MIGRATION, REMITTANCES AND INTRA-HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATION IN NORTHERN GHANA: DOES GENDER MATTER?
A Dissertation Presented
by
LYNDA JOYCE PICKBOURN
Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
September 2011
Department of Economics
© Copyright by Lynda Joyce Pickbourn 2011
All Rights Reserved
MIGRATION, REMITTANCES AND INTRA-HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATION IN NORTHERN GHANA: DOES GENDER MATTER?
A Dissertation Presented
by
LYNDA JOYCE PICKBOURN
Approved as to style and content by:
______James K. Boyce, Chair
______Nancy Folbre, Member
______James Heintz, Member
______Michael Ash, Department Head Department of Economics
DEDICATION
To my mother, Gladys Kotey . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to thank the many people who have contributed in different ways to the completion of this project. First, I owe my deepest gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee – James Boyce, Nancy Folbre and James Heintz – for their patience, support and encouragement. In the initial stages of my research, Jim Boyce allowed me the space to develop and explore my ideas, and throughout the process he has challenged me to think about migration and economic development in different ways and has consistently encouraged me to take things further than I might otherwise have done. I took a class with
Nancy Folbre right after finishing up my field research in Ghana, at a time when it seemed like there was so much to be said that I would never be able to say it all. She inspired me to clarify my thinking about social norms and gave me the confidence to believe in what I had to say, and her feedback has been invaluable in helping to sharpen my writing. James Heintz has been a tremendous source of advice and help with the quantitative aspects of my work, responding to all my questions simply and clearly and with endless patience, and helping to demystify the econometric analysis of household expenditure. Together, they have provided the intellectual direction and guidance that helped this dissertation to evolve, and have contributed in myriad ways to my development as a scholar. I count myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with them.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to the faculty of the Economics and Women’s and
Gender Studies Departments at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from whom I learnt so much, and to the administrative staff of both departments and of the Political and
Economic Research Institute (PERI) who keep the wheels running smoothly for graduate students. I am particularly grateful to Professors Alexandrina Deschamps, Mwangi wa
Githinji, Melissa Gonzalez-Brennes and Léonce Ndikumana, not only for their useful
v feedback on my work, but also for coming through for me at different points in my graduate school career. I would especially like to thank Gerald Epstein for his unfailing professional and personal support when it was most needed.
This work would not have been possible without the people and organizations that participated in my research and contributed to it in myriad ways. My thanks go to the
American Association of University Women, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation and the Political Economy Research Institute for providing funding at different stages of my research. I am deeply grateful to the survey respondents, interviewees and focus group participants for their willingness to share their stories with me, even though they stood to gain nothing from doing so. I was humbled by their infinite patience throughout the process. I would also like to thank my field assistants, interpreters and data entry personnel – Mr. Daniel Danso, Mrs. Ramatu Awudu, Mr. Bawa Kassim, Mr. Alhassan Baba and Mrs. Margaret Yeboah for their excellent work. My thanks also go to Dr. Sulley Gariba and the staff of the Institute for Policy Alternatives in Tamale for their assistance in setting up a workshop with representatives of various NGOs working with female migrants from northern Ghana, and to Mr. Yakubu Sheriff of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture
(Northern Region) for providing data on the region’s agricultural performance. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Seidu Alhassan of the University of Development Studies, Tamale, for his help in sorting out the logistics of field research in northern Ghana, and for his friendship and hospitality.
I have been lucky to enjoy the companionship and support of the many friends I have made here at UMASS. Although I cannot mention everyone, I would especially like to thank Sung-Ha Hwang, Seung-Yun Oh and Smita Ramnarain for reading different chapters and providing valuable feedback.
vi This journey would have been far more difficult without the support of my family and of those that I consider family. I thank my brother, Leslie Brunner, my aunt, Phyllis
Kotey, my cousin Walter Darko and his wife Debbie, my mother-in-law, Mrs. Mariam Smith and my sister-in-law, Kathryn Smith for their unfailing love and support. Special thanks go to my late uncle Dr. Paul Kotey, for encouraging my graduate school aspirations, and to Mr.
John Coleman for keeping my feet firmly planted on a path of spirituality and meditation throughout the process. Finally, I would like to extend heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Jane
Alhassan and her husband Mr. R.I. Alhassan for opening their home to my husband and I while we were in Tamale. And finally, I must thank my husband, Preston H. Smith II, for being there for me every step of the way and for reading through multiple early drafts of this work without ever complaining. He has been, and continues to be, a source of inspiration and encouragement.
To all the above individuals and to several others whose names I cannot continue listing but who have assisted me one way or another, I feel very much indebted. Without doubt there will be errors, omissions and over-simplifications in this work, for which I take full responsibility, while hoping that the rest of the material will be enough to stimulate new insights and directions for research in the study of gender, migration and economic development.
vii ABSTRACT
MIGRATION, REMITTANCES AND INTRA-HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATION IN NORTHERN GHANA: DOES GENDER MATTER?
SEPTEMBER 2011
LYNDA JOYCE PICKBOURN, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF GHANA
M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST
Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST
Directed by: Professor James K. Boyce
My dissertation research is motivated by the growing participation of African women in migration streams long dominated by men. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence from my field research on the rural-urban migration of women in
Ghana, I explore the role of social norms in shaping migration and remittance behavior in developing countries.
Existing studies of the impact of migrant remittances on intra-household allocation are based on datasets that assume that remittances flow to a unified household, in which the household head receives remittances and makes decisions about their use.
In contrast, this study makes use of a unique dataset generated during my field research that provides detailed information not only on migration, remittances and household expenditures, but also on the identities of the remitters and recipients of remittances in
181 rural households in northern Ghana. The study also draws on in-depth interviews with migrants, household and community members to understand how social norms influence migration and remittance behavior.
viii I find that gendered social norms play an important role in migration and remittance decisions, so that gender becomes an important determinant of who migrates and who sends remittances, to whom, and why. In particular, I find that female migrants often direct their remittances to other women, thereby creating female-centered networks of remittance flows within the household.
To determine the effect of this on intra-household resource allocation, I analyze the impact of remittances from female migrants on education expenditure. I find that migrant households in which women are the primary remitter or recipient of remittances spend significantly more on education per child of school-going age than do other migrant households.
By taking an intra-household approach to the analysis of migration and remittances that emphasizes the role of gendered social norms in migration and remittance decisions, this research contributes to the growing body of knowledge of how gender shapes migration outcomes. More importantly, by drawing attention to the positive development outcomes that could result from the migration of women, this research strengthens the case for formulating policies to improve the working and living conditions of women migrants around the world.
ix TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v
ABSTRACT ...... viii
LIST OF TABLES ...... xiii
LIST OF FIGURES ...... xv
CHAPTER
1. THE RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION OF WOMEN IN GHANA ...... 1
1.1 Introduction ...... 1 1.2 Research Motivations and Objectives ...... 5 1.3 The Role of Gendered Social Norms in Shaping Preferences and Economic Outcomes ...... 7 1.4 Methodology ...... 10 1.5. Description of Field Research ...... 14
1.5.1 Fieldwork in Accra ...... 14 1.5.2 Fieldwork in the Northern Region ...... 17
1.6 Chapter Outline ...... 21
2. A REVIEW OF SELECTED LITERATURE ON MIGRATION AND REMITTANCES...... 25
2.1 Introduction ...... 25 2.2 The Neoclassical Approach to Migration ...... 26 2.3 The Political Economy/Structuralist Approach to Migration ...... 28 2.4 Household Models of Migration ...... 30
2.4.1 Applications of the New Household Economics to Migration Analysis...... 30 2.4.2 The New Economics of Labor Migration ...... 33 2.4.3 Female migration in the NELM framework ...... 35
2.5 Migration, Remittances and Economic Development ...... 37
3. POVERTY AND INEQUALITY IN GHANA: A HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR WOMEN‟S MIGRATION FROM NORTHERN GHANA ...... 41
3.1 Introduction ...... 41
x 3.2 Northern Ghana – An Overview ...... 42 3.3 Poverty and Inequality in Ghana...... 43 3.4 Accounting for the Persistence of the North-South Divide in Ghana: A Historical Perspective ...... 47
3.4.1 The Colonial Origins of Regional Inequality in Ghana ...... 47 3.4.2 Post-Independence Consolidation of Colonial Economic Structures ...... 51 3.4.3 Agriculture in Northern Ghana, Post-Independence ...... 52 3.4.4 Economic Crisis, Structural Adjustment and Recovery ...... 57
3.5 Trends in Agricultural Production in the Northern Region, 1991–2007 ...... 61 3.6 Gender Inequality in Northern Ghana...... 64
3.6.1 Customary Land Tenure and Women‟s Access to Land ...... 65 3.6.2 The Gender Division of Labor in Northern Ghana and Women‟s Access to Land ...... 67
3.7 Conclusion ...... 67
4. WHO MIGRATES AND WHY? GENDERED SOCIAL NORMS, THE INTRA- HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR AND THE SELECTIVITY OF MIGRATION...... 69
4.1 Introduction ...... 69 4.2 Migration in Context: The Agricultural Economy of the Savelugu- Nanton District ...... 71 4.3 Female Migration in Historical Context ...... 72 4.4 The Organization of Production in the Household ...... 78 4.5 Norms of Household Provisioning and Migration Patterns ...... 82 4.6 Conclusion ...... 92
5. MIGRATION AS A HOUSEHOLD STRATEGY: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL NORMS AND INTRA-HOUSEHOLD CONFLICT IN WOMEN‟S MIGRATION DECISIONS ...... 94
5.1 Introduction ...... 94 5.2 Household Models of Migration ...... 98
5.2.1 Models of Unified Household Preferences ...... 98 5.2.2 Bargaining Models of Migration ...... 99
5.3 Gendered Norms and Mobility in Northern Ghana ...... 103 5.4 Migration in the Absence of Opposition: Unified Preferences or Bargaining? ...... 107 5.5 Explicit Conflict in Migration Decision-Making ...... 113
xi
5.5.1 Opposition from Parents to Daughters‟ Migration ...... 114 5.5.2 Husbands‟ Opposition to Wives‟ Migration ...... 116
5.6 Bargaining Strategies: Conflict Avoidance in Migration Decision- making...... 118 5.7 Conclusion ...... 123
6. REMITTANCES AND INTRA-HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATION IN NORTHERN GHANA – DOES GENDER MATTER? ...... 128
6.1 Introduction ...... 128 6.2 Migration, Remittances and Economic Development – A Review of the Literature ...... 133 6.3 Social Norms and the Intra-household Flow of Remittances ...... 137 6.4 The Role of Social Norms in Shaping Remittance Behavior in Northern Ghana: A Review of the Qualitative Evidence ...... 140 6.5 Gender, Remittances and Household Expenditure Patterns ...... 142
6.5.1 Variables and Econometric Models ...... 144 6.5.2 Description of the Data ...... 150 6.5.3 Education Expenditure Data ...... 151 6.5.4 Migration and Remittance Data ...... 152 6.5.5 Gender, Remittances and Household Budget Shares ...... 157
6.6 Conclusion ...... 176
7. CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS ...... 178
7.1 Introduction ...... 178 7.2 Implications for Economic Theorizing about Migration and Remittance Decision-Making and Data Collection ...... 179 7.3 Policy Implications ...... 181 7.4 Limitations of the Study and Suggestions for Future Research ...... 187 7.5 Conclusion ...... 189
APPENDIX: SUPPLEMENTARY TABLES ...... 190
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 192
xii LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
1.1 Age Distribution of Population in Savelugu-Nanton, 2005 – 2007 ...... 24
3.1 Distribution of Households by Expenditure Quintile, 1991 – 2006 ...... 46
4.1 Migrant Characteristics ...... 83
4.2 Migrants‟ Relation to Household Head ...... 83
4.3 Marital Status of Migrants ...... 83
4.4 Number of Children at Time of Most Recent Migration ...... 87
4.5 Marital Status and Motives for Migration (Female Migrants)...... 92
4.6 Reasons for Migration...... 92
5.1a Breakdown of Female Migrant Sample by Marital Status and Household Opposition to Migration (%) ...... 126
5.1b Breakdown of Female Migrant Sample by Marital Status and Household Opposition to Migration ...... 127
6.1 Breakdown of Migrants by Gender ...... 153
6.2 Breakdown of Remitters and Remittances by Gender ...... 153
6.3 Gender of Primary Recipients of Remittances by Gender of Remitter ...... 154
6.4 Households by Gender of Remitters and Recipients and Household Status ... 155
6.5 Household Characteristics by Gender of Remitter ...... 156
6.6 Description of Expenditure Categories ...... 158
6.7 Mean Budget Shares by Sex of Remitter and Remittance Status of the Household ...... 159
6.8 Mean Budget Shares by Sex of Recipient and Remittance Status of the Household ...... 160
6.9 Mean Expenditure Shares by Remitter-Recipient Pairs ...... 161
xiii 6.10 Summary Statistics – Determinants of Recipient‟s Gender ...... 162
6.11 Budget Shares by Sex of Remitter and Remittance Status of the Household ...... 164
6.12 Mean Budget Shares by Sex of Recipient and Remittance Status of the Household ...... 168
6.13 Impact of Gender of Remitter on Education Expenditure per Child of School-Going Age ...... 169
6.14 Impact of Gender of Recipient on Education Expenditure per Child of School-Going Age ...... 173
6.15 Impact of Remittances on Per Capita Education Expenditure (without controls for gender of remitter or recipient) ...... 175
A.1 Average Share of Health Expenditure in Total Expenditure by Remitter Category (conditional on positive health expenditure) ...... 190
A.2 Average Share of Health Expenditure in Total Expenditure by Recipient Category (conditional on positive health expenditure) ...... 190
A.3 Regressions on Non-Migrant Household Observations only ...... 191
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
3.1. Mean Annual per Capita Income by Region, 2008...... 44
3.2. Mean Annual per Capita Expenditure by Region, 2008 ...... 45
3.3. Yields of Major Staple Crops, Northern Region (1991 – 2007) ...... 62
3.4. Changes in Area Cultivated of Major Staple Crops, Northern Region (1991 - 2007)...... 63
xv CHAPTER 1
THE RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION OF WOMEN IN GHANA
1.1 Introduction
In the field of economic development, internal migration, and in particular, rural- urban migration has generally been regarded with considerable pessimism. Starting in the late 1960s, rural-urban migration attracted substantial attention from both policy makers and academic researchers. Much of this attention was negative and alarmist and contributed to perceptions of migrants from rural areas flooding into cities, swelling the ranks of the unemployed, putting stress on urban services and infrastructure, and contributing to social unrest and civil disorder (Deshingkar and Grimm, 2005). This view was further bolstered by the argument that migration would deplete the rural economy of its more skilled and innovative individuals, thus stunting the progress of the growth and poverty reduction that was expected to be achieved via technical change in small-farm agriculture (Lipton, 1980).
Surprisingly little has changed today. Despite a large body of evidence that points to the importance of population mobility in the livelihood strategies of poor and marginalized groups around the world, internal migration continues to be seen by many policy makers, bureaucrats, academics and non-governmental organizations as an economically, socially and politically destabilizing process. In a study of the treatment of migration in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) from 59 countries, Black and
Sward (2009) find that in more than half of the 84 PRSPs they review, internal migration is seen as a phenomenon to be discouraged. All of the 51 countries that mention internal migration in their PRSPs cite the problems and challenges posed by internal migration.
1 Only 14 of these countries identify any potential benefits of internal migration for development (p.16). While a number of the PRSPs in their study highlight the perceived negative impacts of out-migration on rural areas, by far the most common concern is the impact of rural-urban migration on urban areas, and in particular the growth of informal settlements and pressure on urban infrastructure and services. Rural-urban migration is also seen as contributing to greater environmental deterioration and/or sanitation problems, ill- health, urban congestion, violence, crime and insecurity.
Sub-Saharan Africa is no exception. For example, the PRSPs of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (2007) and Rwanda (2008) describe rural-urban migration as a constraint on national economic growth (Black and Sward 2009:18). Ghana‟s PRSP
(2006) points to the positive consequences of emigration, such as the investment of remittances in roads and real estate, but barely mentions internal migration, except to state unequivocally (in a section on housing and slum upgrading) that „...the growing incidence of slum development in Ghana has been the result of rural-urban migration,‟
(p. 53).
As Black and Sward observe, this stance overlooks the fact that internal migration is the form of migration that is most accessible to poor people, and in many cases, may even be that which is the most relevant to poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. Even though accurate data on internal migration is difficult to come by, we do know that internal migration is quantitatively a more important phenomenon for many developing countries than is international migration. In
2001, for example, the number of people classified as internal migrants in China and
India alone was over 400 million, double the number of international migrants globally
2 (Deshingkar and Grimm, 2005). In sub-Saharan Africa, census data points to significant increases in migration from smallholder farming areas since the 1980s, perhaps in response to the need to diversify income sources following the imposition of structural adjustment programs (ibid.).
One of the most important changes in internal population movements in sub-
Saharan Africa has been the rise in the participation of women in migration streams that were previously dominated by men. According to the International Organization for
Migration (IOM), the number of female migrants in sub-Saharan Africa increased from
3.369 million in 1965 to 7.237 million in 1990 (IOM, 2000).1 In South Africa, female migration has accounted for most of the increase in the internal migratory movements of the country‟s African population, with the percentage of women in the migrant population rising from approximately 30 percent in 1993 to about 34 percent in 1999
(Posel, 2003). In Ghana, available data from the Fifth Round of the Ghana Living
Standards Survey (GLSS 5) and the 2000 Population Census suggests that internal migrants account for over 50 percent of the population, and that about half of these migrants are women (Ackah and Medvedev, 2010; Litchfield and Waddington 2003;
Ghana Statistical Services [GSS], 2000a).
An important migration stream within Ghana that dates back to the early colonial period is the migration of labor from the north of the country to the south. Unlike other migration streams in the country, this migration stream was male-dominated (Lobnibe,
2008). However, since the 1980s, the country has seen an increase in the migration of women moving from rural agricultural communities in the north to urban centers in the
1 This number includes both internal migrants as well as women who have migrated across national borders within the region.
3 south.2 This migration may be characterized as short-term circular or seasonal migration, with women leaving their origin communities for five to six months at a stretch to work in the south, often right after the harvest is over in November to December, and returning home either in April or May to help with planting or gathering shea nuts when they are in season, or in September to October to help with the harvest, and then leaving again. The capital, Accra, is a major destination for these women; in 2000, women made up 49.8 percent of migrants from northern Ghana living in the city (GSS, 2000a). In contrast to the usual perception of female migrants as simply following their husbands, the majority of these women migrate independently of their families. In the south, where they work primarily as porters in the markets, they are known as kayayei, a word that loosely translates as „women who carry loads‟.3 The demand for their services as porters is determined by congestion in the markets which makes vehicular transport difficult, as well as by the expansion of petty trading activities in the informal sector that require the rapid movement of goods from one part of the market to another. Their clients are mainly traders and shoppers who hire them to carry their goods between storage points and market centers, or between market centers and transport terminals. The migration of these women is widely considered to be an undesirable phenomenon, and existing studies have focused on the challenges faced by the migrant women at their destinations, and on the ways in which they cope with these challenges (Awumbila and Ardayfio-Schandorf,
2008; Yeboah, 2008; Bemah, 2010).
2 Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain raw census data from the 1970 and 1984 population censuses from the Ghana Statistical Service, and so it is impossible to identify long-term trends in female migration in Ghana. 3 The word is actually a combination of the Hausa word for load (kaya) and the Ga word for women (yei).
4 1.2 Research Motivations and Objectives
My research is motivated not only by the tendency to overlook the importance of internal migration for the poor, but also by the paucity of research on the implications of female migration for development in sub-Saharan Africa. My project started out as an attempt to locate the rising migration of women from rural communities in northern
Ghana within the political-economy of persistent poverty and deteriorating agricultural livelihoods in this part of the country, and the interaction of these changes with gender relations in the women‟s origin communities. Informed by the extant literature on migration, as well as by prior research on these migrants, I had initially assumed that their migration was part of a household strategy, in which households decided upon the migration of these women as a way to mitigate risk or income vulnerability.
However, once I began my research, it became clear to me that the models typically used by economists and researchers from other disciplines to explain migration and remittance behavior could not adequately explain women‟s decisions about migration and remittances. To begin with, the majority of these models characterize the rural household as a harmonious unit in which all members are united in maximizing household income. Those models that do entertain the possibility of conflict between the potential migrant and non-migrant household members still assume that non-migrant household members act as a unit in making decisions that maximize household well- being. Feminist scholars of migration have been critical of these approaches towards the study of migration, arguing that these accounts ignore the ways in which „internal structures of control‟ in rural communities, including social pressure and gender
5 ideology, as well as intra-household gender relations, contribute to gendered patterns of migration in which men migrate while women stay at home (Walker, 1990; Posel 2001).
Paying attention to the complexity of household migration decision-making has implications for the assumptions we make about the outcomes of migration, and in particular, about the intra-household flow of remittances i.e. who sends and receives remittances within the household. Models of remittances, like models of migration decision-making, assume that households act as a unit in receiving remittances and making decisions about their use. Likewise, most surveys of migration and remittances simply ask the head of the household about remittances received by the household.
Implicit in this question is an assumption that the household head is fully aware of all remittances received by the household, although this assumption is not necessarily grounded in reality. Recent work on the impact of remittances on development has typically asked how patterns of resource allocation differ between households that receive remittances and those that do not. Little consideration is given to the possibility that the identity of the remitter and recipient of remittances may have an impact on how remittances are used in the household.
As my field research progressed, it became increasingly evident that this approach leaves little room for understanding how the social environment of agents affects their preferences and decisions regarding migration and remittances. The central premise of this dissertation is that gendered social norms play an important role in shaping decisions about migration and remittances. They are important in determining who migrates and why. Social norms are also important in determining who sends and receives remittances within the household, who makes decisions about how remittances are used, and the uses
6 to which remittances are put. This, in turn, has implications for the impacts of migration and remittances on household resource allocation. Thus, without incorporating an analysis of the social context and the norms that prevail in this context, attempts to understand the dynamics of migration and remittances, and their impacts on development will result in at best a limited understanding of the determinants and outcomes of migration. My research, therefore, is an attempt to provide answers to the following questions:
1. How do gendered social norms help to explain the migration of women
between the north and south of Ghana?
2. How does increasing livelihood vulnerability in northern Ghana interact with
intra-household hierarchies and gendered divisions of labor to shape the migration
decisions of women in northern Ghana?
3. What role do gendered social norms play in shaping the remittance decisions of
female migrants and the uses to which their remittances are put, and what is the
impact of remittances from migrant women on household resource allocation?
