Rural out-migration in the drought prone areas of Ethiopia: a multilevel analysis

Drivers of migration and determinants of wellbeing among internal youth migrants in Ethiopia: Towns along Addis Ababa -adama route in focus

The present study surveyed drivers of rural youth influx to urban areas and examined correlates of wellbeing among youth migrants domiciled in towns along important economic corridor of Ethiopia. In total, 694 (M = 418, F = 276) youth migrants aged 15-30 years and identified through multistage and purposive sampling techniques filled in a self-report questionnaire consisting of items probe profile and rating scales intended to uncover circumstantial and intentional activities of respondents. Descriptive statistics, Pearson's product momentum correlation, and multiple regression analysis were utilized to examine the data. The results show that most migrants are single and short distance migrants with secondary education and above. Both "push" and "pull" factors are found to be key factors driving youth to urban areas. The persistent challenges these youth migrants faced at destination areas include high living cost, housing problems and joblessness -- the existing Ethiopian urban area scenario, which is likely to be exacerbated by their very presence. Besides, the analysis of the relationship of circumstantial factors and intentional activities with indicators of wellbeing revealed a strong association of proactive coping behaviour with both indicators of participants' wellbeing (i.e., income and perceived subjective wellbeing). Sex and educational level are related with income, and perceived support from other is associated with perceived subjective wellbeing. The findings of the study provide additional evidence on drivers of youth migrants in developing countries and highlight some determinant factors that account for youth migrants' wellbeing. Implications of the study are discussed.

The Migration Response to Food Insecurity and Household Shocks in Southwestern Ethiopia, 2005–2008

This article examines how severe food insecurity and other shocks impact internal and international migration in southwestern Ethiopia using longitudinal survey data collected between 2005 and 2008 from a random sample of urban and rural households. We found an elevated risk of internal and international migration among sons and daughters in households that experienced severe food insecurity or farm loss. A household member's illness or death also significantly increased the risk of internal migration regardless of a household member's relationship with the household head. We also found that the effects of severe food insecurity and the other shocks were additive. With each additional shock, the risks of migration incrementally increased. This article provides compelling evidence of an international and an internal migration response to food insecurity and other shocks in a context where the prevalence of international migration is increasing and the potential for future international migration is substantial. These results challenge conventional wisdom in the migration literature that food insecurity and other household shocks will have larger relative effects on internal compared to international migration.

Drought and temporary migration in rural India: A comparative study across different socio-economic groups with a cross-sectional nationally representative dataset

Vast stretches of India comes under meteorological drought this year or the other. A huge population base in rural India are rendered highly vulnerable to this drought because of their primary dependency on agriculture and in turn they may respond through temporary migration out of the drought affected rural areas in search of alternative livelihoods. This study aims to investigate the association between drought and temporary migration in rural India by fitting binary logistic regression models on a cross-sectional dataset involving both National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) 64th round data and India Meteorological Department (IMD) rainfall data. The paper also examines whether this association varies across the different socio-economic groups. Out of the total temporary migrants generated in rural India in the study period, 99.46% migrated internally and 67.12% were rural to urban migrants. The study finds that there is a positive association between drought instances and probability of a household to have at least one temporary migrant member in rural India (OR 1.64 with p<0.001) while controlling all other covariates. The study also concludes that the probability of temporary migration on account of drought is more severe among the socio-economically marginalised sections of the rural population compared to their better-off counterparts.

A Critical Analysis of the Drivers of Human Migration Patterns in the Presence of Climate Change: A New Conceptual Model

Both climate change and migration present key concerns for global health progress. Despite this, a transparent method for identifying and understanding the relationship between climate change, migration and other contextual factors remains a knowledge gap. Existing conceptual models are useful in understanding the complexities of climate migration, but provide varying degrees of applicability to quantitative studies, resulting in non-homogenous transferability of knowledge in this important area. This paper attempts to provide a critical review of climate migration literature, as well as presenting a new conceptual model for the identification of the drivers of migration in the context of climate change. It focuses on the interactions and the dynamics of drivers over time, space and society. Through systematic, pan-disciplinary and homogenous application of theory to different geographical contexts, we aim to improve understanding of the impacts of climate change on migration. A brief case study of Malawi is provided to demonstrate how this global conceptual model can be applied into local contextual scenarios. In doing so, we hope to provide insights that help in the more homogenous applications of conceptual frameworks for this area and more generally.

