Amhara Region
• Ethiopia
• transnational marriage

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the research participants who offered their ideas, which I have applied to keep the arguments in this article grounded. Lastly, I am greatly thankful to the copy editor of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography for her critical comments, which served to refine and significantly improve the quality of this article.

Notes

1 The Dergue was a military junta that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991.

2 A kebele is the lowest administrative unit in the administrative hierarchy in Ethiopia.

3 The records contain the number of transnational marriages each year, the origins of migrant spouses and the couples’ demographic attributes, of which 7158 full records were found for the years 1997–2018.

4 Government-owned houses in towns rented with low cost for the urban poor and government employees

5 In this article all participants’ names are pseudonyms.