1.3 The Role of Gendered Social Norms in Shaping Preferences and Economic Outcomes
Most economic analyses of migration and remittance behavior begin with an individual agent or household whose preferences are assumed to be exogenously determined. These preferences shape the agents‟ choices over whether or not to migrate, and whether or not to make remittances. But the tendency of most economists to ignore the role of social norms in shaping preferences does not change the fact that social norms
7 are important in understanding the migration and remittance behavior of people in a society.
Social norms prescribe the boundaries of acceptable behavior for the members of the social group that share those norms. These norms may be partly sustained by the expectation of the approval or disapproval of others if they are obeyed or disobeyed. But norms can also be internalized as codes of proper conduct, so that they are sustained by the negative feelings of embarrassment, anxiety, guilt or shame that one feels at the prospect of violating them (Elster, 1989). In this way, social norms and structures shape the preferences of agents and play a role in shaping their choices.
Gendered social norms are based on the social construction of gender that pertains in a given society and determine what men and women can or cannot do. Early institutional economists like Thorstein Veblen point to the importance of gender norms in defining appropriate behavior for men and women and in shaping economic outcomes.
For example, in his discussion of the origins of conspicuous consumption in feudal society, Veblen writes, „…the women of high rank are commonly exempt from industrial employment, or at least from the more vulgar kinds of manual labor‟ (Veblen, 1899: 22).
Elsewhere, in a comparison of the cultural impacts of industrialization in England and
Germany, he states:
It has, e.g., become improper, not to say immoral, for English women to do fieldwork; whereas in Continental countries, and perhaps especially in German countries, women work in the field without moral restraint. . . Various arguments are advanced for the „exemption‟ of women from outdoor work. So far as these arguments are fit to survive scrutiny they turn out to be considerations of conventional propriety. They appear to be of the nature of an impulsive imitation of that exemption of well-to-do women from all useful work, that constitutes one the chief infirmities of the English social code and one of its chief exemplifications of the principle of conspicuous waste (Veblen 1965: 146).
8 Although later institutional economists have tended to ignore the role of gendered social norms in shaping economic outcomes, feminist economists recognize that gendered social norms act as „structures of constraint‟, defining and constraining behavior and resulting in unequal outcomes for men and women (Folbre, 1994).
Gender as a social category is associated with prescribed norms of behavior for men and women. By identifying as a „woman‟ or „man‟, individuals internalize a particular set of values or prescriptions for behavior such that their actions conform to the behavior of other women or men. In this way, norms associated with gender identity shape the preferences of the individual for certain kinds of behavior for themselves as well as for others. Conflicts arise when individuals feel that their own identity is challenged or threatened by the deviation of others from the norms of behavior prescribed for their gender (Akerlof and Kranton, 2000).
With regard to migration decision-making, one can imagine how the independent migration of women, for example, might be a source of conflict among household members if it challenges social norms that frown upon women leaving their families and communities to work in the city. Norm-driven differences in preferences regarding migration might also influence the formation of interest coalitions among household members when migration decisions are being made. These possibilities are simply ignored in models of migration decision-making that see migration as an individual decision or that assume that migration takes place as part of a stable or unchanging household strategy.
However, social norms are not static. Although usually taken as given, they are often subject to contestation, and small changes in behavior at the individual level can
9 trigger major shifts in norms at the societal level. Economic factors can alter the calculus that sustains social norms by increasing the benefits to be gained from challenging a norm relative to the costs of adherence. Gendered social norms may slowly begin to shift as women begin to question and challenge them, either individually or collectively. For example, in her work on female garment workers in Bangladesh, Naila Kabeer (2000) has shown how women responded to changing economic conditions by questioning or reinterpreting the norms of purdah, ultimately creating spaces within which they could justify working outside the home. Attempts to challenge socially prescribed norms can spark conflict between individuals or groups of individuals who have an interest in maintaining these norms and those who seek to contest these norms so as to accommodate changing economic circumstances. How these conflicts are, or are not, resolved, can have important implications for economic outcomes. In this dissertation, I explore how conflicts among household members over who may or may not migrate may have implications for the intra-household flow of remittances, i.e. who sends and receives migrants‟ remittances.
1.4 Methodology
In 2007 – 2008, in an attempt to examine the role of gendered social norms in shaping migration and remittance decisions, I spent a year in Ghana conducting field research on the migration of women from the rural communities in north of the country to urban areas in the south. Female migration from northern Ghana is a relatively recent phenomenon, and because women typically migrate from households characterized by strongly patriarchal norms that place women at the bottom of the intra-household
10 hierarchy in terms of access to household resources, it provides an excellent lens through which to examine the role of social norms in shaping migration and remittance decisions.
I decided to carry out field research because the questions I was asking could not be answered with secondary data. For one thing, there is very limited data on internal migration in Ghana. The only sources of information are the population census, which provides information on the magnitude of internal migration, but little else besides, and the different rounds of the GLSS which hold more detailed information on migration and remittances. However, the GLSS contains no information on the details of migration decision-making, nor does it provide information on the actual recipients of remittances within the household. Neither one of these sources would be useful in exploring the role of norms in shaping migration and remittance behavior. Moreover, the definition of migration in each of these sources excludes short-term, seasonal or circular migration.
For example, the population census asks for the place of birth and usual residence of each person enumerated, as well as the usual place of residence five years prior to the census.
The place of usual residence is defined as the place in which the person has lived for at least six months. Migrants who move for short periods of time are likely to consider their origin communities as their usual place of residence; thus, if they are enumerated in their origin communities, this will result in them being considered as non-migrants. Likewise, the GLSS defines a migrant as a person who has lived or intends to live in a different district for a continuous period of at least twelve months. Again, short-term moves are likely to be overlooked when migration is defined in this way. The fact that circular migration forms the bulk of migration between northern and southern Ghana meant that if
I wanted to study this particular group of migrants and to understand the role of social
11 norms in shaping their migration and remittance behavior, I would have to collect my own data.
The choice of research methods can present a major conundrum for economists who wish to expand their research tool-kit in a discipline in which quantitative methods are practically sine qua non. The pros and cons of quantitative and qualitative research methods in the social sciences are well-known, and I will merely sum them up here.
Quantitative methods are generally assumed to yield representative, reliable and unbiased information that can be generalized; in practice, however, certain groups may be under- represented in aggregate conclusions, and the use of a priori hypotheses to generate survey questions may miss relevant issues and variables. In contrast, qualitative methods can provide a holistic understanding of complex issues and processes, and increase the likelihood of uncovering unexpected and sensitive issues that are relevant to uncovering causal relationships. However, qualitative methods have been criticized for being subject to the biases of the researcher, and for yielding findings that cannot be generalized because of the small samples typical of qualitative research. Nevertheless, qualitative research can be useful for economists trying to understand microeconomic behavior.
Jaynes (1998) notes that the qualitative techniques of social anthropology permit insights into participants‟ perspectives on the choices they make, effectively allowing the researcher to ask, „…what are the arguments of the agent‟s preference field?‟ (p. 357).
In this way, these methods help the analyst to „construct interpretations derived from the meaning social actions have for the actors performing the acts… (and) help the analyst disentangle the cultural factors from structural determinants of behavior‟ (ibid.).
12 Participatory methods such as focus groups provide another tool in the researcher‟s kit. Having their origins in development activism, they aim to investigate and give voice to those groups in society who are most vulnerable and marginalized in development decision-making and implementation (Lloyd-Evans, 2006). As an ancillary method to other research methods, focus groups are not only an excellent tool for obtaining information on public perceptions of social issues, they also provide a conducive environment for understanding collective social action and accessing group beliefs, understandings, behavior and attitudes that would otherwise be overlooked in quantitative surveys or in-depth interviews, particularly in a context in which gathering such information would require significant investments of time or lengthy stays in a community (ibid.).
The choice of method should ultimately be driven by the questions that the researcher is trying to answer. Since it was clear that no single method was appropriate for the questions that I wanted to answer, I eventually settled on an integrated approach, otherwise known as a mixed methods approach that combines quantitative methods with qualitative and participatory methods. Tashakkori and Cresswell (2007) define mixed methods research as „research in which the investigator collects and analyzes data, integrates the findings, and draws inferences using both qualitative and quantitative approaches or methods in a single study or a program of inquiry‟ (p. 2).
The use of an integrated methodology enables researchers to cross-check and triangulate any information that is central to the particular research questions being asked
(Mayoux, 2006). More than that, however, I found that the use of participatory and qualitative methods at the beginning of my research project was helpful in refining my
13 research questions, generating broad hypotheses and designing the quantitative survey.
This approach was also useful in providing context for analyzing and interpreting the quantitative data collected. Finally, using this integrated approach was particularly valuable in revealing unexpected findings about the role of gendered social norms in shaping migration and remittances decisions. This led to the re-examination of my initial research hypotheses and brought to light information that would otherwise have remained hidden had I stayed within the bounds of a pre-defined hypothesis typical of a purely quantitative study.
1.5. Description of Field Research
My fieldwork took place in two parts. The first part took place between August and December of 2007 in Accra, the capital of Ghana, which also happens to be the most popular destination for both male and female migrants from the north of Ghana. With the help of a male field assistant who also acted as an interpreter, I interviewed a total of 253 female migrants. For this part of my field research, I defined a migrant as any female aged fifteen or older, who had moved from the north of Ghana to live in the south for at least three months prior to the interview, or who intended to stay in the south for at least three months following the interview.
1.5.1 Fieldwork in Accra
These interviews took place in five separate locations in Accra, all chosen for their proximity to market centers where the majority of female migrants from Northern
14 Ghana live and work.4 Because of the difficulties of generating a sampling frame when working with a population such as this, we used the technique of snowball sampling to select the respondents. After spending a few days at the market centers observing the women at work, and occasionally falling into conversation with them and explaining my research project, I began the process of selecting respondents by walking up to women we identified as possible migrants from the north, explaining the details of the project, and asking if they would be willing to talk to us. The women who worked as market porters were easiest to identify, since they all carried a metal basin in which they placed the loads they were hired to carry. Thus the majority of women in the initial sample worked as porters. Once an individual had agreed to be interviewed, I asked her if she would be willing to recommend others to interview. In this way I was able to generate a snowball sample based on the networks of the initial respondents. As a result, a number of the migrants in later rounds of the sample worked as domestics or as dishwashers for food vendors. One of the migrants I interviewed worked as a waitress in a small local restaurant. Most of the women we approached were willing to talk to us, although a number expressed what has come to be known as „respondent fatigue‟ after having been interviewed by NGOs and the local press apparently one time too many. Since the migrants tended to form networks based on age and origin community, there was the possibility that each migrant would only recommend other migrants who were similar to her in important ways. Thus, I purposely selected the initial sample to ensure diversity in terms of age, marital status and origin community.
4 The areas were the Novotel, Tema Station, Railways and Agbobloshie neighborhoods of the Accra Central Business District, and the Madina market which is some distance from the city center.
15 I began each interview by asking migrants about their migration history, their reasons for migrating, their migration and remittances decisions, the migration decision- making process, as well as on their experiences in the city. Then, using a combination of pre-coded and open-ended questions, I collected data on multiple variables, including data on their migration history, family background, the economic status of their origin households and on the migration decision-making process.
As many feminist researchers have noted, the hierarchical power relationships that are maintained, perpetuated or created during field research present a central dilemma for feminists doing fieldwork (Wolf, 1996: 2). The interview process is especially revealing in this regard. Initially, I planned that my interviews with migrants in Accra would take the form of a structured interview, built around a survey instrument, with a series of open-ended questions at the end. The survey began with questions that were designed to elicit basic information about the migrants and their migration history, while hopefully making participants feel more comfortable with the process. However, during the pre-test stage I found the process of completing a questionnaire to be rather stilted. This format basically meant that I was in complete control of the conversation – I asked the question, the participant responded, I wrote down the answer, and then moved on the next question. The participant did not have the opportunity to ask why I wanted this information, to elaborate upon the information or to reflect on her response. The process felt very unnatural, and not particularly satisfying. I also sensed that the participants were not particularly comfortable with this one-sided „conversation‟ which ultimately denied them any voice in determining the direction of the conversation. I also felt uncomfortable with that level of control over what I felt should have been a more
16 engaging conversation; moreover, I felt alienated from the research as well as from the participants, and beholden to the sheets of paper that were my survey instrument.
Ultimately, I decided to use a less structured method in which I simply asked the women about the subjects that were covered in the questionnaire. In the course of the conversation, I raised the questions that I knew were on the questionnaire, and took notes on their responses. My translator/field assistant filled out the questionnaire, which I later checked for accuracy. Allowing the respondents to share their stories freely without being led or influenced by pre-constructed survey questions imparted a more natural flow to the conversation and gave the respondents the opportunity to contribute information that was valuable but that would not have been available to me had I stayed within the boundaries imposed by the pre-designed survey. It also allowed them to laugh at some of the questions, comment on others, ask me about myself – who I was, why I was doing this research, and how their participation in my survey might be of use to them. Finally, it allowed them to raise questions on other issues that they were concerned about. One woman, for example, wanted to know how she could gain access to family planning services before returning to her husband. She already had five children, and didn‟t want any more. Another woman, after talking about saving money to send to her children, wanted to know whether it would be possible to open a savings account at the bank even though she could not read or write.
1.5.2 Fieldwork in the Northern Region
The second part of my fieldwork took place between February and July 2008 in the Savelugu-Nanton district, one of the eighteen administrative districts of the Northern
Region of Ghana. My original intention had been to generate a sample in which the
17 migrants I interviewed in Accra would be matched to their households in the Northern
Region. However, given my limited resources, the logistics of this proved impossible once I arrived in the region, and I decided to limit my household surveys to the Savelugu-
Nanton district. This district has been identified by government and NGO sources as having one of the highest rates of female out-migration in the Northern region. It was also the third most frequently cited district of origin of the migrants I interviewed in
Accra, and unlike some of the districts in the region, most of the communities in the
District were relatively easy to access by motorbike.
The Savelugu-Nanton District is located in the center of the Northern Region.
The population of the district at the end of 2007 was estimated to be 112,774 (Savelugu-
Nanton District Assembly 2008), representing 4.5 percent of the region‟s population. 51 percent of the population is female. Households are predominantly male-headed; the proportion of female-headed households in the entire district is 3.1 percent (ibid.). The majority of the district‟s population belongs to the Mole-Dagbon ethnic group, which includes the Dagomba and the Mamprusi sub-groups. Islam is the dominant religion in the district.
As in other parts of the Northern Region, the rate of out-migration of young men and women from the district is high. Table 1.1 shows the age distribution of the population of the district between 2005-2007 (Savelugu-Nanton District Assembly,
2008). In each of those three years, the population aged 12-15 years is considerably lower than the population of the 0-5 and 6-11 age groups, for both genders. Given that there have been no sharp changes in birth and death rates over the last twenty years, this
18 suggests significantly higher out-migration rates for both males and females in this age group.
I randomly selected 24 of the 147 communities in the District, making sure to cover all the cardinal points of the district. This was important because while some of the communities were close to a major highway or to irrigation facilities, others were more remote and much poorer as a result. In retrospect, it probably wouldn‟t have made much of a difference to my results if I had decided to limit my fieldwork to fewer communities, since the communities did not differ very much from each other in terms of the prevalence of migration or in terms of the norms and perceptions surrounding migration.
In each community I entered, I met with the chief, a group of village elders and the representative to the district assembly (the „assembly-man‟). I explained the purpose of my project, and obtained their permission to speak with community members. I was also able to elicit the views of these community leaders about migration to the south.
Over the six-month period, and with the assistance of three field assistants, I surveyed
181 households randomly selected from these communities. The number of households selected from each community was proportional to the total number of households in the community.
Each household survey consisted of four separate parts. The first part was the household survey, in which I collected information on household membership and migration history, asset ownership and experience of livelihood shocks. I also collected information on health and education expenditures on each member of the household. The second part was a migration survey, which was applied only to households from which at least one person had moved to live in a village, town or city outside the district for at
19 least three months in the previous five years. As it turned out, in all these households, there was at least one person who had moved to a village, town or city in the south of
Ghana within this time frame, so that migration to the south became my operative definition of a migrant. In these migrant households, I conducted interviews with the closest relatives of the migrants, both male and female, as well as with return migrants if they were present. I collected data on the individual migrants‟ migration history, reasons for migrating, the migration decisions, remittances sent in the previous twelve months and the uses to which these remittances were put. The third part of the survey was an expenditure survey, in which I collected detailed expenditure data on food, health, durables, and other miscellaneous items. Finally, I collected data on women‟s status and roles in decision-making in the household. Because of the large household sizes and the number of women in the household, this survey was administered only to women migrants who had returned, or if the migrant was still away, her closest female relative, as well as the most senior woman in the household (usually the household head‟s oldest wife). In non-migrant households, this meant that I spoke only to the latter. The decision to include the senior wife was initially based on the advice of my field assistants that it would be unwise to offend the senior woman in the household. However, these interviews ultimately turned out to be useful in providing information about the differences in status of the women in the household, and the differences between the responsibilities of older women and younger women in the rural households.
I also held focus group discussions with women and men separately in six communities to get a better understanding of the norms and perceptions regarding female migration in the district. Each of these focus groups was purposely constituted
20 differently. For example, in one village, I spoke with a group of older women, none of whom had ever migrated to the south, but a few of whom had daughters who were migrants. In another village, the majority of women in the group were younger women who had returned from the south. In yet another village, I spoke with a group of men, some of whom had wives or daughters who had migrated, or who had migrated themselves.
1.6 Chapter Outline
The structure of the dissertation is as follows. Following the literature review of
Chapter Two, the third chapter provides the context for a study of migration from the north of Ghana to the south. It situates out-migration from the northern half of the country in a political-economy analysis of regional inequality between the north and south. It also examines the links between agricultural policy, rural livelihoods and gender relations in northern Ghana.
In Chapter Four, I examine the role of the intra-household division of labor and responsibility in determining who in the household migrates and discuss how these constraints shape the motivations for migration. The fifth chapter critically examines models of migration decision-making that treat migration as part of a household strategy to diversify income sources and/or mitigate risk. In this chapter, I argue that the notion of a household strategy, as currently conceptualized, ignores the role of social norms in shaping intra-household conflicts over migration, and leaves little room for the consideration of how these norms shape migration and remittance behavior. The sixth chapter of the dissertation examines how gendered social norms shape the flow of
21 remittances within the household, and how the gender of the remitter and recipient of remittances impact how remittances are used within the household.
The concluding chapter discusses the importance of this research for the study of migration and remittances and for public policy. The feminization of migration flows across the globe that has taken place in recent decades has been seen as both the outcome of female empowerment as well as a catalyst for the empowerment process (Hugo, 2000).
However, whether or not migration results in the empowerment of women depends on a number of factors – the economic, structural and institutional context within which migration takes place, the type of movement involved, and the characteristics of the women involved. This chapter argues that there is much scope for policy and program interventions to maintain and protect the rights of women who migrate to ensure that migration results in an improvement in their wellbeing.
This dissertation is in some ways a political project. It is an attempt to give voice to a marginalized group – women who migrate seasonally from rural to urban areas to work in the informal sector – that is either overlooked in scholarly work on migration based on aggregate statistical analyses, which often subsumes their story under that of other groups of migrants, or that is viewed as contributing to a problematic economic and social phenomenon. But it is also an effort to contribute to the literature on gender, migration and economic development. The two projects are interlinked: by bringing a marginalized group to the forefront of academic research, it questions a number of assumptions that underlie the models of migration decisions and raises questions that are relevant to development policy. What can we learn about how female migrants and their families make decisions about migration and remittances? How do we improve the living
22 and working conditions of migrants who make important contributions to the welfare of their households, without furthering or contributing to their exploitation? A feminist perspective on migration recognizes that women migrants in particular face social and institutional constraints that are ignored in much mainstream economic theorizing about migration and affords important insights into the social processes and development outcomes of migration.
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Table 1.1: Age Distribution of Population in Savelugu-Nanton, 2005 – 2007
2005 2006 2007 Age Male Female Total Male Female Total Male Female Total 0-5 10,408 10,833 21,241 10,725 11,163 21,888 11,052 11,503 22,555 6-11 11,866 12,833 24,216 12,226 12,725 24,951 12,599 13,113 25,711 12-15 3,747 3,900 7,647 3,861 4,019 7,879 3,979 4,141 8,120 16-64 24,876 25,891 50,767 25,633 26,679 52,313 26,414 27,492 53,906 65+ 1,145 1,192 2,337 1,180 1,228 2,408 1,266 1,266 2,482
Source: Savelugu-Nanton District Assembly 2008
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CHAPTER 2
A REVIEW OF SELECTED LITERATURE ON MIGRATION AND
REMITTANCES
2.1 Introduction
Despite the increasing migration of women within and from developing countries since the late 1970s, it is only recently that economists have attempted to understand the role of gender in shaping migration determinants and consequences. A review of the literature on migration and remittances in developing countries reveals that the role of social norms in shaping migration and remittance behavior remains relatively unexplored in this literature. The economic literature on migration that I discuss in the sections that follow can be classified into three broad categories: the neoclassical approach typified by the classic Harris-Todaro model; the political economy or historical-structuralist approach; and the household strategy approach, which includes the New Economics of
Labor Migration (NELM) literature. These approaches differ in the emphasis they place on the role of the individual agent or household in the migration decision and in migration outcomes. Where possible, I emphasize studies that use these approaches to analyze migration and remittances in African countries. I also discuss feminist critiques of these approaches, and highlight the insights generated by a feminist perspective on migration and remittances. The purpose of this review is to discuss the extent to which elements from the different approaches can be useful in helping to understand the determinants and outcomes of migration.
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2.2 The Neoclassical Approach to Migration
The earliest literature on migration dates back to the 1880s, when Ernest
Ravenstein (1885, 1889), a geographer, proposed his „laws of migration‟ according to which individual migrants move from areas of low opportunity to areas of high opportunity, with rural residents being relatively more migratory than urban residents.
Perhaps the most interesting result of Ravenstein‟s research, which was based on his examination of census data gathered in the United Kingdom in 1871 and 1881, was that women were more likely than men to migrate, and to do so within the kingdom of their birth. Ravenstein attributed this to women looking for employment in the shops and factories of industrial centers.
The 1950s saw a renewed interest in developing theoretical perspectives across different disciplines to explain migration patterns and behavior. Probably the most cited economic model of rural-urban migration is the Harris-Todaro model, which treats migration as an individual optimization strategy (Todaro, 1969; 1976; Harris and Todaro,
1970). In this model, the potential migrant compares the expected earnings from remaining in the rural areas with an expected stream of income from formal-sector urban employment that depends on the prevailing urban wage as well as a subjective estimate of the probability of obtaining employment in the urban formal sector, which is assumed to be determined by the urban unemployment rate. The model predicts that if rural-urban income differentials are high enough, people will migrate even if their chances of gaining urban, formal sector employment are actually quite low. Thus, an increase in the rural- urban wage differential attracts more migrants, further contributing to urban unemployment.