Inequality in the household and rural-urban migration in Ethiopian farmers

Parental investment theory predicts that biases in investment favour migration by driving some of the sibling group to disperse for resources. Here we test hypotheses arising from this theory to explain patterns of rural-urban migration in south-central Ethiopia considering familial and individual strategies. We focus on the migration of low-skilled men, predicting two scenarios based on a low level of resource availability. Firstly, last-born sons will be more likely to migrate in order to offset their intra-household disadvantage when resources are limited (sibling competition). Alternatively, in households facing livelihood insecurity, older sons will migrate in order to free resources for their younger dependant brothers (reflecting sibling cooperation). Demographic, economic and relational data were collected from 217 families of male migrants, including information for 830 male adults. We performed multivariate analyses, including Bayesian generalised linear models and mixed models, to analyse quantitative data with a focus on household and individual likelihood of out-migration. Consistent with the predictions from parental investment theory, migration is dependent on intra-household resource allocation. Depending on the stage of the family cycle and livelihood context, families and individuals present different strategies: labour migration may result from sibling competition or from cooperation for resource enhancement.

Development impacts of migration and remittances on migrant-sending communities: Evidence from Ethiopia

This paper evaluates the development impacts of migration and remittances in migrant source communities by applying insights from the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM) theory to Ethiopia's migration. Using household survey data, we empirically evaluate how household participation in migration arises and so that the subsequent labor losses and the influx of remittances affect income sources and asset accumulation of smallholder farm households. To account several econometric issues and consistently estimate the impacts of migration and remittances, we adopted three-stage least-squares method complemented with endogeneity and multicollinearity test. Besides, using logistic and multinomial logistic regressions respectively, we estimate the determinants of the household migration decision to have migrants, as well as the probability of the household to send out temporary or permanent migrants. Findings suggest that larger and wealthier households are less likely to have migrant family members, while households living below the poverty line, as well as villages with the highest unemployment rate, are the most likely to have both temporary and permanent migrants. However, a rise in months spent out of agriculture has a significant negative effect on crop income and asset accumulation, but only for permanent migration. By contrast, the influx of remitted income from migrants has led to increased crop income and asset values in the form of land and livestock holdings. Finally, this manuscript provides more comprehensive evidence by showing the net-returns of migration in terms of initial lost-labor effects and the positive developmental impacts that it produces varied for households with different types of migration and production conditions.

Climate Change, Agriculture, and Economic Development in Ethiopia

Quantifying the economic effects of climate change is a crucial step for planning adaptation in developing countries. This study assesses the economy-wide and regional effects of climate change-induced productivity and labor supply shocks in Ethiopian agriculture. We pursue a structural approach that blends biophysical and economic models. We consider different crop yield projections and add a regionalization to the country-wide CGE results. The study shows, in the worst case scenario, the effects on country-wide GDP may add up to −8%. The effects on regional value-added GDP are uneven and range from −10% to +2.5%. However, plausible cost-free exogenous structural change scenarios in labor skills and marketing margins may offset about 20–30% of these general equilibrium effects. As such, the ongoing structural transformation in the country may underpin the resilience of the economy to climate change. This can be regarded as a co-benefit of structural change in the country. Nevertheless, given the role of the sector in the current economic structure and the potency of the projected biophysical impacts, adaptation in agriculture is imperative. Otherwise, climate change may make rural livelihoods unpredictable and strain the country’s economic progress.

Migrants from marginal dry areas in Syria: destinations, employment, and returns

We examine the determinants of migrants’ choices of destination, employment, and remittances from one of the poorest marginal dry areas in Syria. Qualitative and econometric analysis of cross-sectional data indicates that migrants’ choices depend mainly on individual, household, and community characteristics and also on availability of opportunities. The main factors affecting the choice of destination and employment are the sending area, age, and sex of migrants, while the educational level had no significant effect in both cases. The larger the endowments of migrants’ households, the higher the remittances sent back home to preserve households’ assets in marginal dry areas.

