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Abstract
The dominant theoretical framework for analyzing migration in Africa rests on the assumption of cooperative intrahousehold decision making regarding the mobility of household members. This framework, applied to women’s migration, overlooks the varied decision-making processes underlying their mobility, and obscures their ability to act as purposeful agents in making decisions about migration. Drawing on a study of women’s rural–urban migration in Ghana, this article argues that women’s migration decisions exist on a continuum defined by the presence or absence of intrahousehold contestation and the degree of agency exercised by the migrants themselves. Consequently, household models of migration may not always be the appropriate theoretical framework for the analysis of women’s migration in this context. The findings presented have implications for economic analyses of women’s migration and remittances, for our understanding of migrant women’s capacity for agency, and for the design of effective policies to improve migration outcomes for women.
HIGHLIGHTS
The study directly elicits information from women about their migration decisions.
Women’s migration is the outcome of complex decision-making processes.
The dichotomy between household and individual models of migration ignores these complexities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the migrants and community members who patiently responded to my questions, to the many individuals in Ghana who provided support for my research, to Nancy Folbre, Naila Kabeer, and Jennifer Olmsted for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to three anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Research for this project was supported by the American Association of University Women.
Notes
1 For this reason, I do not attempt to propose and test a model of migration decision making, as suggested by an anonymous reviewer. As Jennifer C. Olmsted (Citation1997) notes, statistical outcomes generated by economic models may result from different processes. At first glance, it appears that economic conditions and demographic variables such as age and marital status may play a role in determining whether the individual woman or her household undertakes the migration. However, the role played by these variables in this context is hardly clear-cut, and these variables alone do not fully explain women’s migration decision making. Trying to pinpoint the locus of decision making in an economic model obscures the variety of decision-making processes that result in women’s migration and conflicts with my goal for this article, which is to highlight this complexity and discuss the implications for economic analysis of migration outcomes and for policy.
2 These critiques are familiar: the exclusive focus on individual motivations for migration; the lack of attention to structural determinants of mobility; the suppression of gender differences in migration motivations, and most relevant for this article, the abstraction from the role of intrahousehold gender relations in shaping migration decisions (Lawson Citation1998).
3 Until 2018, northern Ghana comprised the Northern Region, Upper West Region, and Upper East Region. In 2018, the Government of Ghana divided the Northern Region into three regions– Northern Region, Savannah Region, and North-East Region.
4 I conducted interviews and surveys in Twi or English, with the help of a field assistant.
5 One was a dishwasher for a food vendor and the others were restaurant servers.
6 I did not ask the remitters in this sample to explain their choice of recipient. However, interviews with return migrants in the Northern Region, cited in Pickbourn (Citation2016), suggest that women migrants direct remittances to their mothers and other women in the household because women’s normative responsibilities in the household increase the likelihood of remittances being used in ways that are in line with the migrants’ own preferences.
7 At the time of my research, government and NGO sources identified this district as having the highest rate of net women’s out-migration in the region.
8 Two of the groups consisted of older women who had never migrated, although many had daughters who had. Two groups were made up of younger women, married and unmarried, many of whom were return migrants. The other groups consisted of men, including village elders, some of whom had migrated in the past or had wives or daughters who had migrated. To the best of my knowledge, none of those interviewed in the district were related to the migrants surveyed in Accra.
9 Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Northern Region.
10 All names have been changed, and all personal information that would allow the identification of any person(s) described in the article has been removed.
11 A dish made from rice and black-eye peas.
12 About US$150 at the time of the interview.
13 In many cases, their husbands needed to remain at home to tend to the household farm; men are more likely to migrate following the farming season.
14 It is worth noting that although Barimini is not migrating as part of a household strategy, her actions are not completely self-interested. She is leaving out of concern for her own well-being and that of her younger siblings. Individual motives can be difficult to disentangle from concern for household members and attempts to ascribe migration to one or the other set of motives can lead to misleading conclusions.
15 As noted by an anonymous reviewer, these social relationships also provide a safety net for the women, and as such matter for their economic well-being.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lynda Pickbourn
Lynda Pickbourn is Associate Professor of Economics at Hampshire College and Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she also co-directs the African Development Policy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economic development, feminist economics, and political economy, with a focus on Africa. While carrying out field research on the rural-urban migration of women in Ghana, she also developed an interest in economic methodology and the use of mixed research methods in economics. She has authored or co-authored several articles and book chapters on aid effectiveness, rural-urban migration, informal employment, and mixed methods research.