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The Harris-Todaro model, and the neoclassical model of migration, more generally, has spawned a significant body of literature that highlights the shortcomings of this approach. For one thing, by suppressing gender differences in migration patterns, the model does not explore the possibility that the determinants of migration may differ systematically for men and women. In this model, the only way to explain the gender selectivity of migration flows is to fall back on gender differences in income and employment opportunities in the urban area. For example, the higher incidence of male migration in Kenya has been attributed to the fact that the rural-urban wage gap is higher for men than for women, thus men are more likely to respond to this differential by migrating (Agesa and Agesa, 1999; 2005; Agesa, 2003).
However, the gender gap in rural-urban wage differentials may not be the only factor preventing women from migrating in countries like Kenya where men dominate in internal migration flows. Female migrants, for reasons arising from social and cultural constructions of gender, face very different constraints and opportunity structures from those faced by men in areas of both origin and destination. Women‟s ability to migrate is often constrained by their responsibility for non-market work, such as child-care, elder- care and domestic services. However, by focusing solely on individual motivations for migration, the neoclassical approach abstracts from the role of family considerations and intra-household gender relations in shaping migration decisions. This omission has been roundly criticized by a number of feminist geographers who argue for a more comprehensive approach that explores how intra-household gender relations affect both male and female migration (Chant and Radcliffe, 1992; Lawson, 1998).
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Extensions of the Todaro framework that have attempted to explain female migration continue to assume that the motivations for male and female population moves are similar, in that both men and women move to areas which offer potentially higher wages. These models differ from the Todaro model by adding gender-differentiating factors to explain the „extra‟ influence on female migrant populations, such as the availability of marriage partners in the destination areas relative to areas of origin (eg.
Behrman and Wolfe, 1982; Thadani and Todaro, 1984). These models suffer from the same shortcomings: a tendency to treat women as a homogenous group, ignoring differences among women in terms of their position in the household hierarchy and a tendency to abstract from the social factors that condition women‟s participation in migration flows.
2.3 The Political Economy/Structuralist Approach to Migration
In contrast to the Harris-Todaro model which abstracts from the structural aspects of the economy that determine the rural-urban wage differentials that are central to its analysis, the political economy paradigm emphasizes the importance of understanding migration movements within the context of social, political and economic change. The political economy approach to migration presents a strong criticism of the neoclassical concern with individual motivations and preferences, emphasizing instead class conflict, uneven development and the reorganization of production. Migration, from this perspective, arises from the spatial distribution and redistribution of labor requirements among the different sectors of national and international economies as production is reorganized (Safa, 1982).
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In analyzing internal migration, this body of work argues that the uneven accumulation of capital contributes to and exacerbates poverty, income inequality and stagnation in the peasant sector, all of which provoke rural out-migration. At a micro- level, these approaches conceptualize migration in terms of the class position of migrants: members of the dominant classes have greater control over productive resources and may make strategic choices to migrate, whereas members of subordinate classes are more likely to migrate as a survival response to changes in the productive system over which they have no control (Shrethsa, 1988). Thus, the decreasing viability of agriculture, the concentration of agricultural resources among a small number of capitalist producers and outmoded forms of land tenure constitute the most important „push‟ factors from rural areas (Crummett, 2001).
Within this framework, the emergence of gender-differentiated migration patterns is linked to the uneven nature of contemporary world economic development, which affects only certain areas and draws in only specific types of labor. Migration within national boundaries results from capitalist development in urban areas, which in turn gives rise to gender-differentiated migration as rural gender divisions of labor are transformed in response to shifts in labor markets in the wider economy (Standing, 1985).
This approach extends our understanding of women‟s position within constantly evolving transformations in production relations and locations, and reveals processes that prompt and shape female participation in migration flows at different points in time. However, by emphasizing relations of production, the structuralist approach overlooks the fact that the relations of reproduction in which both women and men are involved are equally
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crucial in shaping their ability to enter the paid workforce and participate in migration flows (Chant and Radcliffe, 1992).1
2.4 Household Models of Migration
One of the major weaknesses of the Harris-Todaro formulation of rural-urban migration decision-making, apart from its exclusive focus on labor market conditions, is its treatment of migration as a purely individual decision. In recent years, this assumption has been challenged by a number of researchers, seeking to better approximate the realities of migration decision-making in developing countries where family farming systems predominate in rural areas. In these family systems, the land is owned and cultivated jointly by the extended family, using family labor, and the total family income is shared among family members. Adult family members may either work on the land or migrate to towns in search of employment, and the decision to send some family members to the urban sector is often made by the head of the family if it is thought to be in family‟s best interest. The migrant retains contact with his or her family and sends remittances back to the household.
2.4.1 Applications of the New Household Economics to Migration Analysis
One of the earliest analyses of household migration decision-making to use this approach is Bhattacharyya (1985) in a study of migration in India; the approach has also been used by Low (1986) in his analysis of migration from rural households in Southern
1 Here, reproduction refers to the processes involved in reproducing the current labor force and nurturing the next generation of workers. It includes activities such as childbearing, childcare, cooking, cleaning, caring for sick household members etc.
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Africa, and by Bigsten (1996) and Agesa and Kim (2001) to explore the determinants of patterns of migration behavior in Kenya.
This approach is essentially an application of the New Household Economics
(NHE) to migration decision-making. The NHE approach to household decision-making assumes that the preferences of household members can be aggregated in a common utility function, and that household income is fully pooled. Altruism is assumed to be a basic feature of the household; each individual conceives of his/her own utility in terms of the collective welfare of the household, and household members subordinate their individual inclinations to the pursuit of common household goals (Katz 1991). In particular, the head of the household is conceptualized as a „benevolent dictator‟ who makes decisions that maximize the welfare of the entire household.
In the models of migration based on the NHE approach, therefore, the migration of an individual from a household is undertaken to maximize household utility obtained from the consumption of goods, subject to time and income constraints. A household that needs extra income either for consumption or investment, or that needs to insure itself against risk, decides that this can be achieved through the migration of a family member.
In deciding which household member to send, households are assumed to take into consideration the migrant‟s potential earnings at the destination; the labor of each household member is allocated to the labor market (i.e. local or migrant) in which his or her contribution to household income will be greatest. These models predict that households will typically send male household members as migrants since their expected wages at the destination are likely to exceed those of female household members: in other
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words, men migrate because they have a comparative advantage in wage work, while women stay at home because they have a comparative advantage in domestic production.
A feminist critique of the NHE conception of migration as a household strategy or
„family decision‟ begins with its presumption that there is consensus among household members over the decision of who in the household should migrate. In reality, household labor allocation decisions are subject to competing interests, conflict and negotiation,
(see, for example, Agarwal, 1997; Katz, 1991). This observation is particularly pertinent in conceiving of migration as a gendered process: the extent of a migrant‟s involvement in the migration decision-making process is likely to be a reflection of his or her relative power within the household, which is in turn influenced by factors such as age, generation, relationship to the head of the household and gender (ibid.) Low levels of female mobility, for example, may reflect male resistance within patriarchal households to the migration of women, who provide valuable non-market services to the household.
In a critique of the NHE approach to migration, Posel (1999) observes that the migration decision is essentially a decision about the allocation of household labor, and shows that gender differences in migration in South Africa are not explained by efficiency considerations alone. She develops a model of the patriarchal household in which men control household resources and decision-making. In this household the migration decision is neither made collectively nor in the interests of the household unit; instead, men, lacking direct control over the distribution of output in the household, use their control of decision-making and resources in the household to maximize their own income through further migration, despite the fact that this does not result in the most efficient outcomes for the household. She tests the predictions of this model by
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comparing labor migration in male- and female-headed households in South Africa and finds that even after controlling for differences in household income and composition, the probability that women will migrate is negatively affected by the presence of a male household-head. Posel also finds that in male-headed households, migration patterns were more consistent with the predictions of the patriarchal model than with the NHE model, i.e. the level of female migration in male-headed households was less than the level of female migration that would maximize household income. Indeed, on average, the opportunity cost for the household of female household members remaining in rural production, measured in terms of wages lost in urban employment, is more than double that for male household members. Posel‟s findings are consistent with those of a study of cross-border migration in Southern Africa which concludes that women are more likely to be subject to the will of a male parent or partner in determining whether or not they migrate (Dodson, 2000).
2.4.2 The New Economics of Labor Migration
The strongest challenge to the individual bias of the Harris-Todaro model has come from the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM) literature (Stark, 1978,
1984; Stark and Levhari, 1982; Stark and Bloom, 1985; Lucas and Stark, 1985; Katz and
Stark, 1986b; Stark, 1999). This body of work has provided perhaps the most systematic theoretical treatment of the role played by labor migration in household economic strategies. The central premise of the NELM approach is that migration decisions are made not by isolated individual actors but by families or households.
The NELM framework begins with the observation that the typical rural household is subject to the risk of negative income shocks from a variety of sources. In
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the presence of fragmented capital markets that are unable to supply adequate credit or insurance coverage for rural households, the risk-averse household can reduce risk and accumulate financial surpluses by diversifying its sources of income; one such strategy would involve the migration of the eldest son in the household to find work in the city and remit part of his urban income (Stark, 1978); in this way, migration serves as a means of mitigating risk, or as a means of financing investments for households that are credit- constrained. The NELM literature thus offers an alternative to the almost exclusive focus on the individual evaluation of labor market conditions that defines neoclassical migration models, and points to other influences on the decision to migrate – the presence of some form of perceived risk to the household‟s income, the absence of well-developed credit and insurance markets, and most important, the need of the family or the household to diversify its income sources, maximize expected income, and minimize risk.
The NELM literature is dominated by models that treat remittances as the outcome of intra-family bargaining and strategic behavior by family members (Stark,
1978; 1984; 1991; 1999; Lucas and Stark, 1985; Hoddinott 1994). These models begin with the premise that the decision to migrate is a joint decision made by the migrant and the non-migrant members of the household. The two parties enter into an implicit contractual arrangement in which the household funds the cost of migration and requisite education for the migrant to find employment in the urban destination, and the migrant in return agrees to make remittances to the household. The migrant adheres to this contract so long as s/he expects to gain from doing so. Important gains to the migrant include support from the family to hedge against unemployment at the destination, or the expectation of a bequest from the family when the migrant returns.
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2.4.3 Female migration in the NELM framework
Initial formulations of the NELM framework suggest that households are most likely to choose sons rather than daughters as migrants. This conclusion emerges from the assumption that because households aim to maximize total income, the household member who stands to earn the highest net income in the urban labor market will be selected as the migrant. Thus, if men have a comparative advantage over women in urban labor markets, the NELM framework, like the NHE approach, would predict the dominance of males in migration flows.
Following from this, later extensions of the NELM framework have attributed the increase in the proportion of females in migration flows in Asia to improvements in the comparative advantage of women in urban labor markets. Thus, Lauby and Stark (1988) suggest that the predominance of female migrants in the internal migration flows in the
Philippines is explained not only by structural changes in the economy, but also by the relative stability of women‟s jobs in the urban destination. As a result, „risk-averse rural families seeking to minimize the variance associated with their income‟ will send daughters instead of sons to work in the city (p. 485).
In fact, high rates of female mobility may reflect the influence of gender and power asymmetries in household decision-making that compel daughters to acquiesce to the authority of the male head of the family. This possibility does not enter directly into
NELM framework. Yet, as Lauby and Stark (1988) observe, families may foster the migration of women precisely because their dependent status and the strong normative expectation of material support from daughters increases the perception that they are more likely to continue to make remittances to the family of origin after migration, even
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if they command lower wages than men in domestic labor markets. Daughters may also be more likely to make remittances to their parents in anticipation of future assistance from their mothers in the form of child care. In other words, gendered social norms that make daughters more dependent than sons on familial relationships and networks may ensure that placing daughters in the city will offer greater security to the rural family than having sons migrate. Interestingly, Lauby and Stark observe that gender socialization in the Philippines ensures that daughters can be relied upon to a greater degree than sons to make regular remittances, pointing to the role of gendered social norms in shaping remittance behavior, a point to which I will return later.
Yet another explanation for high rates of female migration may be found in locally constructed gender divisions of labor that designate women as marginal to agricultural work and as secondary, supplemental wage earners. Under these circumstances, women, because they hold less responsibility for the generation of income or support in the areas of origin, may be more likely to move out, as is the case in many
Latin American countries, where women have long dominated rural-urban population movements (Radcliffe, 1991; Chant, 1992). The unequal gender division of labor within the household and the marginalization of women in agricultural production resulting from the focus on export agriculture in these countries have together contributed to the creation of a surplus female population that has little place in rural production, hence migration becomes the only option available for women, especially among poor and landless households (Crummet, 2001).
However, the gender division of labor is not by itself enough to explain patterns of labor allocation both inside and outside the household. It is also important to
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recognize that intra-household hierarchies of power associated with gendered social norms are equally important in shaping the participation of both men and women in migration flows (Chant and Radcliffe, 1992).
Finally, in order to understand the reasons for high or rising rates of female migration within the NELM framework, it is also important to consider the context within which the household is confronted with livelihood risk, and the ways in which household perceptions of risk may change in response to changes in economic policies pursued by the state or to changes in the national or global economy that may have an impact on the livelihood strategies of the household. As existing livelihood strategies are rendered inadequate, families may adapt and alter their behavior; as Massey et al., (1987) note, the behavior of households in allocating workers to different productive pursuits may be viewed as a series of dynamic, flexible strategies that shift as needs and economic conditions change. The migration of women, in a context in which female mobility has been socially sanctioned, may arise as part of such dynamic coping strategies on the part of households in response to changing economic conditions, a possibility that I explore in greater detail in Chapter Four of this dissertation.
2.5 Migration, Remittances and Economic Development
Despite its shortcomings, the NELM approach has been influential in providing a framework within which to analyze the remittance behavior of migrants, and has given rise to a vast literature that has primarily been concerned with analyzing the motives for remitting and the determinants of the level of remittances.
Within this framework, the actual terms of the contractual arrangement between the migrant and the non-migrant family members depend on the relative bargaining
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power of both parties, which is central to determining the magnitude of remittances that the migrant makes. An individual‟s bargaining power is generally defined by the strength of a person‟s fall-back position, i.e., the outside options that determine how well-off she/he would be if cooperation failed. Variables that enhance the bargaining power of the family relative to the migrant, such as highly valued family property that can be inherited by the migrant or unstable urban labor markets, will have a positive effect on the magnitude of migrant-to-family remittances, while variables that enhance the bargaining power of the migrant relative to the family, such as worsening economic conditions in the origin community, or stable urban labor markets, will reduce the magnitude of these remittances (Stark, 1984b).
Empirical applications of these models have generated interesting insights into the motivations for migrants‟ remittances, and have contributed to an ongoing debate on whether remittances are motivated by altruism or self-interest. For example, Hoddinott
(1994) finds that the probability of male migration and the level of remittances from sons in Western Kenya are positively influenced by the ability of parents to offer rewards in the form of bequests of land. Lucas and Stark (1985; 1988) in a study of the motives for migration remittances in Botswana, find that the level of family per capita incomes and assets have a positive impact on the volume of remittances received. The authors note the presence of systematic gender differences in the motivations of migrants who make remittances: remittances from migrant daughters are positively influenced by family investments in their education while sons make greater remittances to families with larger herds of cattle, consistent with a strategy to maintain favor in patrilineal inheritance systems. However, like other studies that have pointed to differences in the motivations
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for making remittances between male and female migrants (e.g. de la Brière et al., 2002;
Vanwey, 2004), they do not explore the reasons for these gender differences in migrants‟ motivations.
This focus on altruistic or instrumentalist motives alone as an explanation of migrants‟ remittance behavior again overlooks the role that social norms may play in determining who sends remittances, how much is sent, and to whom remittances are sent.
To my knowledge, there are only two papers that have even considered the possibility that remittances may be governed by social norms. In their analysis of the determinants of remittance behavior of immigrants in the UK, Clark and Drinkwater (2001) find that large and significant inter-ethnic differences in remittance probabilities remain even after having controlled for other influences on the incidence and magnitude of remittances.
They suggest that these differences might reflect cultural or religious differences in behavioral norms and traditions. In a more recent paper that examines the remittance behavior of Filipino emigrants, Alba and Sugui (2009) make use of a dataset that matches emigrants with their origin households to explore the possibility that remittances are circumscribed by the giving norms that prevail in the Philippines. They argue that remittances are not simply transfers between anonymous agents; instead, they are
„manifestations of underlying … multi-dimensional relationships between the overseas worker and the recipient household.‟ As a result, remittance behavior must be influenced
„by more general rules of the community on how to relate with others and particularly with members of the family.‟ Their findings suggest that the remittance behavior of overseas Filipino workers is indeed consistent with Filipino giving norms, in which individuals are socially obliged to give gifts, but to do so only in small amounts. Alba
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and Sugui do not discuss whether these results hold for both male and female overseas workers in the Philippines, an important omission for a country in which the number of women going abroad to work has consistently outnumbered the number of men doing so since the 1990s (Asis, 2005).
My work builds on the research on the links between social norms and remittance behavior begun by these authors. In the chapters that follow, I draw on both qualitative and quantitative evidence to show how the migration and remittance behavior of migrants in Northern Ghana is shaped by the interactions of gendered social norms with changes in the wider economy, and how this in turn impacts the outcomes of migration for households.
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CHAPTER 3
POVERTY AND INEQUALITY IN GHANA: A HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR
WOMEN’S MIGRATION FROM NORTHERN GHANA
3.1 Introduction
Although the movement of women and girls to work in urban markets is a relatively recent phenomenon, migration from the north of the Ghana to the south dates as far back as the early 1900s (Plange, 1979b). This chapter provides the historical background for understanding the migration of labor from the north of Ghana to the south and situates the migration of women within the context of deteriorating agricultural livelihoods and unequal gender relations in this part of Ghana.
Since independence, agricultural policy in Ghana has been focused on large-scale, mechanized farms, and has placed emphasis on tree crops, plantation cultivation and food and raw material production as inputs into agro-industries (Amanor et al., 1993). Small- scale farms have been neglected, and subsistence-oriented farming systems, such as those commonly found in the north of the country, have received little government support
(Sarris and Shams, 1991). The effects of these policies on rural livelihoods in northern
Ghana has been exacerbated by erratic rainfall patterns and falling agricultural yields.
The impact of these changes on rural women in northern Ghana has not been investigated in much depth; however, given the gender relations that prevail in northern Ghana, it is conceivable that women would experience these changes very differently from men.
This chapter presents a detailed study of economic transformations in the region, and discusses the structural reasons for the out-migration of labor from northern Ghana. It provides the context for the discussion of female migration in the chapters that follow.
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3.2 Northern Ghana – An Overview
Ghana is divided into 10 administrative regions, and northern Ghana in this chapter is defined to include three of these regions: the Northern, Upper West and Upper
East regions (see map in Appendix). These regions together cover a little over 40 percent of the total land area of Ghana, and with a combined population of just over four million, account for roughly 17 percent of Ghana‟s population (GSS 2010).
The area lies within the fragile Guinea Savannah agro-ecological zone, and due to its proximity to the Sahel, is much drier than the south, with the vegetation being primarily savanna grassland. Contrasting agro-ecological constraints have given rise to different trajectories in the northern regions, most starkly demonstrated in the evolution of very different population densities. Although the Upper East and Upper West regions are drier and more prone to drought, they became much more densely settled than the
Northern Region because of their slightly better soil fertilities and abundance of rivers and streams, and because of in-migration from the neighboring French Territories during the colonial period (Whitehead, 2006). The Northern Region is the largest in the country in terms of land size; however, with a population of just over two million, it is also the least densely populated region in the country (GSS 2010).
The major economic activity in all the three regions of northern Ghana is agriculture, with close to 80 percent of the population depending on agriculture for their livelihood. The major food crops grown include corn, millet, yams, rice, sorghum, groundnuts and okra. The seasonality and annual variability of the rainfall exerts a strong influence on the cycle of agricultural activity, and the rainfall pattern allows for only one cropping season, between April and August (Songsore, 2003). Thus, livestock, especially
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cattle, sheep, goats and poultry, are an important store of wealth, as well as a source of cash income when food stocks run out. The absence of modern industry in northern
Ghana is glaring: the region contributes only 1.3 percent of Ghana‟s industrial establishments, 0.3 percent of industrial value-added, and 0.7 percent of total number of persons employed in industrial enterprises employing 30 or more people (Songsore,
2003).
The three northern regions are the poorest in the country: mean regional incomes derived from the Fifth Round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 5) show that mean annual per capita income in the three northern regions is far lower than the national average, as is mean annual per capita expenditure (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2 below). Fifty- nine percent of the population in northern Ghana lives in extreme poverty (GSS 2007).1
3.3 Poverty and Inequality in Ghana
Income inequality in Ghana has increased steadily since the 1980s. In 1987, the country‟s income Gini coefficient was 0.38. By 1998, it had risen to 0.41, and has since remained high, averaging around 0.42 between 2000 and 2010. Although intra-regional inequality accounts for the greater share of overall inequality, inter-regional inequality is becoming an increasingly important dimension of inequality in Ghana: the proportion of the change in total inequality accounted for by changes in inter-regional inequality actually increased from 40.04 percent in 1988-1992 to 84.34 percent in 1992-1999
(Coulombe and McKay, 2004; Vanderpuye-Orgle, 2004).
1 The Fifth Round of the GLSS defines extreme poverty as a level of household expenditure that falls below 50 percent of the average household expenditure.
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Figure 3.1: Mean Annual per Capita Income by Region, 2008
Source: GLSS 5
The rising inequality between northern and southern Ghana is without doubt the most glaring example of inter-regional inequality in the country (Shepherd et al. 2005a).
The Ghana Living Standards Surveys (GLSS) undertaken in 1991/1992, 1998/1999 and
2005/2006 indicate a striking increase in north-south inter-regional inequality. Per capita incomes in the Greater Accra region (in the south) were approximately twice the per capita income in the Upper East region in 1991/1992; in the 1998/1999 survey, per capita incomes in the Greater Accra region were over four times per capita incomes in both the
Upper West and Upper East regions (ibid.). GLSS 5 shows the same trends: the per capita income in the Greater Accra region is more than four times the per capita income in both the Upper West and Upper East regions, and is almost double the per capita income of the Northern region (Figure 3.1). Per capita expenditure in this region is also
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more than four times the average per capita expenditure in the three regions in the north of Ghana (Figure 3.2).
Mean Annual Per Capita Expenditure
1200
1000
800 GH¢ 600
400
200
0 Western Central Gt. Volta Eastern Ashanti B. Northern U. U. Ghana Accra Ahafo East West
Figure 3.2: Mean Annual per Capita Expenditure by Region, 2008
Source: GLSS 5
The distribution of households among expenditure quintiles also shifted dramatically over the 1990s and the 2000s in the Greater Accra, Western and Ashanti regions, with a decrease in the proportion of households in the lowest quintile and corresponding increases in the proportions of households in the highest quintiles between
1991/1992 and 2005/2006 in each of these regions. In contrast, however, there was a substantial increase in the proportion of households in the lowest quintile in the Northern and Upper East regions between 1991/1992 and 1998/1999 (Table 3.1). In 2005/2006, the proportion of households in the bottom quintile in all three regions in the north exceeded the proportion of households in that quintile in every other region.