Climate, migration, and the local food security context: Introducing Terra Populus

Studies investigating the connection between environmental factors and migration are difficult to execute because they require the integration of microdata and spatial information. In this article, we introduce the novel, publically available data extraction system Terra Populus (TerraPop), which was designed to facilitate population-environment studies. We showcase the use of TerraPop by exploring variations in the climate-migration association in Burkina Faso and Senegal based on differences in the local food security context. Food security was approximated using anthropometric indicators of child stunting and wasting derived from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and linked to the TerraPop extract of climate and migration information. We find that an increase in heat waves was associated with a decrease in international migration from Burkina Faso, while excessive precipitation increased international moves from Senegal. Significant interactions reveal that the adverse effects of heat waves and droughts are strongly amplified in highly food insecure Senegalese departments.

Migration as an adaptive strategy to climate variability: a study of the Tonga-speaking people of Southern Zambia

There is increasing consensus that the effects of extreme weather conditions in the form of drought, flooding and extreme temperature will have increasingly devastating impacts on those who depend on climate-sensitive resources and ecosystems for their livelihoods. The most affected will be the poor in developing countries who have a low adaptive capacity to climate change due to high poverty levels. Despite these projections, there are, to date, insufficient empirical studies linking the relationship between climate change and migration, particularly in the context of southern Africa. Using field-based data collected from two study locations in Zambia, this paper examines the complex relationship between extreme weather events and population movement. It is envisaged that the findings presented in this paper will contribute to current discussions on the complex relationship between extreme weather conditions and population movement specifically in the context of sub-Saharan Africa and other developing countries.

The Environmental Dimensions of Migration

Research on the environmental dimensions of human migration has made important strides in recent years. However, findings have been spread across multiple disciplines with wide ranging methodologies and limited theoretical development. This article reviews key findings of the field and identifies future directions for sociological research. We contend that the field has moved beyond linear environmental "push" theories towards a greater integration of context, including micro-, meso-, and macro-level interactions. We highlight findings that migration is often a household strategy to diversify risk (NELM), interacting with household composition, individual characteristics, social networks, and historical, political and economic contexts. We highlight promising developments in the field, including the recognition that migration is a long-standing form of environmental adaptation and yet only one among many forms of adaptation. Finally, we argue that sociologists could contribute significantly to migration-environment inquiry through attention to issues of inequality, perceptions, and agency vis-à-vis structure.

Opportunities and Challenges for Investigating the Environment-Migration Nexus

Environmental change is an acknowledged factor influencing human migration. Analytical research regarding the relationship between the environment and human migration has increased in recent years yet still faces numerous hurdles, partly due to limited availability of suitable data. We review available data and methodologies for investigating the environment-migration nexus, identifying data inconsistencies resulting from the combination of different sources and illustrating the underlying reasons for them. We discuss a number of methods for investigating the environment-migration relationship, including frameworks and concepts; surveys; empirical, quantitative methods; and simulation approaches. Based on this overview, we offer recommendations for improved analyses of the environment-migration nexus including reporting data inconsistencies and uncertainties, combining approaches and data sources, and developing multiple-study approaches.

The impact of biases in mobile phone ownership on estimates of human mobility

Mobile phone data are increasingly being used to quantify the movements of human populations for a wide range of social, scientific and public health research. However, making population-level inferences using these data is complicated by differential ownership of phones among different demographic groups that may exhibit variable mobility. Here, we quantify the effects of ownership bias on mobility estimates by coupling two data sources from the same country during the same time frame. We analyse mobility patterns from one of the largest mobile phone datasets studied, representing the daily movements of nearly 15 million individuals in Kenya over the course of a year. We couple this analysis with the results from a survey of socioeconomic status, mobile phone ownership and usage patterns across the country, providing regional estimates of population distributions of income, reported airtime expenditure and actual airtime expenditure across the country. We match the two data sources and show that mobility estimates are surprisingly robust to the substantial biases in phone ownership across different geographical and socioeconomic groups.