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Table 3.1: Distribution of Households by Expenditure Quintile, 1991–2006
Quintiles 1991/92 Quintiles 1998/99 Quintiles 2005/06 Region First Fifth First Fifth First Fifth Quintile Quintile Quintile Quintile Quintile Quintile Western 22.9 15.1 6.2 29.9 5.8 35.9 Central 14.6 23.7 15.4 19.7 7.0 34.5 Greater 8.9 35.0 0.6 60.9 4.6 46.1 Accra Volta 15.4 17.2 18.2 18.1 12.7 22.4 Eastern 21.5 16.0 9.8 20.7 4.9 31.9 Ashanti 15.5 24.5 7.9 45.5 7.9 38.9 Brong 29.0 13.2 8.3 29.2 11.0 26.5 Ahafo Northern 35.0 12.8 40.7 10.0 32.9 15.3 Upper 49.6 5.4 47.1 4.2 76.7 3.1 West Upper 28.4 11.1 65.4 2.6 54.8 5.9 East
Source: GSS 1996, GSS 2000b and GSS 2007 2
Successive rounds of the Ghana Living Standards Survey indicate that while there has been a reduction in overall headcount poverty in Ghana from 51.7 percent in
1991/1992 to 28.5 percent in 2005/2006, this reduction has not been uniform across geographical regions (GSS 2007). The greatest reduction in poverty, from 63.6 percent to 39.2 percent, has occurred in the rural forest regions – mainly in the Ashanti, Brong-
Ahafo, Western and Greater Accra regions – and has been largely due to improvements in the country‟s export earnings from cocoa as well as benefits derived from migrant remittances from abroad (Shepherd et al., 2005a).
In contrast, the incidence of poverty actually increased in the Northern and Upper
East regions in the 1990s, and by 2005/2006, the poverty rate in the north of Ghana was
2 Households covered in the GLSS were ranked into five quintiles on the basis of total expenditure per capita.
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62.7 percent compared to 19.7 percent in the south of the country. Together, the three regions in the north account for just under 22 percent of the population, but close to 50 percent of the country‟s poor, and 80 percent of the extremely poor i.e., those living below the lower poverty line (GSS 2000b; GSS 2007).
3.4 Accounting for the Persistence of the North-South Divide in Ghana: A Historical Perspective
The explanations for the persistence of northern poverty and inequality between the north and south of the country can be found in an analysis of the trajectory of development that the country has followed, first as a British colony in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and later, after it gained independence in 1957. The historical origins of the marginalization of the north of Ghana are important enough to the present state of affairs to merit some discussion.
3.4.1 The Colonial Origins of Regional Inequality in Ghana
The relative lack of natural resources in the northern half of the country, its poor soil quality, aggravated by rainfall variability and soil erosion due to mounting population pressure, and natural climatic changes that create lengthy, dry seasons of
„inactivity‟ have frequently been identified by some historians as reasons for the
„underdevelopment‟ of northern Ghana (see, for example, Bourret, 1960; Ladouceur,
1979). According to this line of thinking, it is inevitable that the north of the country would lag behind the south, where resources like cocoa, gold and timber are abundant, and where the climate is favorable. However, this perspective fails to acknowledge the role of the British colonial administration in rearranging the economic activity of the
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colony to suit the needs of Britain‟s economy, and in doing so, introducing the economic distortions that sowed the seeds of the north-south divide that we see today.
It would be mistaken to argue that pre-colonial northern Ghana, because of its savanna ecology, was bereft of natural resources.3 In response to the predicaments of the environment, the indigenous societies of the area had evolved systems of agriculture and settlement that minimized their vulnerability to the harsh environment in which they lived. The commercial production of cotton, shea butter, groundnuts and leather was an important source of income to the indigenous population, as was the healthy cattle trade between the north and the south (Plange, 1979a). Moreover, pre-colonial northern
Ghana, because of its geographical position, was an important point of convergence for trade routes that linked the southern (coastal) regions to the rest of the African continent, and its participation in the continental trade between the West African coastal and forest areas and the Sudan-Sahel zone further north was an important supplement to the region‟s local economy (ibid; Whitehead, 2002, 2006).
The insertion of the Northern Territories into the colonial administration as a
Protectorate in 1902 radically transformed the economic organization of the region. The
British colonial government, having granted mining concessions to expatriate firms, was now confronted with the problem of supplying the mines in the south with the necessary labor. It also needed to terminate trade relations between the north and its Western
Sudanese trading partners and to redirect trade southwards towards the coast. The administration responded by instituting a system of compulsory recruitment of labor in the Northern Territories, and by using various forms of coercion to ensure that the
3 The country became known as Ghana only after independence. As a colony, it was known as the Gold Coast.
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growing demand for labor by the capitalist enclaves in the south was satisfied (ibid.). At the same time, the transit trade between the north and the south was deliberately terminated through the closing down of local markets, and the trade routes were redirected southwards towards the coast, stunting the development of the traditional cattle-rearing, shea-butter, groundnut and leather industries of the north (Plange, 1984).
Peasants and traders who had previously been self-sufficient were transformed into unskilled wage labor, a process that was assured by the deliberate policy of providing a limited and inferior education to the northern population, and that intensified as the new economic system became entrenched. By the 1920s, forced labor recruitment was no longer necessary to create a flow of labor from the north to the south: the flow of voluntary migrants to the mines and cocoa farms of the south had become large enough for the colonial state to dispense with the unpleasantness of forced labor (Shepherd,
1981). By the mid-1940s, the region had been sufficiently proletarianized so that migration to the south was seen as a way of life for young men from the north.
To understand the impact on development in northern Ghana of being inserted into the world capitalist system as a labor reserve, one may turn to Samir Amin (1974) who observes that „migration is not just the cause of unequal development due to
“natural” causes … it is also an element in unequal development, reproducing the same conditions and contributing in this manner to their aggravation.‟ Indeed, it is not unreasonable to conclude that this siphoning out of the region‟s labor resources would have reduced the productive capacity of households, as only women, children and the aged were left to work on farms and herd cattle. The domestic mode of production in the north remained in limbo, neither pre-capitalist, nor yet successfully transformed into a
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full-blown capitalist mode of production. The economic structure of the region had become distorted towards the export of labor-power and the import of manufactured consumer goods, complemented by some production from subsistence farms with minimal yields (ibid.).
At the same time as the geography of economic opportunity in the country was being permanently altered, the increased emphasis on mineral extraction and cash crop production for export introduced other distortions into the colonial economy. The spatial disparities associated with the production of these primary exports meant that only the regions endowed with the resources needed by the colonial state could participate in the export-oriented model of development that had been adopted. The development of road and railway networks was based on the availability of the resources that were important to the colonial economy, and the areas that were located on or close to these networks became the focus of economic activity. The railway network linked the ports on the eastern and western coasts with the resource-rich areas of the forest belt (see Figure 1,
Appendix) creating an area that became known as the „Golden Triangle‟ (Konadu-
Agyeman and Adanu, 2003). This area, despite covering less than a third of the country and holding about 60 percent of the population, became the location of 90 percent of all educational institutions, health facilities, manufacturing industries and formal-sector jobs, thus establishing the foundation of the spatial inequalities that now characterize the country (ibid.).
When Ghana achieved independence in 1957, there were already remarkable structural differences between the southern and northern parts of Ghana, differences that were reflected in the levels of income and poverty as well as in access to health and
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educational facilities and other social services. To explain migration from northern
Ghana as a rational adaptation to climatic and environmental factors is to ignore the fact that these population movements in the colonial context were not simply the result of free and rational decision-making by individuals in response to market forces, nor the efficient outcomes of a rational calculus by households seeking to diversify household income and risk. Instead, these migratory flows were perpetuated, at least initially, by the use of force and other extra-market mechanisms. Having established that the origins of the spatial disparities in socio-economic opportunity between north and south lie in the restructuring of the country‟s economy by the colonial state and the deliberate transformation of the Northern Territories into a labor reserve for the export enclaves in the south, I now move on to look at developments in northern Ghana after independence.
3.4.2 Post-Independence Consolidation of Colonial Economic Structures
Despite the fact that independence marked the transfer of decision-making power to the Ghanaian nationalist government in 1957, in many ways the basic organizational and spatial structures that had formed the basis of the colonial economy remained unchanged. The main thrust of economic policy under the new government was import- substitution industrialization, which was to be financed by revenues from the primary export sector. The infrastructure to support modern industry was already available in the large urban centers of the south, and this provided justification to the new elites for locating the majority of new industries in these areas. This led to further concentration of economic activity in the same areas of the south that had formed the center of the colonial economy, effectively reinforcing the spatial disparities in economic activity between north and south. The migration of males from north to south intensified in the immediate
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post-independence period; in 1960, net out-migration was highest in the northern regions, with the majority of migrant labor from the north concentrated in the cocoa and mining areas of the south (Songsore, 2003).
3.4.3 Agriculture in Northern Ghana, Post-Independence4
With close to 80 percent of households in the north engaging in agriculture as their main economic activity, it is not surprising that the government‟s agricultural policy, especially with regard to food crops, has been critical for bridging or widening the north-south gap and reducing or increasing the incidence of poverty in the north. This section therefore focuses on the main features of Ghana‟s agricultural policy since the country achieved independence in 1957 and examines the impact of these policies on household livelihoods in the north.
Three distinct periods can be identified in the history of Ghana‟s agricultural policy: the statist approach of the country‟s first government, which began in 1957 and ended in 1966 when the government was overthrown; a period of state-supported agricultural capitalism from 1969 to 1979; and the era of structural adjustment and liberalization that began in 1983. One theme that has run through all three periods has been a consistent focus on the modernization of agriculture, in particular on the use of modern technology, mechanization and large-scale commercial farming, with very little support for peasant farmers. As far as the north of the country is concerned, it is possible to distinguish a period of positive state support for the mechanization of agriculture, from
4 This and the following sections draw heavily on the work of Shepherd, 1981 and Shepherd et al., 2005
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1957 to 1983, and a period of relative state withdrawal from 1983 to the present, during which peasant agriculture has been left to its own devices.5
The immediate post-independence years, from 1957 to 1966, were characterized by direct public intervention in production and marketing by means of large-scale state farms, marketing boards, public enterprises and other para-statal institutions (Kranjac-
Berisavljevic, 2001). Impatient with the capacity of peasant farming to meet the nation‟s food needs, the government adopted the mechanization of agricultural production as the dominant strategy to increase food output (Shepherd et al., 2005a). The north of the country, in particular, saw the development of large-scale mechanized cooperatives organized by the farmers‟ wing of the ruling party, with a particular emphasis on the cultivation of rice, which was thought to be the commodity for which large areas of the north were suitable with irrigation.
These cooperatives had been in operation for only two years when the government was overthrown in 1966; however, it has been argued that the prospects for their success were limited (Shepherd, 1981). The state cooperatives relied heavily on peasant labor to carry out most farming activities with the exception of plowing and land clearing, in return for which the peasants would receive a share of the crop. At critical times in the farming year, the cooperatives came into direct competition with the peasants‟ food farms for labor. This problem was compounded by the low level of development of local labor markets within the north, which constrained the extent to
5 In response to the growing concern about the widening disparities between the north and the south, the government of Ghana in its 2008 budget statement introduced a Northern Ghana Development Fund with seed money of about US$ 25,000,000. Whether this money will go towards supporting small-scale agriculture is as yet unclear.
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which farmers could hire labor to work on their own farms while they were at work on the rice cooperatives (ibid.).
Following the 1966 coup, the focus of agricultural policy in the north shifted towards the expansion of capitalist rice farming, a shift that was almost inevitable given the ideological commitment of successive governments to promoting the interests of private Ghanaian businesses and the preference among policy makers for this approach to agricultural development. A substantial investment program was undertaken by the state to open up the shallow river valleys of the north for the commercial mechanized cultivation of rice to feed southern markets, and the one surviving farm cooperative became the basis for a USAID-supported introduction of Green Revolution rice seed in the 1970s. The members of the cooperative, many of whom came from urban areas in the north, became the pioneer commercial rice farmers, starting up new farms elsewhere in the north with the support of the state-owned Agricultural Development Bank (ADB)
(Shepherd, 2005a). By 1979, 150,000 acres of rice were under cultivation by commercial farmers in the north using subsidized inputs and high-yielding rice varieties, an achievement that was made possible by the state‟s provision of the necessary foreign exchange, subsidies, infrastructure, guaranteed markets and credit.
It has been suggested that this approach generated some benefits to small peasant farmers: for one thing, it provided agricultural employment opportunities in the land- surplus areas of the region where commercial rice farming dominated. The ADB also provided some finance to groups of peasant farmers, who concentrated their productive efforts mainly on the cultivation of crops that could not be easily mechanized: yams, groundnuts, cotton and coarse grains. German aid focused on providing intermediate
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technologies and plant breeding for the peasant crops. A dualistic agrarian structure gradually emerged: easily-mechanized crops, mainly rice, were grown on a small number of large-scale commercial farms, which received the bulk of agricultural investment in the region, while a much smaller amount of investment was spread over a much larger number of peasant farmers cultivating more labor-intensive crops (Shepherd, 1981).
There was an added benefit for peasant farmers: investment in roads for rice farming meant that other crops could access the markets more easily.
However, the distribution of benefits from this approach was highly skewed. The biggest rice farmers in most villages were those best able to gain access to subsidized credit and other inputs – mainly traders, employees of agricultural institutions and senior military and police officers with strong political connections, many of them urban residents or wealthy southerners. The conservative lending policies of the commercial and development banks meant that small peasant farmers found it difficult to access subsidized credit directly from the banks, and were forced to rent tractors and buy fertilizers from the larger, well-connected bank-financed farmers at a substantial mark- up. The capitalist farmers also controlled access to processing and storage facilities; they would send peasant produce to the mills on condition that peasant farmers worked as casual laborers on their farms in return, and on terms dictated by themselves (ibid.).
Cotton cultivation in northern Ghana was another sector that received the attention of the state during this period. In the 1970s, the Ghana Cotton Development
Board developed a vertically integrated production program with small-holder out- growers as primary producers, with the aim of providing raw materials for Ghana‟s textile industry. The decade saw substantial expansion in this sector in response to high
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producer prices, and by the mid-1970s, there were over 38,000 small farmers cultivating a total of 24,829 hectares of cotton, almost all of them in the north (ibid). This expansion did not last, however: rising food prices in the mid-1970s quickly eroded incentives to cultivate cotton, and with the increasing inability of the government to assure farmers of a reliable supply of inputs, many farmers simply shifted away from cotton production and returned to cultivating food crops.
Despite the unequal distribution of benefits of the state-led private capitalization of agriculture, the northern regions enjoyed a period of relative growth in the 1970s. A regional labor market developed and the net drain of labor out of the region was slowed
(ibid.). There was significant investment in the regional economy, especially in infrastructure, marketing and processing. State support, with the aid of tariffs and import controls, helped to create a mass market in Ghana and in neighboring countries for rice from the north. On the whole, however, the tendency by successive governments to favor large-scale, capital-intensive modes of production over labor-intensive farming by small- holders did not dramatically improve the livelihoods of small-holder farmers in northern
Ghana.
In economic terms, the rural areas of the north benefited little from the entire investment in rice farming, and the relative deprivation of rural communities increased.
The growing demand for labor on commercial rice farms conflicted with labor requirements on household farms, and most peasant farmers chose to withdraw their labor from the rice farms. The casual agricultural labor market eventually shifted from the rural areas to the towns as rice farmers increasingly relied on urban casual labor and to some extent on the labor of rural women and children.
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Land became the only important factor of production that the rural areas contributed to capitalist farming in the north, and peasants found themselves losing land and opportunities to urban-based capitalist farmers. As state subsidies on agricultural machinery encouraged a land-extensive style of cultivation, more of the land in the north came under the control of „stranger‟ commercial farmers. Easy access to cheap land allowed capitalist rice farmers to practice large-scale shifting cultivation while making little or no investment in maintaining soil fertility. As a result, peasant communities have had large tracts of land rendered infertile, a factor that has contributed to worsening livelihoods among small-holder farmers (Konings, 1984). At the same time, very few chiefs attempted to limit the appropriation of land by outsiders to ensure that their own subjects had easier access to rice land; as a result, peasant farmers wishing to farm rice have had to migrate from their own communities to do so. To make matters worse, capitalist rice farmers increasingly began to diversify their business from rice cultivation in the river valleys, where peasant farmers did not farm, to cultivating crops on the uplands where peasant farmers grew their food and cash crops, leading to a direct reduction in the land available to peasant farmers, and a decline in the acreage devoted to local food staples, a situation that resulted in food price inflation in the north of Ghana in the late 1960s and 1970s (Sarris and Shams, 1991).
3.4.4 Economic Crisis, Structural Adjustment and Recovery
The late 1970s saw the onset of nationwide economic crisis, the symptoms of which were a steady fall in per capita incomes, an erosion of foreign exchange earnings with a consequent contraction in real import capacity, severe budgetary problems and inflation rates of over 120 percent. In 1983, the government embarked on an economic
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recovery program (ERP), at the center of which was an IMF- and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment program (SAP). The country adopted the policy changes characteristic of SAPs: a devaluation of the cedi (the national currency) and a move to market-determined exchange rates, reductions in government spending and market deregulation.
The overriding concern of Ghana‟s SAP was with expanding export earnings.
However, the focus was on the country‟s traditional exports, and much of the external funding that the country received was directed at the minerals sector and the timber and cocoa industries of the south, which received significant resources for infrastructural support and improved capacity utilization in the industrial establishments (Songsore,
2003). Northern Ghana, not an important producer of any major export crop or mineral, and lacking important industrial establishments or linkages with the export economy of the south, benefited the least from the resulting growth in exports. Attempts at expanding the export base to incorporate non-traditional exports could in theory have been a means for bridging the gap between north and south; indeed, export diversification brought into the ambit of the export trade some products of the savanna north, including the distinctive handicrafts of the region and produce such as cashews, shea nuts, cotton and yams.
However, the bulk of the country‟s non-traditional exports, which together contributed only 13.6 percent to total exports in 2000, still originated from the south of the country
(Konadu-Agyemang and Adanu, 2003). Moreover, exposure to international competition did not favor exports from northern Ghana: the region lost its craft markets to countries like Vietnam in 2000; likewise, imports of heavily subsidized rice from Asia and the US flooded into Ghana and reduced the domestic and regional demand for rice from the north
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of Ghana, while low cotton prices attributed to US and EU subsidies have lowered the profitability of the domestic cotton industry (Shepherd et al., 2005b).
As a result, northern Ghana grew little during the 1990s, and poverty levels worsened. The key factors contributing to Ghana‟s economic growth in the SAP/ERP period – increased exports of cocoa and other agricultural exports, gold and other minerals and timber; increases in wholesale and retail trade, transport and construction of activity and increased receipts of remittances from overseas – continued to be spatially differentiated, so that growth was fastest in the large cities of the south and in the rural forest zone (Shepherd, Jebuni et al., 2005b).
Not only did northern Ghana stand to gain little from the export-oriented focus of the SAP, but the region‟s dependence on food crop farming meant that it probably also stood to lose the most from the emphasis on getting agricultural prices right, where
„right‟ was defined by world market prices. In the final phase of the SAP, agricultural policy was implemented within the context of the Medium-Term Agricultural
Development Program, (MTADP) which was to run from 1991 to 2000. Under this program, the guaranteed minimum prices for the country‟s food staples were abolished, and all subsidies, including those on agricultural inputs, were removed. In addition, the procurement and distribution of agricultural inputs, hitherto the responsibility of the
Ministry of Agriculture and other state institutions, were privatized, ostensibly to enhance competition and efficiency in the marketing of agricultural inputs. The expected improvements in efficiency did not occur; instead, the sluggish response of the private sector merely resulted in the decreased availability of farm inputs at the farm gate
(Nyanteng and Seini, 2000). By 1992, domestic prices of farm inputs had doubled or in
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many cases tripled, with the impact of this felt most strongly in the north of the country
(Sarris and Shams, 1991). In contrast, output prices of foodstuffs did not increase as fast, partly because of competition from cheaper sources following trade liberalization under the SAP. Sarris and Shams suggest an even more subtle impact on poor smallholders: rising labor demand in the southern cocoa sector raised real rural wages for hired farming labor, inducing greater labor migration from the north to work on the cocoa farms of the south. The impact of these developments would be felt most severely by households in the north that lacked an adequate supply of family labor to meet their subsistence needs
(ibid., 1991: p.178).
The financial sector reforms that were an important component of Ghana‟s SAP are also likely to have had a significant negative impact on poor farmers in the north.
Generally considered to be a high-risk borrower category, small-holder farmers are often disadvantaged in accessing credit from the formal sector. Recognition of this had formed the basis for the interventionist approach to rural finance in Ghana after independence.
However, the failures of state-owned banks to direct sufficient credit to small-holder agriculture, together with the influence of the new orthodoxy of financial liberalization, led to a shift in the financial sector regime in Ghana in the 1980s. Interest rates on lending and deposits were deregulated in 1987, and the gradual removal of sectoral credit controls followed in 1988. The sectoral allocation of credit began to shift steadily away from agriculture, and by 1993, the share of agriculture in total credit had dropped from over 30 percent in 1983–84 to under 10 percent (Aryeetey et al., 2000). The lack of adequate credit and the high interest rates charged by the banks have constrained the adoption and extensive use of modern agricultural inputs among small-scale farmers, who
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are compelled to rely on the informal financial market, which provides small short-term loans at prohibitively high rates of interest (Nyanteng and Seini, 2000). The rural banking system, introduced during the interventionist era of the 1970s and expanded upon in the 1980s and 1990s, was an attempt to relieve the credit constraints faced by farmers in remote areas that were not served by the commercial banking system; however, the distribution of the rural banks has been heavily weighted towards the rural south, with approximately 102,000 people per rural bank in 2006, as compared with approximately 418,000 people per rural bank in the north of the country (Epstein and
Heintz, 2006).
3.5 Trends in Agricultural Production in the Northern Region, 1991–2007
The adverse effects of Ghana‟s Economic Recovery Program on small-holder agriculture in the north of Ghana have been exacerbated by low and fluctuating rainfall levels since the 1990s. These changes have been reflected in changes in agricultural yields and output. In the Northern Region, for example, production of the major staple crops – maize, rice, sorghum, millet, and yam – has been on a downward trend, driven by falling yields as well as decreases in area cultivated, since the 1990s (see Figure 3.3). In contrast, there has been an increase in the output of groundnuts – the region‟s major cash crop. This increased production has been driven primarily by an increase in area cultivated: although groundnut yields increased by about 10 percent between 1995 and
2004, the area under groundnut cultivation increased by over 250 percent (see Figure
3.4). Groundnuts are easier to grow than cereals in marginal soils, do not require fertilizers, and need fewer pesticides (Christensen et al. 2004). Thus, with less financial
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resources and declining soil fertility, more farmers find it more attractive to cultivate groundnuts instead of maize, the food staple.
Yield per hectare for Major Crops in Northern Region (1991-2007)
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5 Yield (MetricYield Tonnes per Hectare)
Millet 0 Rice
Maize
1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 Sorghum Year
Figure 3.3: Yields of Major Staple Crops, Northern Region (1991 – 2007)
Source: Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Northern Region
Falling output of food staples have been accompanied by rising real food prices over the 1997-2004 period (MOFA 2007). Given the importance of these crops in the diet of households in the region, this has resulted in a situation of chronic food insecurity in this part of Ghana (Braimoh and Vlek, 2006; WFP 2010). According to the 2008
Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Assessment (CFSVA), 450,000 people in the three northern regions (roughly a tenth of the population) are food-insecure (WFP
CFSVA 2008).6
6 This refers to a persistent inability to meet minimum food requirements.
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A number of empirical studies have pointed to a link between migration and livelihood vulnerability resulting from droughts or erratic weather patterns in primarily agricultural communities in sub-Saharan Africa (see, for example, Findley and Diallo,
1993; Marchiori et al. 2011). Persistent out-migration from northern Ghana certainly seems to fit this pattern, although as I have indicated, historical factors as well as sustained neglect of small-holder agriculture in the region have also been important in creating a flow of labor from the north to the south.
Percentage Change in Area of Major Crops, Northern Region, 1991-2006
250
200
150
100
50 % Change %
0 Rice Sorghum Cassava Yam Groundnuts Cowpea Maize -50 Millet
-100 Crop
Figure 3.4: Changes in Area Cultivated of Major Crops, Northern Region (1995 – 2004)
Source: Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Northern Region
However, what is interesting about current migration flows between the north and south of Ghana is the growing participation of women in these flows, since the 1980s, and the fact that female out-migration from rural communities in northern Ghana currently exceeds male out-migration from these communities. Data from the latest
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round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 5) shows that 47 percent of females in the rural savannah over the age of seven had migrated at least once in their lifetimes, as compared with only 37.6 percent of males in the same age-group.7 In the sections that follow, I discuss the gender relations that prevail in northern Ghana, and provide some context for understanding the role of gender inequality in shaping migration behavior.
3.6 Gender Inequality in Northern Ghana
Ghana‟s ethnic and cultural diversity makes it difficult to generalize about gender relations in the country. There are more than 90 ethnic groups in Ghana and the different kinship systems that characterize these ethnic groups have varying implications for women‟s access to resources and decision-making power in the household. Even in northern Ghana, where the Mole-Dagbani ethnic group is predominant, there are over thirty other ethnic groups. What these northern ethnic groups have in common, however, is a social organization informed by patrilineal descent ideologies that differentiates them from the matrilineal groups in southern Ghana. The patriarchal family structures that are sustained by these ideologies, in combination with the overall neglect of development in the three northern regions, have contributed to creating and maintaining the low status of women in northern Ghana. This gender inequality is reflected in women‟s access to land, arguably the most important productive resource in a region where agriculture is the primary source of livelihood.
7 The GLSS defines a migrant as anyone who was either born outside their current place of residence or who has lived away from their current locality for a year or more. Those born at their current place of residence who have never stayed away from a year or more are classified as non-migrants. Given the prevalence of short-term migration among both women and men (ie less than a year) in rural communities in northern Ghana, it is likely that this definition results in significant undercounting of migration from the region.
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3.6.1 Customary Land Tenure and Women’s Access to Land
Ghana maintains a plural system of land tenure, comprising mainly of customary land tenure systems and formal land administration systems, which often overlap and contradict each other. In customary land tenure systems, under which about 80 percent of the lands in Ghana are held, control over resources follows clearly defined gender segregated patterns based on traditional norms (Rünger, 2005). Women‟s access and control over productive resources, including land, are typically determined by male- centered kinship institutions and authority structures, which tend to restrict women‟s land rights as compared to men (Aryeetey, 2002). In the Northern Region, where I carried out my field research, land ownership rights in individual communities are held by the community as a whole, and use rights are granted by the chief of the community to individual family lineages. Use rights to farmland are upheld as long as the land is in cultivation, and are passed down in patrilineal inheritance. Women do not hold any rights to land, and they can only gain access to land by „begging‟ for it from the household head. Marital status is an important determinant of women‟s access to land. If the household has enough land, married women in the household might be given access to a small plot of land by their husbands. This land, which is usually less than an acre, is used by women to cultivate vegetables and other food crops to supplement household food needs. In other households, married women are only able to cultivate vegetables along the edges of their husbands‟ farms. As land becomes increasingly scarce, women are more likely to be allocated inferior land, and their access over this land is always tenuous, subject to the stability of the marriage and the maintenance of good relations
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with male in-laws. In particular, women‟s usufruct rights to their husband‟s land are forfeited in the event of divorce or death of a husband.
In 1985, in an attempt to eliminate gender discrimination in inheritance practices, the Government of Ghana enacted the Intestate Succession Law. This law grants courts the right – in the absence of a valid will – to distribute the property of a deceased man to his wife and children. In theory, this law should endow women with greater security of tenure of any land that they acquire through marriage. However, family land does not fall within the ambit of the Intestate Succession Law, and wives and children cannot inherit family property (Rünger, 2005). Thus, even if a woman in northern Ghana is aware of the existence and provisions of this law, which is not usually the case, she does not have legal rights over her husband‟s land: if this land was appropriated from the family‟s land, it reverts to the family upon his death.
Likewise, separation or divorce voids a woman‟s usufruct right to land acquired through marriage. The absence of clearly defined statutory provisions on the distribution of property upon divorce puts Ghanaian women in general at a disadvantage, even when they have access to the legal system, since courts usually demand evidence of financial contribution to the acquisition of property acquired during marriage in order to determine how such property is to be allocated. For women in northern Ghana who face often insurmountable constraints in gaining access to the protection of the legal system, divorce leaves them without any right to property or financial support from their husband.
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3.6.2 The Gender Division of Labor in Northern Ghana and Women’s Access to Land
According to the gender division of labor and responsibility in northern Ghana, men are primarily responsible for growing the staples - maize, millet and yams. This is regarded as the most important contribution to the household‟s food needs. Women are expected to provide their husbands and children with meals, and are responsible for all the necessary expenses incurred in preparing the raw maize, and for providing „soup‟ ingredients.
The gender division of responsibility for household provisioning is also reflected in the gender-sequential tasks that make up the crop-cycle. Clearing the land, plowing and weeding are primarily male tasks, while the labor of women and children is important during the planting and harvesting stages. Despite the importance of their contributions to food crop cultivation and household provisioning, women are not considered to be farmers because they are not directly responsible for staple cultivation.
This ideology not only renders women‟s contributions to farming and household provisioning invisible, but also is used to justify the distinct advantage that men have over women in access to land. As I will argue in the rest of this dissertation, these gendered patterns of responsibility and access to resources play an important role in shaping the migration and remittance behavior of women in northern Ghana.
3.7 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have attempted to provide some context and historical background for understanding the progressive worsening of agricultural livelihoods in northern Ghana that has occurred since the 1980s. How are greater livelihood
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vulnerability and food insecurity linked to the increasing migration of women from the northern regions of Ghana? The answer, I believe, lies in the normative responsibilities for household provisioning that are assigned to women in this part of Ghana, and the claims that they have on household resources. As a result of these socially defined rights and responsibilities, women experience changes in subsistence production very differently from men. In the following chapter, I examine the roles of women in the household livelihood portfolio of households in the Savelugu-Nanton District of the
Northern Region of Ghana. I then draw on evidence obtained from my field research to establish the links between increased migration of women from northern Ghana, gendered social norms and increased livelihood vulnerability.
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CHAPTER 4
WHO MIGRATES AND WHY? GENDERED SOCIAL NORMS, THE INTRA-
HOUSEHOLD DIVISION OF LABOR AND THE SELECTIVITY OF
MIGRATION
4.1 Introduction
Despite the long history of migration from the north of Ghana to the south, it wasn‟t until the 1980s that women began to migrate independently. A simple structuralist explanation for this shift would be that changes in the wider economy have made it more difficult for households to guarantee the subsistence of members through existing livelihood strategies predicated on male migration alone. This has in turn led to greater diversification of economic activity, including the migration of women, as households try to satisfy subsistence requirements.
Such an explanation fails to account for the fact that migration appears to be selective on both age as well as marital status, with the majority of migrants being young and single. The neoclassical approach and the New Economics of Labor Migration
(NELM) perspective would attribute this selectivity to the greater skills of the migrants or the higher net income that these individuals can expect to command in the urban labor markets. However, these explanations seem to fall apart when one realizes that those who stay possess the same education levels and labor market skills as those who migrate.
In this chapter, I draw on evidence from my interviews with migrants as well as my household surveys to argue that the reason for the selectivity of these migration flows lies in the social institutions that assign roles and responsibilities to individuals based on hierarchies of age, gender and marital status. Within the household, these structures are
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reflected in the different claims that individual household members exercise over the productive base of the household. Household members who have a stronger claim on household resources experience structural changes in the wider economy very differently from other household members. Household members with weaker claims on the household‟s productive base are much more likely to migrate in response to structural changes in the wider economy. Thus, the women who migrate are likely to be women whose position in the household hierarchy gives them the weakest claim on household resources.
It has often been suggested that marriage and childbirth reduce the mobility of women, so that female migrants are usually young and single (Chant, 1992). Although the typical migrant (male and female) from northern Ghana is likely to be young and single, my field research also revealed that at least a third of women who migrate are married with children. In other words, marriage and the presence of children do not necessarily prevent women from migrating from this part of Ghana. In fact, the responsibilities that married women take on after having had one or two children actually provide an extra motivation for married women to migrate shortly after giving birth, although this is predicated on whether they can take their children with them, or whether other family members will be able to care for their children while they are away. A perspective that emphasizes the different roles and responsibilities that are assigned to men and women on the basis of their position within the intra-household hierarchy helps us to understand the selectivity of migration in this context.
The chapter begins with a description of the agricultural economy of the
Savelugu-Nanton District. I then draw on evidence gathered from focus group interviews
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in rural communities in the Savelugu-Nanton district as well as personal interviews with migrants and non-migrant household members to show how changes in agricultural livelihoods have led women to challenge existing norms that long supported male out- migration but not female out-migration. In order to explore how the selectivity of migration is linked to the gender ideologies that determine the social and economic roles that men and women play at different points in their lives, I examine the organization of production in the typical rural household in the Savelugu-Nanton district, and discuss how gender and other ideologies structure intra-household hierarchies and determine the access of individual household members to the household‟s productive resources.
4.2 Migration in Context: The Agricultural Economy of the Savelugu-Nanton District
The major economic activity in the Savelugu-Nanton District is subsistence agriculture, which employs about 97% of the district‟s economically active population.
The major crops cultivated are maize, rice, yams, groundnuts and beans. A number of farmers also cultivate cash crops such as cotton, cashew nuts and soy beans. Farming in northern Ghana is dominated by men, and the majority of farm holdings in the District belong to men. In 2007, for example, out of 17,066 agricultural holdings, only 3,584
(21%) belonged to women (Savelugu-Nanton District Assembly, 2008). Fewer than two- thirds of the 181 households in my rural household sample have plots that are controlled and cultivated by women. In these households, on average, female household members cultivate a total of 1.89 acres, representing only roughly 1.7% of the land cultivated.
Apart from cultivating vegetables intended for household consumption, women also cultivated groundnuts, which are easy to cultivate on the marginal lands that women are
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typically allocated, and which can be consumed within the household or sold to generate cash income that women can use to meet their obligations for household provisioning.
Off-farm economic activities include rice-milling, groundnut oil or shea nut oil processing, and charcoal burning (mostly carried out by women), and basket-weaving, carpentry and hunting (mostly carried out by men). Livestock, mainly cattle, small ruminants and poultry, provide a source of income and a store of wealth.
4.3 Female Migration in Historical Context
The migration of women from rural communities in the Savelugu-Nanton district of the Northern Region, as I have already stated, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Although the lack of census data from censuses prior to 2000 makes it difficult to present data on the gender composition of migration from the district, anecdotal evidence obtained from my interviews with district officials, chiefs and village elders suggests that the autonomous migration of women did not begin until the late 1980s and the early
1990s.1 In contrast, male out-migration is considered part of the normal cycle of economic activity, particularly for younger men. Men migrate during the off-farm season, either to work as casual laborers on cocoa farms in the south, or to take advantage of the different rainfall patterns in the south by working as tenant-farmers. More recently, young men and boys travel to the south to work in the informal sector of the scrap metal industry, harvesting copper, brass and other semi-precious metals from
1 As I explained in Chapter 1, I was informed by officials at the Ghana Statistical Services that data from the 1970 and 1984 population censuses was destroyed during the transition to digital media.
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discarded electronic waste.2 They return to the village just before the planting season to begin preparing their land.
During the focus group discussions with men and women in some of these communities, I asked what had prevented women from migrating prior to the 1980s. The participants‟ responses provided valuable insights into the perceptions surrounding the migration of women to the south.
In the past, men were the only ones who left during the dry season to go to farming areas in the south. At that time, women could stay at home and take care of the house. Women didn’t have to farm, because the men could afford to cultivate large areas of land. So we women also got a lot of groundnuts and rice when we helped them to harvest; we could store it for food, or we could wait until the price was high before selling it for cash. Also, we could store all the shea nuts we harvested and sell them when the price was high, so there was no need for a woman to go to the south to look for money. In those days, it was very rare to see a woman migrating from this place. If this happened, everyone knew that it must have been because of very serious financial difficulties. It was degrading for a woman to go and work for money in the south. (Head of a women‟s group and focus group participant, Bunglung)
Before the 1990s, the migration of men had been seen as the normal thing to do during the dry season, when men would go to work in the south as farm laborers or miners. Women‟s migration, on the other hand, was far less common, and when it occurred, was generally met with disapproval, or pity. These norms regarding the migration of women had been sustained by the relative economic prosperity of the 1960s and 1970s. Women were not expected to migrate because the farming activities of the male household heads were productive and farm yields were high. Their husbands were able to „provide their needs‟ and women themselves received enough from their own economic activities to meet their financial obligations. Prior to the 1990s, therefore,
2 The scrap metal is sold to middlemen who in turn sell it to exporters.
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moving to the south to work was a strategy undertaken by very few women, and only if they found themselves in desperate circumstances.
Based on the responses of both male and female focus group participants, it would seem that the expansion of state-sponsored capitalist farming in the Northern region in the 1970s, and state support for agriculture more generally, had generated multiplier effects that had benefited women. In particular women could count on employment on groundnut and rice farms during the planting and harvest seasons. When women participate in harvests, they are usually paid in kind with a share of the crop they harvest.
Like the head of the women‟s group quoted above, many of the older female participants in the focus groups that I conducted in other communities described how they had been able to earn enough in the 1970s to meet household food needs and have some left over to sell to meet their other obligations and provide for their own needs, as well as those of their children.
The impact of the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and the subsequent decline in yields of food crops on women‟s livelihoods in the northern regions of Ghana has been poorly documented. However, there are many reasons to think that the well- being of women in the rural areas in northern Ghana would have suffered under the impact of structural adjustment reforms. In theory, the impact of structural adjustment on agricultural incomes should be favorable or at least neutral, because of increases in the relative prices of tradables including agricultural output. However, measures such as the removal of subsidies on inputs and consumption goods may have a countervailing effect on the incomes of small-scale producers and net food buyers who are forced to pay higher prices for their requirements. In addition, a substantial proportion of rural
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incomes come from off-farm sources such as remittances, and to the extent that these are dependent on urban incomes, they are likely to fall as public sector workers are laid off and urban incomes decline (Borguignon and Morrisson, 1992; Baden, 1993). As household incomes fall, rural women may come under increasing pressure to earn cash income to purchase food and meet other household needs either by selling produce or by intensifying their off-farm economic activities.
Whitehead (2002, 2006), in a longitudinal study of livelihood change in the Upper
East Region of Ghana (in the north-eastern part of the country), finds evidence to support the above conjectures. She notes how shrinking household incomes led to a marked expansion of petty income-generating activities for women in the 1980s, although their responsibilities for domestic reproductive work had not diminished. There was also an increase in the migration of females across the border to Côte d‟Ivoire.
My own fieldwork in rural communities in the Savelugu-Nanton district in the
Northern Region yields findings similar to those of Whitehead. With the inception of the
Economic Recovery Program in 1983, farmers lost access to state-subsidized inputs, and agricultural livelihoods in the Northern Region became increasingly vulnerable. Since the 1960s, farmers had become increasingly dependent on chemical inputs. Following the removal of subsidies on fertilizers and other agricultural inputs in the 1990s, average farm sizes began to dwindle, as did agricultural yields for most crops (see Chapter 3).
Increasingly erratic weather patterns meant that farm yields were also becoming more unpredictable. In July 2007, for example, shortly after I arrived in Ghana to begin my field research, the seasonal rains in the north of Ghana were interrupted by a drought that lasted for 45 days; farmers who had planted their crops lost their entire investment.
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When the rains began again, the farmers tilled their land and replanted their fields, only to have their crops destroyed in September by massive floods.3
Women have experienced these livelihood changes in a number of ways. Their in-kind payments from participating in harvests fell, so that they now have little left over to sell. Declining yields of food crops have also meant that household food supplies run out well before the next harvest. My household surveys show that in the previous two years, stocks of food staples have lasted for about seven months on average, leaving households dependent on the market to make up the short-fall. Women‟s obligations to make up the gap between falling stocks of grain and adequate food intake have led to greater diversification of women‟s economic activities.
What impact have these changes in economic conditions had on perceptions about women‟s migration? For one thing, more women have begun to see migration to the south as an option for coping with increasing economic adversity:
These days, farm yields are poor and since your children have to eat, you end up using your trading capital to feed the house. We sell our shea nuts and groundnuts during the harvest season when the price is low instead of waiting for the price to rise. So now when our daughters see that we are suffering, and we can’t provide their needs, they go to work in the south so that they can help us. Sometimes women will even encourage their daughters to go in order to help out at home. The men don’t like this at all, but they don’t know the problems that women face in their rooms. (Middle-aged female participant, Focus group, Bunglung)
Economic adversity has also altered women‟s evaluation of the costs of adhering to the norms that prevented them from migration:
If you stay here you will be idle and you will eat all the food you have, and then when you run out, what will you do? (Returned female migrant, Bunglung)
3 Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Northern Region Directorate
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It would seem that households in the Northern Region of Ghana, faced with the challenges of survival under increasingly difficult circumstances, have sought to further diversify their sources of income in an attempt to secure a more stable income stream, as predicted by the voluminous literature on household livelihood diversification in agricultural communities (Ellis, 2000a and 2000b Ellis and Bahigwa, 2003). However, what this literature has largely failed to acknowledge is the role that women‟s economic activities play in the process of livelihood diversification. Although social constructions of gender constrain the activities into which women can diversify, these social constructions are not static; instead they interact with the operation of macro-economic forces to open up new sources and opportunities for diversification that may have previously been denied to women. It is within this context that increased off-farm economic activity by females, including migration, is increasingly becoming an important source of household income, and this may in part explain the flow of women and young girls to the south of Ghana to work as market porters.
However, this by itself is not enough to explain the selectivity of migration within the household. It is clear from the household surveys that not all women, or men, for that matter, make the decision to migrate. What determines which household members migrate? In the sections that follow, I argue that the different economic and social roles that women and men play in the household at different points in their lives are important in determining who migrates and their reasons for migrating. These economic and social roles are shaped in part by the ideologies and social constructions of gender; however, gender is not the only social construct that determines the roles and status of individuals in households in northern Ghana. In the following section, I describe the structure and
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organization of production of the typical household in Northern Ghana, focusing on how hierarchies based on age, gender and marital status shape the social and economic roles of different members of the household.
4.4 The Organization of Production in the Household
The typical rural household in the Savelugu-Nanton district, as in the rest of
Northern Region, is an extended family unit that occupies a number of huts in a walled compound. The building block of the household is usually a closely related small group of married men and their families – wives, sons, daughters-in-law, unmarried daughters and grandchildren. Each household has a designated head, usually the oldest male in the senior generation of the compound: only 14.1 percent of all households in the region have female household heads (UNDP 2007). In most Mole-Dagbon households, there will also be one or more wubsibu (loosely translated as foster-children) in the household.
These are boys or girls who are not the biological children of household members, but who are being raised by a member of the household as part of a reciprocal system of child-rearing intended to strengthen ties among distant kin. A daughter is typically fostered out to her father‟s sister, while a son is fostered out to his father‟s brother.
The core livelihood strategy of the household is based on the collective farming of staple crops on the household farm, together with arrangements for individual economic activity. It is the responsibility of the household head to provide shelter as well as the food staple for all members of the household. In the past, the household head was responsible for providing enough food for three meals in the day; increasingly, however, they are obliged only to provide enough for the evening meal (Alhassan and Poulton,
2009). In order to ensure an adequate level of staple food supplies, the household head
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has the authority to demand labor from other household members on the main compound food plot; this responsibility passes on to the eldest son if the head dies or becomes too old or sick to meet his obligation to provide food for household members. Although the largest part of the household‟s land is used to cultivate the food staple, male household members are allocated individual parcels of farmland by the household head. On these private farms, they cultivate cash crops such as groundnuts and soybeans. Each individual plot holder is responsible for acquiring the inputs for his farm, and controls the income generated from the sale of his crops.
This distinction between household and individual farms has important implications for household budgeting arrangements. As is common in other parts of
Africa, husbands and wives do not pool their incomes, and apart from the shared output from the household farm, there is no such thing as a common housekeeping budget.
Their respective responsibilities are defined by the gendered social norms of household provisioning described above, whereby women are responsible for „soup ingredients‟4 and men are responsible for the staple. Although the ability to retain control over one‟s personal income applies to men and women equally, women‟s individual farms are smaller than those belonging to men and the cash income that women can generate from these farms is far less than the incomes men receive from the sale of their private crops.
Moreover, the gender ideology that assigns to women the responsibility for ensuring that their children do not starve means that women are more likely to use their personal incomes to make up for household food shortfalls. Thus, women are likely to feel the impact of reductions in the food staple more sharply than men.
4 This broad category includes vegetables, cooking fat, salt and meat or fish, as well as the costs of preparing a meal out of the staple eg. the cost of milling and grinding maize.