Rural to urban migration is an unforeseen impact of development intervention in Ethiopia

Rural development initiatives across the developing world are designed to improve community well-being and livelihoods. However they may also have unforeseen consequences, in some cases placing further demands on stretched public services. In this paper we use data from a longitudinal study of five Ethiopian villages to investigate the impact of a recent rural development initiative, installing village-level water taps, on rural to urban migration of young adults. Our previous research has identified that tap stands dramatically reduced child mortality, but were also associated with increased fertility. We demonstrate that the installation of taps is associated with increased rural-urban migration of young adults (15-30 years) over a 15 year period (15.5% migrate out, n = 1912 from 1280 rural households). Young adults with access to this rural development intervention had three times the relative risk of migrating to urban centres compared to those without the development. We also identify that family dynamics, specifically sibling competition for limited household resources (e.g. food, heritable land and marriage opportunities), are key to understanding the timing of out-migration. Birth of a younger sibling doubled the odds of out-migration and starting married life reduced it. Rural out-migration appears to be a response to increasing rural resource scarcity, principally competition for agricultural land. Strategies for livelihood diversification include education and off-farm casual wage-labour. However, jobs and services are limited in urban centres, few migrants send large cash remittances back to their families, and most return to their villages within one year without advanced qualifications. One benefit for returning migrants may be through enhanced social prestige and mate-acquisition on return to rural areas. These findings have wide implications for current understanding of the processes which initiate rural-to-urban migration and transitions to low fertility, as well as for the design and implementation of development intervention across the rural and urban developing world.

AGRO-ECOLOGICAL DRIVERS OF RURAL OUT-MIGRATION TO THE MAYA BIOSPHERE RESERVE, GUATEMALA

Migration necessarily precedes environmental change in the form of deforestation and soil degradation in tropical agricultural frontiers. But what environmental factors may contribute to these migration streams in the first place? Identifying environmental characteristics related to this process is crucial for understanding how environmental change and migration may form recurrent feedback loops. Further understanding this process could be useful for developing policies to reduce both environmentally induced migration from origin areas and also to palliate significant environmental change unleashed by settler deforestation in destination areas. Evidently, apprehending this holistic process cannot be approached only from the destination since this ignores environmental and other antecedents to rural out-migration. This paper presents data from surveys conducted in areas of high out-migration to the agricultural frontier in northern Guatemala. Results suggest that land scarcity and degradation in origin communities are linked to out-migration in general and to the forest frontier of northern Guatemala in particular.

Environmentally influenced urbanisation: footprints bound for town?

Over the past 30 years, urbanisation has been a prominent phenomenon and various drivers have been proposed to explain it. Very few have suggested that the degradation of the rural environment was one of them. This paper explores the human–environment interface by focusing on the portrayal of these concepts within scholarly literature. A systematic literature review was conducted and 147 articles were examined to determine the direction of the link between the environment and human mobility, and if urbanisation was featured. The results demonstrate that equal attention is paid to both directions of the environment–mobility link. Of the articles reviewed, 40 per cent focus on urbanisation, but 93 per cent of those portray urbanisation as a forcing on the environment, rather than an impact of environmental degradation. The lack of support for environmentally influenced urbanisation can be explained by coupled system complexity, disciplinary research and the silence of those most likely to endure environmental change. Understanding these relationships is paramount to the promotion of adaptation without eroding resilience or further degrading environments.

DROUGHT AND POPULATION MOBILITY IN RURAL ETHIOPIA

Significant attention has focused on the possibility that climate change will displace large populations in the developing world, but few multivariate studies have investigated climate-induced migration. We use event history methods and a unique longitudinal dataset from the rural Ethiopian highlands to investigate the effects of drought on population mobility over a ten-year period. The results indicate that men's labor migration increases with drought and that land-poor households are most vulnerable. However, marriage-related moves by women also decrease with drought. These findings suggest a hybrid narrative of environmentally-induced migration that recognizes multiple dimensions of adaptation to environmental change.