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However, as Warner, et al. (1997) have also noted, other social constructs, such as marital status and seniority play an important role in determining the contributions that each household member is expected to make to the household. Beyond providing labor on the household farm, young unmarried men in the households have few financial obligations towards the household. Any income they generate from selling cash crops such as groundnuts they cultivate on their individual farms may be kept for their own use, and there is no expectation that this income will be used to meet household needs.
Likewise, although married men who are not household heads are also obliged to provide labor to the household farm, any income generated from their private plots is intended to be used to meet their personal needs as well as those of their families. They may, if they wish, contribute to the household granary, but there is no requirement that they do so.
Similarly, the economic roles of women within the household differ according to their seniority and marital status. Like other household members, young unmarried women are expected to contribute labor to the household farm. In addition, they are required to help with cooking, caring for children and fetching water and fuel. They are also expected to assist older married women in the household with their income- generating activities, for example, by helping to gather and process shea nuts into sheabutter, or by assisting with the parboiling of rice and the processing of groundnut oil.
Young unmarried women typically have few sources of personal income. Even when they receive payments in-kind for participating in the groundnut harvest, they are expected to contribute these in-kind payments towards meeting the household‟s food needs. For a young woman, therefore, getting married and moving out of her parents‟ home to her husband‟s compound is an important stage in passing out of the category of
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„junior woman‟. Successfully giving birth to one or two children who survive infancy marks an even more important transition in a woman‟s social status within the household.
At this point, a woman becomes a „cooking wife‟, a transition that is celebrated with the cooking of a special meal for her husband and in-laws (Warner et al., 1997).
Besides providing for her own personal needs as well as those of her children, a cooking wife is expected to provide meals for her husband and other household members and to supplement household food supplies. When the household head is unable to meet his obligation to provide the food staple, she is expected to make up the shortfall. If the household has more than one cooking wife, they take turns in assuming these responsibilities, usually on a weekly rotation. In addition to these obligations, cooking wives are also often responsible for other items of expenditure, such as children‟s educational expenses, clothing and other needs.
Warner et al. (1997) note several important differences between junior women
(both married and unmarried) and cooking wives. For example, unlike junior women who are expected to assist with cooking every day, cooking wives have the right to take days off from cooking. This gives them time to devote to income-generating activities.
It is also common for them to be entrusted with the sale of the crops grown collectively by the compound, a service for which they expect to receive a „commission‟ (ibid: 148).
They are also more likely to be allocated a small piece of land on which they may cultivate vegetables and groundnuts; single women as well as married women who have not achieved full cooking status within the household are almost never allocated any land for farming.
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In order to meet the obligations associated with their role as senior women in the household, cooking wives also engage in a variety of economic activities, mostly low- return small-scale production, such as gathering shea nuts and other wild bush fruits, food processing and making charcoal from firewood. Because cash income is not pooled, cooking wives retain full control over the income from these activities. However, they also face a strong social obligation to use this income to meet household food needs. A woman who is able to provide meals for her children and other members of the household independently of her husband or the household head is considered to be a „strong woman‟
(Whitehead, 1981). In a study of NGO-sponsored income-generating projects, for example, Atengdem (1995) finds that over 70 percent of the women surveyed used the extra income earned from their participation in these projects to purchase food for the family; only 10 percent of the women surveyed use the extra income for their own needs.
4.5 Norms of Household Provisioning and Migration Patterns
These distinctions between the rights and responsibilities of household members on the basis of their status within the household are important factors in determining who migrates, when they do so, and why. In this section, I draw on my rural household surveys, as well as my interviews with migrants who had returned to their rural communities, to explore the role of the household hierarchy in shaping the migration behavior of both men and women.
Most of the female migrants from the households in my rural survey were young, single and childless, the daughters of the household heads or the foster-daughters of the heads‟ wives. Likewise, the majority of male migrants were young and single (Tables
4.1, 4.2 and 4.3).
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Table 4.1: Migrant Characteristics
Migrant Characteristics Male Female 23.9 23.3 Age (mean) (5.1)5 (6.6) 6.6 5.1 Years of schooling (mean) (2.8) (2.5) Number of children at time of last 1.5 1.7 migration (0.7) (0.6) N 66.0 184.0
Source: Author’s Household Surveys, Savelugu-Nanton District
Table 4.2: Migrants’ Relation to Household Head
Relation to household head Male (%) Female (%) Head 3.0 0.0 Spouse 0.0 16.9 Child 62.1 31.0 Grandchild 1.5 1.1 Niece/Nephew 16.7 8.2 Sister/brother 15.2 8.7 Son/daughter-in-law 1.5 2.2 Brother/sister-in-law 0.0 3.8 Cousin 0.0 7.1 Foster-child/Wife's Foster-child 0.0 19.0 Other 0.0 2.2 Total 100 100
Source: Author’s Household Surveys, Savelugu-Nanton District
Table 4.3: Marital Status of Migrants
Marital Status at time of last migration Male (%) Female (%) Married 15.2 33.7 Divorced/separated 0 1.1 Never married 84.9 60.3 Engaged 0 4.9 Total 100.0 100.0
Source: Author’s Household Surveys, Savelugu-Nanton District
5 Standard deviations in parentheses
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Sanaatu,6 a 23 year-old migrant, had returned to the village just a few days before
I met her. She had come back to help her mother harvest shea nuts. She had been going to Accra every year for the last 3 years, returning each year around May or August to help her mother harvest shea nuts or groundnuts. The first time she went to Accra, she wasn‟t particularly happy about going, but knew that it was the only way she could make enough money to buy the things she wanted. She was single, and had no children.
In our culture, a woman must have certain things before she marries. She needs clothes and cooking utensils. If she doesn’t migrate, she can’t get those items, and her parents can’t also afford to buy them for her. Even if you help to harvest groundnuts or shea nuts, you can’t sell it and keep the money. It is for your mother, and because she has to use it to feed the house, she can’t sell it to buy what you need.
Although she had left primarily to save money to buy personal items for her own use, she had also been sending money to her mother regularly.
There are five of us children, and I am the oldest. I knew that if I stayed at home, my mother would not have enough money to look after my younger brothers and sisters. But now, when I work, I can send her money to help with their education.
I come back to help with the harvest because I know that I will always be able to leave something behind for my mother. I do this because my earnings in Accra are unpredictable. Sometimes I have a lot of money, and sometimes I don’t make much money. But if I help her to harvest shea nuts or groundnuts, she will have enough left over to sell for food if I can’t send her money.
Meimunatu is 19, and had just returned to her parents‟ home after having been in
Accra for eight months.
I went there to save money to buy a sewing machine. I want to learn how to sew. My parents could not afford to buy the machine and pay the apprenticeship fees, and that’s why I went there. I sent money to my mother while I was there to help with buying food.
6 Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the respondents.
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Young women like Sanaatu and Meimunatu migrated because they wished to earn an income to pay for their education, pay for an apprenticeship, or purchase items for a trousseau. Within the existing household division of labor, this group of women has very limited opportunities to engage in farming activity in their communities of origin, or to engage in non-farm productive activities such as food processing. Even if they had the resources to do so, their responsibilities for housework leave them little time to invest in these activities. I was repeatedly told that under conditions of economic prosperity, they would have been assisted in meeting these needs by their mothers, aunts or other older women who were responsible for their upkeep. However, with the decline in household incomes, it has become much more difficult to do this, and thus, for this group of women, migration to the south presents an opportunity to earn an independent income. However, because of the norms of household provisioning that oblige women to contribute to the household‟s food needs and upkeep of children, they did not retain all of their income – instead, they sent money back home to their mothers or to other female relatives to help with purchases of food or for the education of their children.
In some ways, they were not very different from young men like Iddrisu, who had just finished junior secondary school and was waiting for his exam results to find out whether he had qualified for senior secondary school. He had gone to Accra a number of times to earn money to pay for his school fees; other male migrants had also gone with the intention of saving money to buy radios, furniture or bicycles for their individual use when they came back to the village. However, there was one important difference –
Iddrisu, like almost all the other young male migrants, had a private farm at home, usually between one or two acres, on which they cultivated groundnuts or other cash
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crops. An important and frequently cited reason for migrating for these young male farmers was to earn money to rent a tractor or bullock to till their land in preparation for planting. Thus, even though they might have brought money back with them after having been in Accra or Kumasi for some time, most of this money was to be invested in their personal farm.
It was far less common to find male household heads migrating. Out of the 66 men who had migrated from the rural communities in the previous 5 years, only two were household heads (Table 4.2). Both were young men in their thirties who had moved out of their father‟s compound to set up a compound of their own. Both of them had left to get money to invest in the household farm for the next farming season. However, in keeping with the norms of household provisioning, they, like other male migrants, were not obliged to share any income they received from their work in cities in the south with the household. Beyond ensuring that they cultivated the food staple for that farming season, they could spend that income as they wished.7
Somewhat surprisingly, junior married women constituted a significant proportion
(over 30 percent) of the female migrants on whom I collected data in the rural household survey (Tables 4.3 and 4.4). These were women who had already given birth to one or two children at the time of their most recent migration, and who were about to make the transition to „cooking wife‟ in their husband‟s households. Taking on cooking responsibilities meant that these women needed to acquire the necessary utensils for cooking. Even more importantly, they also needed to invest in some income-generating
7In migrant households where the migrant was away at the time of the interview, this information was obtained from the household member who had the most information about the migrant. Where the migrant was present because they had returned for a visit, or had returned permanently, I interviewed him or her directly.
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activity that would enable them to meet their obligations to feed the household and care for their children. Some of them had been allocated a small area of land by their husbands to cultivate, but they needed money to pay for seeds, rent a plow or hire a tractor to prepare the land for planting.
Table 4.4: Number of Children at Time of Most Recent Migration
Number of children at time of last migration Male (%) Female (%) 0 84.9 64.7 1 7.6 18.5 2 7.6 10.3 3 0.0 5.4 4 0.0 1.1 Total 100.0 100.0
Source: Author’s Household Surveys, Savelugu-Nanton District
Ramatu is the daughter-in-law of the head of the household, and she had returned to the village about a week prior to our interview „to rest‟ as she put it. She had been migrating to the south for about five years, and had continued to go even after she got married.
Last year, I came back for my father’s funeral, and my husband wanted me to stay with him. I refused. In this village, we women have so many responsibilities that we need to have a source of income. I left because I could not get any income if I stayed in the village.
In Kumasi, I have been lucky enough to get a job with a woman who buys and sells onions in bulk. I help to sell the onions, clean the shop and sweep. Initially she was paying me GH¢2.00 a day (about $2.00 at the time of the interview) based on how many bags of onions I can sell. Now I earn about GH¢10.00 a day (about $10.00 at the time of the interview). I can save enough money for farming when I come back.
Amina is the second wife of the village‟s assembly man. Before she got married, she had spent time in Takoradi, Tarkwa and Accra.
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Before I had my second child, my husband’s senior wife was cooking and taking care of the home. I was just helping her. But after my second child was born, I had to start cooking, and I needed money. My husband and my aunt tried to discourage me from going, but I realized that they couldn’t help solve my problem, so I left.
She had returned about two years before I met her, having saved enough money to come back and start a trading business. Although she hasn‟t been back to the south, she says she will go if she needs more money.
I met other migrants who had migrated for the first time only after they had gotten married and had a child. Meimunatu was one of these women.
In this village, we don’t get a lot of land to farm, so we have to grow groundnuts for soup and maize to make porridge on the same land. Your husband will give you seeds if he can; if not, then you have to buy your own seeds. If you don’t have money to buy your seeds and pay someone to plow the farm, what will you do? You have to go!
I was repeatedly told by focus group participants that in the past, when young women were about to become „cooking wives‟, their mothers or older female relatives would have assisted them by providing the money they needed to buy cooking utensils as well as the capital they needed to invest in an off-farm productive activity. However, as household livelihoods became more precarious, this had become more difficult, and many women in this position found themselves confronted with the possibility of greater financial responsibility in the household attendant on their imminent status as senior women, but without the necessary income or claims on household resources to meet these obligations. For women in this position, migration presented an opportunity to raise the capital they needed for this phase in their transition to senior women in the household.
In contrast, women who had already attained the status of „cooking wives‟ were far less likely to migrate. However, it was not uncommon for them to finance the
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migration of a daughter or niece to the city. As one woman whose daughter was in Accra told me,
The men only give us maize. We women have to provide everything else in the house, so we have to do something to earn income. If the children are hungry, the man doesn’t care because you are not the only woman he has married, so you have to do whatever you can to help yourself. A woman will do anything to get income, including sending her children to migrate to send money home. It is mostly the young ones who go. If you see an older women going, then it means things are really bad for her. She goes unwillingly, with tears in her eyes. She worries about leaving the children behind. (Focus group participant, Bunglung)
Salamatu is in her late thirties or early forties. The first of her husband‟s two wives, she came to Accra after the petty trading business she had been operating in her village failed. She had three children, all of whom were in school, and she was responsible for paying their fees as well as any other expenses related to their education.
The oldest, a girl, was about to go to senior secondary school, and needed a mattress, books, a trunk and other items. Salamatu had already bought all these items for her with the money she made working in Accra, and she had saved over GH¢ 1000 (about
$1000.00 at the time), part of which was intended to pay her daughter‟s fees.
This year, things are even worse than before. Our farms have been destroyed. How are we going to manage, if we don’t come to Accra? I came to Accra because if I stayed at home, my children would not go to school. My husband always says he does not have money. All the money I was getting from trading was going to feed the house. I even started using my capital to buy food. So after a while there was no money left, and so I decided to come.
As I have shown in the previous chapter, declining yields of the household staples have led to a deterioration in the food security situation of households in the north of
Ghana. Under these circumstances, women are likely to experience greater demands on their financial resources because of their ideologically determined responsibility for making up for any food shortfalls. At the same time, relative to men, they have less
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access to or control over the household‟s productive resources – in particular, land – with which to meet these increasing demands.
However, women experience these difficulties differently depending on their position in the household hierarchy, and the claims they have on the household‟s productive resources. Although women generally have a weaker claim on the household‟s productive resources relative to men, single women as well as married women who have not achieved the status of full cooking wives have even weaker claims on the household‟s productive resources than senior women. Single women, who previously could count on the financial support of their older female relatives, must now find alternative sources of income. However, their position in the household hierarchy means that they have no opportunity to do so if they remain at home; for them, migration to the south presents an opportunity to earn cash income to meet their personal needs.
Married women with children who are about to take on the status of full cooking wives and the attendant obligations and responsibilities cannot count on the support of older female relatives. For them, migration to the south provides an opportunity to acquire the start-up capital necessary to invest in some productive activity that would enable them to meet their obligations in the household.
Because of the responsibilities that marriage and the transition to senior status in the household confer, this group of married women had very different objectives from their single counterparts. Tables 4.5 and 4.6 summarize the motives for migration by the marital status of the 253 female migrants I interviewed in Accra. A common objective was to save money to buy items such as cooking utensils, items of clothing and sewing machines. However, many women also wanted to send money home to help pay for food
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or care for children. Others wanted to acquire capital to trade with, to invest in some other income-generating activity, or to pay for an apprenticeship. Others mentioned wanting to save money for their own education or that of their children, or to prepare for a forthcoming marriage. Over 50 percent of women who stated that they wanted to save money to help look after the families, invest in some income-generating activity or pay for their children‟s education were married. In contrast, the majority of women who wanted to save money to buy items for their own use or to pay for an apprenticeship were single women.
Compared to single women and junior married women, senior married women who have already attained cooking wife status have somewhat more flexibility in their choices about where and how to earn an income. Even though all women have weaker claims on the household‟s productive resources than men, senior married women do have more opportunities than junior women for generating cash income at home. In every single one of the households that I surveyed, the most senior women earned cash income from harvesting and selling shea nuts, making sheabutter, parboiling rice, processing groundnut oil or trading. For those women who were fortunate enough to have access to some farmland, they also received cash income from harvesting and selling groundnuts.
However, in many cases, this cash income was not always enough to meet their obligations to the household as well as supply the needs of the younger women under their care. Thus, for some senior married women, financing the migration of a single daughter or niece who would make remittances that could be used to meet their obligations in the household was a way to ease their own budget constraints. For others, however, especially those who did not have children who were old enough to be sent to
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the city or who wanted to keep their children in school, migrating to cities in the south on their own was really their only option.
Table 4.5: Marital Status and Motives for Migration (Female Migrants)
Motive for Marital Status (%) Migration Married Single Divorced Widowed Total Purchase Personal 43.18 54.55 0.76 1.52 100 Assets Help with Family‟s 60.2 36.74 1.02 2.04 100 Finances Finance 11.36 87.5 1.14 0 100 Apprenticeship Trading 53.33 41.67 1.67 3.33 100 Capital Prepare for Marriage 0 100 0 0 100 Ceremony Save for Children‟s 81.25 0 0 18.75 100 Education Save for own 0 100 0 0 100 Education
Source: Author’s Survey of Female Migrants, Accra
Table 4.6: Reasons for Migration
Reason for Migration Frequency Purchase Assets 132 Help Family 98 Finance an Apprenticeship 88 Trading Capital 60 Prepare for Marriage Ceremony 21 Save for kids education 15 Save for own education 7
Source: Author’s Survey of Female Migrants, Accra
4.6 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that the question of „who migrates‟ cannot be answered only by recourse to differences in skill sets and expected wages at the destination. Hierarchical divisions of labor in the household determine the strength of the
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claims of different household members on the household‟s productive resources.
Although the failure of agricultural livelihoods in northern Ghana creates a strong impetus from migration, household members respond to this impetus differently depending on their position in the household hierarchy and their access to and control over the household‟s resources. Young unmarried women who are at the bottom of this household hierarchy are most likely to migrate because their claims on the household‟s resources are weakest – in times of extreme scarcity, their needs are least likely to be met if they remain at home. However, it is not only young, single women who migrate. The gendered norms of household provisioning confer on married women the responsibility for making up for household food shortfalls and ensuring that children do not starve, while at the same time denying them access to the resources that they need to meet these obligations. Thus, the failure of agriculture livelihoods can present a very strong push for migration for married women, even though they may have a stronger claim on household resources than single women.
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CHAPTER 5
MIGRATION AS A HOUSEHOLD STRATEGY: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL
NORMS AND INTRA-HOUSEHOLD CONFLICT IN WOMEN’S MIGRATION
DECISIONS
5.1 Introduction
For many years, the dominant approach in the literature characterized migration as being motivated purely by individual self-interest. More recently, however, researchers in the social sciences have increasingly acknowledged that individuals are unlikely to make migration decisions independently of the household to which they belong (Aguilera and Massey, 2003; Munshi 2003). This recognition has been reflected in a shift towards household-based models of migration, in which migration is seen as part of a household strategy to diversify income sources, mitigate risk, and/or raise funds for investment (see Chapter 2 for a full review of this literature). These models typically fall into one of two categories: unified household models, based on an application of the
New Household Economics to migration decision-making, or intra-household bargaining models that incorporate a game-theoretic approach to the analysis of the determinants of migration and remittances. In keeping with this line of thinking, the migration of women from northern Ghana has often been unquestioningly attributed to strategies adopted by households in response to worsening agricultural livelihoods (see Agarwal et al., 1997, for example).
While it is true that individuals do not make decisions independently of their households and communities, the notion of a household strategy, however it is conceptualized, ignores the role of social norms in shaping intra-household conflicts and
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coalitions within the household, and leaves little room for the consideration of how social norms shape migration and remittance behavior. Social norms, as I stated in Chapter 1 of this dissertation, define the boundaries of acceptable behavior for the members of the social group that share those norms. Because they are often internalized as codes of proper conduct, social norms play an important role in shaping the preferences of agents and in shaping their choices. Conflicts arise when some members of a group deviate from the norms of behavior prescribed for that group. For example, gender norms, which are based on the social construction of gender in a given society, determine what men and women can or cannot do (Folbre, 1994). Individuals who go against these gender norms may incur the disapproval of family members as well as members of the community.
Although most economic analysis treats norms as being exogenously determined, they can be subject to contestation, and small changes in individual behavior can trigger major shifts in norms at the societal level. Economic factors can alter the calculus that sustains a given norm by increasing the benefits to be gained from challenging a norm relative to the costs of adherence. Gendered social norms that constrain the actions of women, for example, may begin to shift as women begin to question and challenge them, either individually or collectively. But more importantly, attempts to challenge socially prescribed norms can spark conflict between those individuals or groups of individuals who have an interest in maintaining these norms and those who seek to contest these norms.
Thus, one can imagine how the independent migration of women from rural to urban areas might be a source of conflict among household members if it challenges social norms that frown upon women leaving their families and communities to work in
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the city. Norm-driven differences in preferences regarding migration might also influence the formation of interest coalitions among household members when migration decisions are being made. In other words, contrary to what is generally assumed in household models of migration, non-migrant members of the household may not necessarily act as a unit in making migration decisions. These possibilities are ignored in models of migration decision-making that treat migration as part of a household strategy that results from consensus or bargaining. In this chapter, I argue that the treatment of the migration decision as a household decision, however conceptualized, fails to capture adequately the diversity of forms that migration decision-making may take and the importance of social norms in shaping migration decisions. The analysis of female migration, in a social context in which it is a fairly recent phenomenon and therefore more likely than male migration to be subject to constraints imposed by social norms, offers a lens through which to explore the role of social norms in shaping the participation of the household in migration decisions.
In some cases, the migration of a woman may well be the result of a decision involving all household members, in which she is sent out with the active or tacit cooperation of all non-migrant family members. Even then, as I argued in the preceding chapter, intra-household inequalities and hierarchies based on age, gender and social norms will shape decisions about who migrates and who does not. In other cases, it may be the result of an agreement between the migrant and some household members. In yet other cases, it is a strategy undertaken by women acting against the limits imposed by patriarchal norms of behavior on their mobility but within the constraints of limited opportunities in their communities for realizing an independent livelihood, without the
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support or approval of family members. In all of these cases, the notion of consensus, either among all household members, or among non-migrant household members, becomes questionable.
This has important implications for how we collect data on migration and remittances. The absence of consensus among household members regarding migration can have an impact on who sends and receives remittances in the households. If, for example, female migrants leave with the support of only their mothers, co-wives, or female in-laws, but against the wishes of male household members, they might decide to direct their remittances only to these female relatives. Thus, in households in which certain types of income are not pooled, a male household head may have no knowledge of these remittance flows, and therefore no control over their use. The possibility of these female-centered networks of remittance flows is completely ignored in migration surveys that assume that migration is part of a household strategy and that therefore ask for information about migration and remittances only from the household head, as well as in studies of the impacts of migration and remittances that make similar assumptions.
In this chapter, I argue that the treatment of the migration decision as a household decision that results either from consensus or from bargaining fails to capture the diversity of forms that migration decision-making may take, and the importance of social norms in shaping migration decisions. I present qualitative evidence from my field interviews with female migrants at their destinations as well as rural migrant and non- migrant households to show that social norms lead to gender-based differences in migration preferences and bargaining power, which are in turn important determinants of the migration decisions of migrants and their households. In doing so, I make a case for
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an intra-household approach to migration that places social norms at the forefront of analyses of migration determinants and outcomes. I also highlight the implications of such an approach for the collection of data on migration, and more importantly, for understanding the determinants of the intra-household flow of remittances and their impacts on development.
In the section that follows, I extend the review of the literature on household models of migration decision-making that was began in Chapter Two. In the subsequent sections, I present and analyze the qualitative evidence obtained from my field research, and in the final section, I conclude with a brief examination of the implications of this evidence for the analysis of migration and remittances.
5.2 Household Models of Migration
The analysis of household-level economic determinants and consequences of migration is characterized by two distinct theoretical frameworks: the unified household approach, and the neoclassical bargaining approach, both of which were introduced in
Chapter Two. This section expands on the discussion that I began in that chapter.
5.2.1 Models of Unified Household Preferences
The unified household approach is essentially an application of the New
Household Economics (NHE) to migration decision-making. As I discussed in Chapter
Two, models of migration decision-making based on this framework are silent on the presence of interactions and friction among household members in making decisions about migration, and leaves no room for an analysis of how intra-household relations of power, subordination, conflict and dissent shape migration decisions and determine how
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the gains from migration are distributed. The majority of studies that adopt a unified household approach to migration decision-making do not question the validity of the underlying assumption of unified household preferences embodied in a single utility function. In failing to do so, these studies ignore differences in preferences that family members might have about who should or should not migrate, and the role that social norms play in shaping these distinctive preferences.
In societies in which household income is not pooled, and in which social norms assign different responsibilities to household members and constrain or facilitate the mobility of some on the basis of their age and gender, as is the case in northern Ghana and in many other parts of Africa, there is no reason to expect that households would act as a unit in making decisions about migration.
5.2.2 Bargaining Models of Migration
An alternative strand of the household strategy approach to migration, also discussed in Chapter 2, makes use of neoclassical bargaining models to analyze the process of migration decision-making. Because this approach is able to accommodate the possibility of intra-household conflict in migration decision-making, the neoclassical bargaining approach underlying the bargaining models of migration and remittances represents an advance over alternative economic models of migration and remittances that see households as having unified preferences. From a feminist standpoint, however, these bargaining models of migration suffer from a number of shortcomings.
An important limitation of the cooperative game framework used in these models lies in their symmetric treatment of household members and migrants. The underlying assumption of this framework is that the gains to each party from cooperation determine
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their relative bargaining power: intuitively, if an agent has less to gain from cooperation, she/he can hold this over the other agents in the process of intra-household bargaining.
Although the migration models described above recognize that differences in bargaining power will be important in determining the outcomes of migration decisions, the sources of these differences are not made explicit. The implicit assumption being made in these models is that household members, regardless of age and gender, have the same rights and abilities to enter into a household bargaining process, and to convert their gains from cooperation into bargaining power (Katz, 1997). It is worth spending some time to examine the implications and criticisms of this assumption.
First of all, certain attributes such as „boldness‟ and „lack of fear of conflict‟ make some individuals better bargainers than others. However, because of the prescriptions of social norms, these attributes are often gender and age-specific, so that one‟s ability to bargain effectively can be influenced by one‟s age, gender and/or position in the intra- household hierarchy (Chaudhuri, 1996; Katz, 1997). Secondly, the ability to participate in household decision-making is itself influenced by prevailing social and cultural norms; for example, younger household members are expected to obey and respect the wishes of their elders, while women might be expected to respect the wishes of their husbands or other men in the household. These cultural constructions of appropriate behavior, especially for women, can affect their ability to bargain explicitly, thus indirectly impinging on their bargaining power in household decision-making. Norms also set limits to what can be bargained over: women, for example, might be expected to stay at home and care for their household and provide sexual services to their husbands: attempts to bargain over these norms may be met with heavy social and/or legal sanctions
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(Agarwal, 1997). Finally, social norms may be internalized by household members to such an extent that they may not perceive their own individual interests as being distinct from those of others in their household; this may be especially true in the case of women, who might perceive their own welfare as being inextricably linked with that of other household members (Sen, 1990). All of these caveats would suggest that intra-household hierarchies based on societal norms associated with age and gender can be an important constraint on the ability of some household members, particularly women, to participate in household bargaining regarding their migration on par with other household members.
Another implication of the assumption of symmetry in a typical bargaining model of migration is that all household members, again regardless of age and gender, are able to accurately perceive and fall back on their alternatives to cooperation, also known as their „exit options‟. So, for example, in a bargaining model of migration, it is assumed that a would-be migrant has the option of ceasing all contact with her origin household if she perceives this as being in her best interest, filial obligations notwithstanding.
However, as Agarwal (1997) points out, social norms can lead to asymmetries in the perception and exercise of exit options. More importantly, social norms derive their power over individual behavior from the fact that the relevant universe of migration decision-making agents consists not only of household members, but also of the wider community, which enforces social norms and sanctions those who deviate from them.
For example, social sanctions imposed by the community against women who are perceived to have abandoned their husbands and children may be so high as to make separation or divorce an unviable option for these women, thus impinging on the
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willingness and ability of migrant women to completely sever ties with their origin households.
The most important shortcoming of the bargaining models of migration, in my opinion, lies in their treatment of interest coalitions in migration decision-making. These models assume that non-migrant household members have shared preferences regarding the migration of a given household member and are therefore able to form a coalition vis-
à-vis the migrant based on their shared interests in the gains from migration. However, interest coalitions within the household are often far more complex than is allowed for in the typical bargaining model of migration (Agarwal, 1997). Individual non-migrants may be affected quite differently by the migration of a particular household member, and may have conflicting preferences over who migrates. These conflicts could potentially have a strong gender component. For example, if mothers anticipate that daughters are more likely than sons to send regular remittances that could be used to provide the food needs of the household, this may favorably affect their attitude towards the migration of a daughter, while if fathers see the migration of daughters as a reflection of their loss of control over women in the household, or perceive that the migration of daughters might enhance the bargaining power of their wives through their receipt of remittances, they might prefer that their daughters stay at home. Thus, it is possible to conceive of an interest coalition between a daughter who wishes to migrate and her mother, who anticipates the remittances she may receive, against a father who believes his daughter‟s migration would ultimately bring disgrace to the family. The bargaining models of migration described above overlook these complexities in analyzing the determinants and outcomes of migration. However, these issues are not trivial: if one parent supports the
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migration of a daughter while the other is against it, for example, this could have implications for who receives the remittances from the migrant daughter, which could in turn have a significant impact on the uses to which these remittances are put.
Despite the shortcomings of both the unified household model of migration and the bargaining model of migration, researchers have continued to make use of one or the other of these approaches in their analyses of migration and remittances.
5.3 Gendered Norms and Mobility in Northern Ghana
In the previous chapter, I noted that, unlike male migration, the migration of women from northern Ghana is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back only to the
1980s. Despite its prevalence in the Savelugu-Nanton district, female migration remains highly contested. In this section, I draw on the contributions of participants in the six focus group discussions that I held in the rural communities, as well as on the comments of chiefs, village elders and women‟s group leaders to identify the norms and perceptions surrounding the migration of women, and to contrast these perceptions with those surrounding the migration of men.
It should be clear from preceding chapters that relative to men, women occupy the status of subordinates within the household and the community. Although more senior women are treated with respect and deference, they still do not enjoy the same access to productive resources that senior men have (see Chapter 4). Women‟s subordinate status is also clearly reflected in the norms of behavior regarding their mobility. Married women are expected to ask the permission of their husbands or older men in the household before leaving the house to visit friends or relatives or to attend social gatherings; in more than half of the households I surveyed, women thought that a
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husband was justified in beating his wife if she left the house without telling him.
Unmarried women are expected to seek the permission of the household head before leaving the compound. This permission is generally granted – it would be quite rare for a woman to be prevented by her husband or the head of the household from leaving the compound to go to another compound, for example. However, personal interviews with a number of women, as well as the comments of focus group participants, indicated that it was quite common for husbands to prevent their wives from traveling outside the village to visit relatives in another village, even within the same district, and a wife who left without her husband‟s permission could be beaten or thrown out of the house. In contrast, adult men were generally not expected to seek the permission of anyone in the household before going out of the compound or before traveling. Young men, out of respect, would inform the head of the household if they were traveling outside the village; however, unlike women, they were not subject to the threat of violence or ejection from the compound if they failed to do so.
In a context within which women‟s mobility is relatively restricted, one might expect that the decision by women to migrate from the village to cities in the south for an extended period of time might be met with some opposition. It was therefore not surprising that in 23 out of the 24 communities in which I did my field research, chiefs and elders voiced their displeasure with the migration of women from their communities.
When our daughters go to the south, they come back with disease, or they come back pregnant and there is no father. Sometimes they come back to die. When my daughter went I sent her brother to go and bring her back. I think this migration to the south is not a good thing for our young women – it has to be stopped (Village elder, Tootenyilli).
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These misgivings were not voiced only by older men. Both older women as well as young men also had strong views about the migration of women.
We don’t want them to go to the south. We don’t like them to go because when they come back they think they are better than us. You see them walking around in the village with their hairstyles and clothes from the city, and some of them even have cell-phones! If the woman you are going to marry goes to Accra or Kumasi, the next thing you hear is that she is pregnant by another man. (Young male focus-group participant).
We don’t like them to go. In our house we discourage them from going and give them everything they need so that they will stay and take care of the children (Married male household head, explaining why there were none of the women in his household had migrated).
We prefer that our daughters should not go to the south. They go because they want to buy items they need for marriage, or because their friends are going. But it is not safe for them to go. They don’t tell us because they know that we will try to discourage them from going (Elderly female focus-group participant).
Women as a group were far more understanding and less condemnatory about the reasons for the rising migration of women from their communities. A few men, however, also showed some empathy for women‟s reasons for migrating. These were typically young men who also left the village during the dry season to work in the south.
It is not the women’s fault that they have to migrate; after the harvest is over, there is no work to do. Because they don’t get a lot of groundnuts and shea nuts, they have nothing to sell, so they go there to work and get money (Unmarried male focus-group participant)
On the whole, there was a marked contrast between the largely negative perceptions surrounding the migration of women to the south and the perceptions surrounding male migration. Migration to the south was seen as something that young men had always done after the harvest when there was no work to be done on the farms.
It was a way to earn some cash to purchase bicycles, radios and furniture, or to pay for the rental of a tractor or other inputs for their individual farms. They would generally return at the beginning of the next planting season to begin work on the household farm as well as their individual plots. While there was a general agreement that male
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migration had certainly been on the increase since the 1980s, not once did I hear concern expressed about the safety or the health of male migrants by members of the community or by their family members.
Clearly, at the time I was doing my fieldwork, the norms surrounding the migration of women from rural communities in the north to cities in the south were still in a state of flux. Although the worsening economic conditions described in previous chapters were altering the calculus that had sustained the norms that had previously proscribed women‟s migration, this was not true for everyone. Normative prescriptions about the appropriate roles for men and women in the household continued to shape the views of both men and women regarding migration to cities in the south. Even if both male and female migration were seen as responses to worsening agricultural livelihoods in the north of Ghana, female migration was generally viewed in a far more negative light than male migration.
While there is no reason to expect male migration to be met with opposition from family members, constraints on the mobility of women in these communities, together with the negative perceptions surrounding their migration, would lead one to expect that the migration of a woman might be met with some resistance or opposition from family members. On the other hand, economic circumstances could reduce the likelihood of opposition, or at least weaken its potency. Thus, a focus on the migration decisions of women provides a lens through which to explore how social norms shape migration decisions.
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5.4 Migration in the Absence of Opposition: Unified Preferences or Bargaining?
Despite the widespread negative perceptions about the migration of women from the rural communities, I gathered from my interviews with migrants in Accra that there were quite a few instances in which migration decision-making was characterized by the complete absence of opposition from non-migrant family members (see Tables 5.1a and
5.1b).1
The migrants who experienced the least resistance to their migration were women who had been widowed or separated from their husbands. In this part of Ghana, once a husband dies, his property, and in particular, his land, is passed on to the next oldest male of the same generation. Because women derive their access to the household‟s land and to subsistence from their husbands, a woman whose husband dies loses her rights to any land she may have been granted when her husband was alive as well as her rights to a share in the household‟s subsistence. She is expected to return to her natal home, where she and her children become the responsibility of her parents or her brothers. However, she may remain in her husband‟s home if she has sons who are old enough to take over their father‟s property, in which case she becomes their responsibility. This dependence on the charity of relatives means that the loss of a husband leads to heightened insecurity, especially for women who are widowed early in their lives. Rukaya was an example of this group of women.2 Her husband of 20 years had died about three years prior to our interview, and she had moved back to her parents‟ compound, where her brother was now
1 As I explained in Chapter 1, this was not a matched sample i.e. there was no connection between the migrants I interviewed in Accra and the households I surveyed in the Savelugu-Nanton district. However, in some households, I was able to speak with migrants who were on a short visit or who had returned to their households for an extended period. 2 All names have been changed.
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the head of the household. In addition to his wives and children, he had been taking care of their mother, and he could not afford to look after Rukaya and her three teenage children. Her two daughters were apprentice hairdressers, and her son was still in his second year in senior secondary school. She had come to work as a porter in Accra because she needed the money to look after her children and support them in their training and education:
When I was coming I didn’t tell my mother because she is very old, and would have been worried and would have discouraged me from coming. I told my brother, but he didn’t object. He only said that he wished he had money to look after me so that I wouldn’t have to come to Accra. We all know that if I stay in Savelugu, I will not be able to help my children; but now that I am here I am able to send money home. Just last week I sent GH¢150 (about $150.00) to my son to pay his school fees (Rukaya, age 48).
The lack of opposition from family members to the migration of Rukaya and other women in her position results from the perception that the women themselves have very little choice over whether or not to migrate. The family members who might otherwise have protested, such as Rukaya‟s brother, who was the head of the household, also recognize that since they are unwilling or unable to take on the responsibility of providing for these women, any attempt to protest against their migration will be seen as hollow. Instead, they are more likely to pay for the cost of transport to the city, as
Rukaya‟s brother did, although this is certainly not in expectation of any benefits to themselves or to the household as a whole.
Another small group of migrants also experienced little resistance from family members to their migration. These were young single women who had migrated as a result of a joint decision by both parents to send a daughter to work in the south. There were only three migrants (out of a total of 253 interviewed) in this group; they were all
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relatively young, with an average age of 17. One of these women was Barikisu, age 17, who came to Accra with her older sister who had been working there for over a year.
After I finished junior secondary school, my father didn’t have money for me to go to senior secondary school, so he and my mother told me to come to Accra to work and get some money to continue with my education. I want to become a journalist, but they don’t have money to help me. My mother asked me to keep my savings with my older sister for safety.
Seven other women had migrated at the bidding of their mother, who was either widowed or divorced. Busanpaga (age 19) was one of these women:
Before I came here, I was helping my mother to cook and sell waakye3 but the business wasn’t going so well, so she asked me to come here and help my sister sell groundnut paste, so that I can send her money to trade with.
On the surface, the apparent absence of conflict in the migration of these women appears to provide support for models of migration based on the assumption of unified household preferences regarding migration. However, it is also quite plausible that the relative youth of all the women who had migrated at the bidding of one or both parents might have impinged on their ability to fully participate in decisions about the allocation of their labor. In a context in which young women in particular are expected to respect their parents‟ wishes, these women did not appear to have exercised much choice in whether or not they migrated, or in what they did with the money they earned from working. Typically these women were living with another family member in Accra who kept a close watch on them and to whom they gave their money for safekeeping. Given this caveat, it would be difficult to argue that the absence of overt conflict in the migration decisions of these women provides support for a household model of migration decision-making in which household members have similar preferences that can be
3 A dish made from rice and black-eye peas.
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represented in a common utility function. Such an approach overlooks the role of social norms in shaping intra-household hierarchies in which young single women have very little say over the allocation of their labor.
Another category of migrants consists of women who had initiated the move themselves and who experienced little or no opposition to their migration. This group consisted mainly of women who said they had come to Accra to get money to help out at home. There were 80 women in this group, all of them unmarried (see Table 1,
Appendix). All of these women explained that no one had objected to their decision to move. In the words of Damata:
I saw that life was hard and my parents were just there.4 I decided to come to Accra and get some money so that I could help them out. They did not try to stop me; instead they agreed and asked me to send money to help out at home if I am able to make enough money. They helped me to pay the transport fare the first time I came here, and now I send money to them whenever someone is going home.
A closer look at the description of the migration decisions of these women suggests a variety of plausible interpretations, all of which seem to fit in with the notion of a household strategy. But how exactly is this household strategy conceptualized? The decision was initiated by the migrants, but was clearly motivated by their concern for the situation of their families, in addition to a desire to save money to meet their own needs.
Although the parents of these migrants did not protest, was this because they approved wholeheartedly, or was it because they realized that were not in a position to prevent their daughters from migrating, and that their daughters did not have any other choice?
Arguably, in the presence of negative social perceptions that might otherwise limit
4 This expression is a direct translation from Twi, the language in which I conducted my interviews with migrants in Accra. It is not meant to suggest that her parents were idle, but it does indicate a certain helplessness or inability to change an existing situation.
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women‟s geographical mobility by causing her family to object to her migration, relative bargaining power may assume an important role in the ability of women to migrate. In the case of Damata, for example, her relative bargaining position might have been strengthened by the economic hardship faced by her parents, and they did not try to stop her from leaving. Only about half of the migrants in this group had had their transport costs covered by a member of the household; the rest had paid for their transport costs in different ways: borrowing money from traders or stealing and selling part of the family‟s food stock. Thus, it is not clear that the absence of opposition in these cases is necessarily indicative of a household strategy of migration.
One might expect that married women would be more likely than single or widowed women to face resistance from their husbands when they broached the idea of migrating. However, a small number of the married women in my sample experienced no opposition from their husbands. A third of the 91 married women in the sample said that their husbands had approved of their decision to migrate, and 15 of these women had even received money from their husbands to pay for their transportation. The quotes below provide some insight into some of the reasons for this.
My husband and I were suffering in the village, and we needed money to take care of our children. So we borrowed money to pay for me to come here, and I am planning to use the money I get to buy things the children need for school before I buy anything for myself (Amina, age 32)
A number of married women whose husbands had not raised any objections to their migration gave similar explanations to Damata‟s.
When I told my husband I was coming here he did not protest. He agreed because he knows when I send money home the whole family will benefit. He can’t complain because he is not able to provide very well for me (Rubaba, age 32)
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Here too, Rubaba and her husband had come to an agreement: he would not prevent her from migrating because he knew he and the rest of the family would benefit from the remittances that she would send. In any case, his ability to prevent her from migrating was weakened by his inability to „provide‟ for her.
During my interviews in migrant households in the Savelugu-Nanton district, the importance of shifts in relative bargaining power was also clearly reflected in the comments of some of the parents and husbands of migrants.
We would prefer the young women to stay here. If we had the means, we would support them and give them capital to trade so that they will stay here. But if you don’t have a means of livelihood yourself, how can you stand in her way if she wants to go? (Mother of a female migrant, Bunglung).
Economic adversity not only compelled women to look for work outside their communities, it also appeared to have weakened the ability of non-migrants to prevent the women in their families from migrating. The words of Issifu, a farmer in his mid- fifties, whose wife and daughter had both migrated, summed this up.
My wife left because we both didn’t have money. How could I stop her? If a man has no money but his wife has money, she can afford to stay here and not go to the south, but if she also has no money, then it is difficult for her to stay. And since the man has no money, he cannot stop her. If I was strong financially, I would go to the south myself and bring them back, but since I am not strong, what can I do?
Economic hardship also made consensus and cooperation in migration decision- making more likely, even when men might have otherwise objected to women‟s migration. This was true for Tahiru, whose wife had migrated with their child a few months prior to our conversation.
The harvest last year was very bad, so my wife and I sat down and decided that she would go and work and, if God-willing, she is able to get enough money, we can look after our child and send her to school. Would I have agreed to her going if things weren’t so bad? Of course not!
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This variety of decision-making processes that female migrants from the Northern
Region of Ghana described in this section suggests that models of migration based on assumptions of unified household preferences overlook the variety of relations of power and subordination, conflict and cooperation that characterize migration decision-making.
In some cases, younger women were sent by their parents to work and make remittances to the household; in other cases, women came on their own, with little opposition from relevant household members (parents or husbands) who, whatever they might have thought about women going to the south, agreed either because they lacked the means to compel the women to stay at home or because they saw the economic benefits that could be gained from the women‟s migration.
5.5 Explicit Conflict in Migration Decision-Making
In all of the cases described above, it would seem that the migration decision was not characterized by outright conflict among household members. The quotes suggest that the migrants and non-migrant household members were able to reach consensus in one way or another regarding the migration decision. However, this was true for less than half of the 253 migrants that I interviewed in Accra. In this section, I explore the presence of open conflict in the migration decision, and the different forms that this conflict could take. These cases provide a basis for a critical reevaluation of extant conceptualizations of migration as the outcome of a unified household strategy or as the outcome of bargaining between migrants on the one hand and a coalition of non-migrant household members on the other.
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5.5.1 Opposition from Parents to Daughters’ Migration
Many female migrants were confronted with opposition or resistance from household members when they first broached the topic of migration. In the case of single women, parents or guardians who did not support their decision to migrate were a frequent source of conflict in the migration decision. Barimini‟s story is typical of those migrants who had faced opposition from both parents when they first broached the subject of migration.
I came here because I knew if I stayed at home, there wouldn’t be enough money to look after my younger brothers and sisters, and I also knew it was the only way that I would be able to buy the things that I need to buy for my trousseau when I eventually get married. When I told my parents I wanted to come to Accra, they tried to stop me, saying that life in Accra was too difficult. I stole some of my father’s corn and sold it without his knowledge to pay for my transportation here (Barimini, 19).
Another important source of conflict in the migration decision was conflict between the parents of the migrant. Although bargaining models of migration have usually assumed that non-migrant household members are able to form a coalition vis-à- vis the migrant based on shared interests in the outcome of migration, it is quite possible that interest coalitions in the migrant household may have more complex formulations, as individual non-migrants might be affected quite differently by the migration of household members, depending on their gender and their interdependence in the household division of labor (Katz, 2001).
For example, it was not uncommon to find the preferences of parents with respect to their daughters‟ migration diverging along gender lines. A number of migrants who had initiated the discussion with their parents regarding their intentions to migrate reported that their fathers had objected on the grounds that they were too young, Accra
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was too dangerous, or that they would come back unmarried and pregnant. In all of these cases, the migrant‟s mother had supported the migrant‟s decision, either helping the migrant to persuade her father that it was in the family‟s interest for her to go, or by helping her to run away. This was the case for Reinatu (age 21).