Katrina in Historical Context: Environment and Migration in the U.S

The massive publicity surrounding the exodus of residents from New Orleans spurred by Hurricane Katrina has encouraged interest in the ways that past migration in the U.S. has been shaped by environmental factors. So has Timothy Egan's exciting book, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl. This paper places those dramatic stories into a much less exciting context, demonstrating that the kinds of environmental factors exemplified by Katrina and the Dust Bowl are dwarfed in importance and frequency by the other ways that environment has both impeded and assisted the forces of migration. We accomplish this goal by enumerating four types of environmental influence on migration in the U.S.: 1) environmental calamities, including floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes, 2) environmental hardships and their obverse, short-term environmental benefits, including both drought and short periods of favorable weather, 3) environmental amenities, including warmth, sun, and proximity to water or mountains, and 4) environmental barriers and their management, including heat, air conditioning, flood control, drainage, and irrigation. In U.S. history, all four of these have driven migration flows in one direction or another. Placing Katrina into this historical context is an important task, both because the environmental calamities of which Katrina is an example are relatively rare and have not had a wide impact, and because focusing on them defers interest from the other kinds of environmental impacts, whose effect on migration may have been stronger and more persistent, though less dramatic.

Rural Household Demographics, Livelihoods and the Environment

This paper reviews and synthesizes findings from scholarly work on linkages among rural household demographics, livelihoods and the environment. Using the livelihood approach as an organizing framework, we examine evidence on the multiple pathways linking environmental variables and the following demographic variables: fertility, migration, morbidity and mortality, and lifecycles. Although the review draws on studies from the entire developing world, we find the majority of micro-level studies have been conducted in either marginal (mountainous or arid) or frontier environments, especially Amazonia. Though the linkages are mediated by many complex and often context-specific factors, there is strong evidence that dependence on natural resources intensifies when households lose human and social capital through adult morbidity and mortality, and qualified evidence for the influence of environmental factors on household decision-making regarding fertility and migration. Two decades of research on lifecycles and land-cover change at the farm level have yielded a number of insights about how households make use of different land-use and natural resource management strategies at different stages. A thread running throughout the review is the importance of managing risk through livelihood diversification, ensuring future income security, and culture-specific norms regarding appropriate and desirable activities and demographic responses. Recommendations for future research are provided.

Migration to the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala: Why place matters

Virtually all migration research examines international migration or urbanization. Yet understudied rural migrants are of critical concern for environmental conservation and rural sustainable development. Despite the fact that a relatively small number of all migrants settle remote rural frontiers, these are the agents responsible for perhaps most of the tropical deforestation on the planet. Further, rural migrants are among the most destitute people worldwide in terms of economic and human development. While a host of research has investigated deforestation resulting from frontier migration, and a modest literature has emerged on frontier development, this article explores the necessary antecedent to tropical deforestation and poverty along agricultural frontiers: out-migration from origin areas. The data come from a 2000 survey with community leaders and key informants in 16 municipios of migrant origin to the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), Petén, Guatemala. A common denominator among communities of migration origin to the Petén frontier was unequal resource access, usually land. Nevertheless, the factors driving resource scarcity were widely variable. Land degradation, land consolidation, and population growth prevailed in some communities but not in others. Despite similar exposure to community and regional level push factors, most people in the sampled communities did not out-migrate, suggesting that any one or combination of factors is not necessarily sufficient for out-migration.

Migration and Environmental Hazards

Losses due to natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, hurricanes) and technological hazards (e.g., nuclear waste facilities, chemical spills) are both on the rise. One response to hazard-related losses is migration, with this paper offering a review of research examining the association between migration and environmental hazards. Using examples from both developed and developing regional contexts, the overview demonstrates that the association between migration and environmental hazards varies by setting, hazard types, and household characteristics. In many cases, however, results demonstrate that environmental factors play a role in shaping migration decisions, particularly among those most vulnerable. Research also suggests that risk perception acts as a mediating factor. Classic migration theory is reviewed to offer a foundation for examination of these associations.