I wanted to come here and save some money to trade with, but my father told me to stay at home. He told me that if I come to Accra, I would become spoilt, and because of that I would not get a good husband. When he traveled, my mother told me to come to Accra, and gave me money for the fare. Since I came, I have been able to send her money or food items whenever someone is going home.
Amina (age 19) told a similar story.
My mother and I made the decision for me to come here together, and my mother sold some groundnuts to pay my fare; we did not tell my father about it because he would not have allowed me to come.
Conversations with elderly men in the rural communities gave some more insights into why fathers were likely to oppose their daughters‟ migration.
It is a disgrace if your daughter goes to Accra or Kumasi. It means that as a man, you don’t even know what is going on in your own house. Some years ago, when my daughter went to Accra without telling me, I stopped talking to her mother. She saw I was very annoyed because I ignored her when she came to tell me that our son was sick and had to be taken to hospital. Within three days she sent someone to go and bring the girl back from Accra. Now this daughter is married and has two children. If I hadn’t done that, she would have stayed in Accra and become pregnant and we wouldn’t even know the father of the child. This migration of women to the south is not a good thing. We have to stop it (Village chief, personal interview).
It is the women who encourage our daughters to go, because they think that when they go, they will send them money and clothes and so on. I know my wife has been receiving items from our daughter who has also gone but she doesn’t tell me anything when the money comes. She told me my daughter left without telling her, but I know she is lying (Father of migrant, personal interview).
These statements provide evidence of a divergence between the preferences of the migrants‟ fathers and mothers over their migration. Some fathers were opposed to their daughters‟ migration out of concern for family honor: they were worried that their
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daughters would come back home from the south unmarried and pregnant. Their opposition may also have reflected their concern that the migration of their daughters would be perceived as their own loss of control over women in their household. Finally, they might also have been concerned about potential changes in the distribution of bargaining power in the household, especially if daughters were more likely to send remittances to their mothers than to their fathers. Mothers, on the other hand, were likely to support their daughters‟ migration, despite the potential loss of their daughters‟ help with household and subsistence work, either in anticipation of remittances from their daughters that could be used to meet their own obligations in the household, or because they realized that migration allowed their daughters access to an outside source of income that could be used to meet their personal needs. Thus, the assumption of a coalition of non-migrant household members in bargaining models of migration suppresses any differences in the preferences of non-migrant household members regarding the migration of a household member. These preferences may be based, at least in part, on perceptions of who in the family would gain or lose from a daughter‟s migration, and on other important motivations, such as empathy or sympathy for a daughter‟s limited options for earning an independent livelihood if she remains at home.
5.5.2 Husbands’ Opposition to Wives’ Migration
Male opposition to women‟s migration occurred most frequently within the context of marriage. About half of the women who had initiated a discussion of migration with their husbands said that their husbands had objected strongly to their plans to migrate. The reasons the men gave for objecting are best described as „officializing strategies‟, to borrow Naila Kabeer‟s term for strategies that allow men to disguise their
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interest in keeping women at home in terms of the interests of whole family (Kabeer,
2000). The most common of these was the objection that the children were too young to be left behind at home, or too young to travel with their mother. Although their concern for the welfare of children may have been genuine, men were able to disguise their own self-interested reservations about the migration of their wives in terms of their altruistic concern for the family.
But many men were much more open about their reasons for wanting their wives to stay at home, and in the reasons they give we can see the role that norms regarding gender identity played in shaping men‟s preferences regarding their wives‟ migration.
According to Fadillah (age 27),
My husband didn’t want me to come here. He thought that when I came down south I would start flirting with other men.
Fadillah‟s husband was clearly concerned with maintaining control over her sexuality: by allowing his wife to leave, he would lose this control, as well as the respect of other men in the community if she did become involved with other men.
Keeping up the appearance of a successful male breadwinner able to provide for his family was also an important consideration for men whose wives wanted to leave, such as Farouza‟s husband (age 23):
My husband tried to stop me from coming here. He said that if I came to Accra, my parents would think that he was not capable of looking after me well, so I had to run away.
In a context in which male responsibility and respectability are defined by the man‟s ability to meet his obligations to his household, it is not surprising that some husbands were concerned that if their wives migrated, this would be taken as an indication of their inability to provide adequately for them. Likewise, other husbands
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were concerned about retaining control over their wives‟ sexuality: if she was away from the home, there was always the possibility that she might end up leaving him for another man, or maybe even bringing home another man‟s child, which would be an affront to his masculinity. The comment by a male household head whom I interviewed in the
Savelugu-Nanton district that he had become the target of jokes and mocking comments by other men in the village since his wife left for Accra with their twin daughters is particularly illuminating in this regard. Gender identity, and the norms and expectations associated with notions of masculinity and femininity, contributed to the conflicts that characterized the migration decisions of married women whose husbands objected to their leaving.
5.6 Bargaining Strategies: Conflict Avoidance in Migration Decision-making
Given the frequency of conflict between migrant and non-migrant household members, what was the process by which these conflicts were resolved? Bargaining models typically do not specify the bargaining process, beyond simply assuming that the bargaining outcome will reflect the preferences of the individual with the greatest bargaining power. Bargaining power is assumed to be determined by the individual‟s access to material resources such as land and other assets. In the context of rural communities in northern Ghana, where the majority of women migrants have little or no access to land, and where social norms proscribe subordinate members of the household, such as women and children, from engaging in outright bargaining, how do women negotiate these constraints to their ability to participate fully in decisions regarding their migration?
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A number of the migrants I interviewed were able to deal with resistance to their migration by resorting to less explicit means of ensuring that their own desire to migrate would prevail, even if they did not have access to the material determinants of bargaining power. One of the strategies employed by migrants was to leave without informing the members of the household who could potentially have prevented them from leaving.
This is what I term a conflict-avoidance strategy. Of the 157 unmarried migrants in the sample, 23 reported leaving home without telling their parents or guardians, because they knew they would have been prevented from leaving if they had done so. The average age of this group was 19, and the most common reason given for their migration was to save money to pay for an apprenticeship or to continue their education. Samia, age 22, was an example of the women in this group.
I finished senior secondary (school) in 2003; after that I looked for work in my village and in the district capital but everywhere I went they said there were no jobs available. So I was at home helping my parents on the farm. I decided to come here because I want to go to university, so I sold some of the beans I harvested to pay for the transport fare here. I didn’t ask my parents for permission because I knew they would say no, but if I stay at home they won’t be able to help me go to university. My sister was already here when I came and she helped me to find work. I don’t really like living here because people don’t respect me, so I will go back as soon as I have saved enough money. I think my parents will be happy that I have come back.
Although the chances of saving enough money to go to university on the income she would earn in Accra as a market porter were probably quite slim, Samia and others like her saw their migration as a way to achieve objectives that they felt would not be possible to achieve if they had stayed at home. Knowing that their parents were likely to disapprove, they avoided outright conflict by simply leaving without telling them.
By leaving without telling the more powerful members of the household about their intentions, these migrants run the risk of incurring the displeasure of their parents
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and guardians. However, they also avoid a potentially more costly option: disregarding the express requests of a parent or other elder to stay at home, and thus risking being cut off from their household for their outright disobedience. While displeased parents could perhaps be mollified by remittances, by frequent visits or by a daughter‟s success as a migrant, parents who had „washed their hands of‟ a disobedient daughter might be somewhat more difficult to appease.
Another strategy that migrants used was to persuade their parents that their migration would benefit the family. This was the case with Barimini, mentioned earlier, whose parents had objected to her intentions of migrating to buy items for her trousseau:
I convinced them that I was ready to suffer if it would improve my life, and I would also be able to help them if they allowed me to come here, so they eventually gave in and my mother gave me some money to pay for the bus.
These strategies were also commonly used by married women who appeared to devote considerable time and energy to persuading their husbands to see their point of view. A little over half of the women whose husbands were initially opposed to their migration eventually succeeded in persuading their husbands to agree, and three of them even received money from their husbands to cover all or part of their transport costs to
Accra. One of these women was Ayesha (age 25), who wanted to save money to start up a trading business:
When my husband objected, I explained that I really needed to come to the south to work and make some money for trading, and after talking to him for a long time eventually he agreed and gave me money to pay the bus fare here.
Rihanna (age 40) also managed to convince her husband that it was in their children‟s best interest if she came to work in Accra:
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At first, my husband refused to let me come, but I tried and convinced him that if I came to Accra, I would be able to get money to send home to help take care of our children. After a while he gave in.
Ayesha (age 20) found another way to wear down her husband‟s resistance:
I begged him and told him that I wouldn’t stay in Accra for very long. When I told him this he gave in and allowed me to come here.
On the other hand, close to half of the married migrants had left their husbands‟ homes without telling them about their plans to migrate to Accra. Mariam (age 42) was one of these women:
I came because I have six children to look after. I did not tell my husband because he would have stopped me from coming. But he does not take good care of me, so I just left and came here to work.
In a patriarchal society in which women are expected to obtain their husbands‟ permission before traveling, these migrant women must have been aware of the potential risks to their marriage that leaving without their husband‟s knowledge entailed. Since women derive material benefits such as respectability, social status, and access to the shea nut trees on their husbands‟ farm from being married, it was in their interest to remain in their conjugal homes. Why did they leave without telling their husbands, despite the very real possibility that doing so could incur the wrath of the latter? The comments of Sadia, a migrant who had returned to her village for a visit, provide some insight:
If a woman goes without telling her husband, she can always come back and beg him5, and he will take her back. But if you tell him, and he says don’t go, and you go, then how can you come back to the house? It is better that you leave without telling him, because he will always forgive you when you come back.
5 A literal translation from Dagbani – the language in which my interviews in the Savelugu-Nanton District were conducted. It suggests an apology, rather than begging in the usual sense of the word.
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There were a few cases in which women whose husbands remained adamant, such as Meimuna (age 44), left despite their husbands‟ objections:
My daughter is getting ready to go to boarding school, and I have to buy many items for her. I also want to put some more money into my trading business. I told my husband that I wanted to come to Accra to work and save money, but he told me not to come. But how can I get the money I need if I stay in the village? So I just ran away and came here. I know if I go back home, my husband won’t allow me to return to Accra.
Meimuna did not seem unduly concerned that she could be thrown out of her house when she went back, although this was a very real possibility, as illustrated by the case of Mariama, a returned migrant who had been thrown out of her husband‟s house some months before we met and was staying with her cousin when I met her:
My husband was very angry when I came back from Accra. He wouldn’t let me come inside the house, and I had to sleep outside that night. The next day I went and called some of my relatives to come and beg, but he told them he didn’t want me back in the house again. So now I am here living in my cousin’s house.
The literature on intra-household bargaining focuses on access to material and economic resources as an important source of bargaining power. The testimonies highlighted above paint a more complex picture of the variety of ways in which subordinate members of the household either negotiate or avoid open confrontation with more powerful household members, while still ensuring that their preferences prevail in situations of potential conflict. More than a few women left their homes without telling their parents or husbands; for these women, the economic consequences of insisting on their preferences and leaving outweighed the negative consequences of incurring the displeasure of more powerful members of the household. However, they recognized that open defiance and insistence on their wishes in the face of objections from these household members was potentially risky because it could mean the loss of the social,
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psychological and material benefits they derived from being a member of a household.
By leaving without telling anyone, they were able to improve the odds that they would retain the goodwill of the family and the material benefits they derived from family membership if they came back with an apology. Other women resorted to placation rather than overt negotiation or bargaining, such as promising not to stay too long, and to send remittances regularly to „help out‟ at home. Thus, even without access to material or economic resources, women were able to devise various means to negotiate the constraints on their geographical mobility.
5.7 Conclusion
I have argued that in a context in which female migration is a relatively recent phenomenon, decisions regarding the migration of women, like other household decisions, may not always reflect consensus within the household, or even consensus among non-migrant members. On the contrary, they are just as likely to be characterized by conflict. This is because the preferences of individuals regarding women‟s migration are to a large extent shaped by the social norms, values and beliefs around what is considered to be acceptable economic activity for women. The power of social norms is such that decisions about migration are influenced not only by household members but also by the wider community. In other words, the question, “What will people think?” is an important argument in the preference fields of the people making decisions about migration.
However, these preferences and the norms on which they are based are situation- dependent. In other words, the willingness of agents to adhere to these norms may be strongly influenced by the prevalent economic conditions, as has been the case in rural
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communities in Northern Ghana. Although women‟s migration has been frowned upon in the past by both men and women, economic circumstances have changed the calculus that had previously sustained these norms. Now, women weigh the benefits from challenging these norms against the costs of adhering to them, and for increasing numbers of prospective migrants, it is clear that the expected benefits of violating the norms outweigh the costs. The growing participation of women in outmigration also seems to have made migration somewhat more acceptable to an increasing number of people in these communities, although not to everyone. Normative beliefs about the appropriate roles for women in the household continue to shape the views of men and women regarding the migration of women to cities in the south, leading in many cases to outright opposition and open conflict in decisions about the migration of women.
In contrast to the NELM models of migration that treat migration as the outcome of a bargaining process between the migrant and the non-migrant household members, I argue that these conflicts play a role in shaping interest coalitions within the household, so that non-migrant household members do not necessarily act as a unit in making decisions about migration. Conflicts over migration decisions may also play an important role in determining who in the household receives migrants‟ remittances: for example, a daughter may decide to direct her remittances to her mother in return for having supported her migration. This could in turn have important implications for how those remittances are used. By ignoring the role played by social norms in migration decision-making, we limit our understanding of the impacts of gender on the determinants and outcomes of migration. Placing social norms at the center of analyses of
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migration determinants and outcomes can yield valuable insights into the factors that determine who migrates and who stays, as well as who sends and receives remittances.
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Table 5.1a: Breakdown of Female Migrant Sample by Marital Status and Household Opposition to Migration (%)
Degree of Consensus in Migration Decision Married (%) Unmarried (%) Widowed/Divorced (%) No opposition 36.3 50.9 100 Received financial support 45.5 n/a from spouse Received financial support 12.12 11.25 from both parents/guardians Received financial support 27.3 46.25 from mother/female relative only* Received financial support 0 2.5 from father/male relative only** Opposition 47.3 34.5 0 Did not tell anyone in anticipation of 16.4 14.6 0 opposition
126 Total 91 157 5
Source: Author’s Interviews with Female Migrants in Accra
* Father was household member. ** Mother was household member
Table 5.1b: Breakdown of Female Migrant Sample by Marital Status and Household Opposition to Migration
Degree of Consensus in Migration Married Unmarried (Living with parents/ Widowed Divorced/ Total Decision other relative) Separated Did not tell anyone in anticipation 15 23 0 0 38 of opposition Opposition from family member 43 54 0 0 97
Of which: Opposition from father/male 6 guardian only (overlooked with mother’s/female guardians support) No opposition from family 33 80 3 2 118 member
Of which: 15 n/a n/a n/a Received financial help from spouse 4 9 0 0 127 Received financial help from both
parents or guardians 9 33 (Father was household member) 0 0 Received financial help from mother or female guardian only n/a 2(Mother was household member) 0 0 Received financial help from father or male guardian only 0 4 1 2 Received financial help from other relative in household Total 91 157 3 2 253
Source: Author’s Interviews with Female Migrants in Accra
CHAPTER 6
REMITTANCES AND INTRA-HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATION IN NORTHERN
GHANA – DOES GENDER MATTER?
6.1 Introduction
Remittances refer to the money and goods that households receive from one-time household members who have migrated outside their origin communities. Although migrant remittances from within and across borders are increasingly considered an important feature of many African economies because of their potential impact on economic development, the diverse impacts of remittances on household resource allocation have not received commensurate attention from researchers. In particular, the implications of the growing feminization of migration flows within and across borders in sub-Saharan Africa for intra-household allocation have not been explored in depth (see
Guzman et al., 2008 for one exception to this). This chapter aims to expand our understanding of how gender influences migration outcomes through an intra-household analysis of the impact of remittances from female migrants on the bargaining power of women in the household. I draw on qualitative as well as quantitative evidence from my field research to show that gender norms relating to household provisioning play an important role in shaping migration and remittance decisions, so that gender becomes an important determinant of who sends remittances, how much is sent, to whom, and why.
This has important implications for the impact of remittances on household expenditure patterns, especially within patriarchal households in which men exercise control over the most important means of production and hence over a greater proportion of material resources.
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Qualitative research in the Dominican Republic and in the Philippines has shown that female migrants prefer to send their remittances to other women within their household (UN-INSTRAW 2006; 2008). In the Philippines, for example, migrant women remit money through bank accounts that they maintain, not with their spouses, but with an older daughter, or with female members of the extended family (Parreñas,
2005). There are also a number of qualitative studies that point to gender differences in migrants‟ preferences regarding how remittances are used: while women prefer their remittances to be spent on food, clothing, education and health, men direct their remittances towards housing and the purchase of consumer durables. For example, male
Mexican migrants in the US direct their remittances towards personal investments in land, housing, agricultural production and cattle, in anticipation of a planned return to
Mexico, while female migrants are more likely to send money to origin households to help pay for the cost of education of other household members (de la Cruz, 1995).
Similarly, female migrants from Moldova prefer to send money for current consumption expenses (food, clothing and education, health and debt repayment) while male migrants prefer to send money for housing, cars and other consumer durables (IOM, 2005).
Why are women migrants more likely to contribute to female-centered networks of remittance flows, and why are there such gendered differences in the preferences of migrants for how their remittances are used? The answer to these questions lies at least in part in the social constructions of gender and the gendered norms of household provisioning that prevail in a particular society, and the role that these norms play in shaping the preferences of migrants for how remittances are used. Because of the disproportionate responsibility that they bear for child rearing, family care and household
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provisioning in general, women migrants may prefer that their remittances be used on expenses that are in line with these norms of household provisioning, such as food, education and health care, while male migrants, who are not subject to the same expectations, may prefer their remittances to be used to acquire assets for their personal benefit when they return. In other words, observed differences in the preferences of male and female migrants for how their remittances are used may be shaped at least in part by gendered norms of household provisioning rather than by the altruism of female migrants and the relative selfishness of male migrants.
However, the ability of individual migrants to ensure that their remittances are used as intended depends on a number of factors – the frequency of their visits home, their proximity to the community of origin as well as other factors related to household and family structure such as their age and gender and position in the intra-household hierarchy. For example, younger women who migrate from subordinate positions in patriarchal families are unlikely to be able to exert much control over the allocation of the remittances they make to the household. But this does not mean that migrants have no influence over the allocation of their remittances: if migrants realize that their ability to influence how their remittances are used is limited, then they are likely to direct their remittances to those in the household who are most likely to ensure their preferences are met, that is, those who are subject to similar norms and whose decisions over the use of remittances are most likely to be in line with their own preferences.
Female migrants who want to ensure that their preferences for the use of remittances are met may thus be more likely to make remittances to other women in the household because gendered norms of household provisioning ensure the latter will use
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the remittances in ways that are in line with their own normatively shaped preferences.
These norms of household provisioning may interact with other norms, such as norms of reciprocity and commitment. For example, female migrants who have had to leave children behind are likely to reciprocate by sending remittances to the household members most likely to be caring for their children – other women. Most importantly, they may do so even if the head of the household is male. Likewise, male migrants who want to ensure that the money they send is used in ways that they intend may be more likely to send remittances to those in the household most likely to have similar preferences i.e., other men in the household. In this way, gendered norms of household provisioning can give rise to gendered networks of remittance flows among household members in migrant households based on perceptions of common interests regarding the use of the remittances.
Whether remittances are received or controlled by men or women, in turn, has important implications for how remittances are used. The literature on intra-household expenditure patterns suggests that the distribution of resources depends on the bargaining power of individual household members (see Haddad et al., 1997). In particular, this literature has consistently shown that household expenditure on children‟s education, health and nutrition increases with the extent of resources controlled by women
(Quisumbing and Maluccio 2000; Quisumbing 2003; Hallman 2000; Thomas 1990;
1994).
In spite of this, with very few exceptions, studies of the impact of migrant remittances on household welfare have largely proceeded as though remittances flow to a unified household, and the identity and gender of the remitter and that of the recipient
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have no impact on the intra-household allocation of remittance income. Those studies that do consider the gender of the recipient simply assume that the household head is always the recipient. But the ability to send remittances may enhance the influence of female migrants in household spending decisions, and this may be reflected in household expenditure patterns.1
Moreover, if, as I have argued above, female migrants are more likely to send remittances to other women in the household, and if these remittances do have an impact on the bargaining power of the recipients, this is also likely to be reflected in the impact of remittances on household expenditure patterns. In the African context where individual household members retain control over their personal incomes (eg. see
Whitehead, 1981), the remittances that women receive may help to relax the budget constraints they face, making it possible for them to spend more on items such as children‟s education. Most importantly, the gender of the individual in the household who actually receives the remittances, and makes decisions over their use, rather than the gender of the household head, is key to understanding the impact of remittances on the household. If, for example, migrant daughters direct their remittances to their mothers, this increases the likelihood that their remittances will go towards greater expenditure on food and education, regardless of the gender of the household head. I draw on household level remittance and expenditure data collected during my field research to test the validity of these hypotheses.
1 As already noted, it is possible that the ability of female migrants to influence household decisions may be limited by their physical absence from the household, even if they do send remittances (for examples, see Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; for a theoretical examination of imperfect monitoring of remittances, see Chen, 2006).
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6.2 Migration, Remittances and Economic Development – A Review of the Literature
A significant segment of the vast literature on migration and remittances has focused on the impact of remittances on development, and on the well-being of the origin household. This literature has revolved primarily around an ongoing debate over how remittances are used, and whether they are used primarily for consumption or whether they are used to finance investments in human and physical capital by origin households.
Probably the most widespread view is that remittances are perceived by households as extra income, and are therefore perfectly fungible with other sources of income, so that the impact of a marginal increase in household income from remittances has exactly the same impact as a marginal increase in income from any other source.
A second view, emanating from a particularly economistic focus on investment and growth, argues that the receipt of remittances can lead to changes in household behavior, inducing recipients to act in ways that reduce economic activity and increasing their preference for status-oriented consumer goods. In this view, remittances are spent on consumption, rather than on investments in physical capital, and hence they have little impact on economic growth and development. For example, in a widely cited paper,
Chami, Fullenkamp and Jahjah (2003; 2005) find that in contrast to foreign direct investment, remittances are negatively correlated with per capita GDP growth. The authors argue that this constitutes strong evidence that remittances are not a source of capital for development. They observe that the majority of remittances are spent on consumption goods, followed by residential investment, thus increasing the family‟s consumption and stock of wealth, but not increasing the stock of wealth of the overall economy. However, they do not consider the possibility that remittances could be used to
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finance investments in human capital, such as education and health, both of which can have a positive impact on future GDP growth.
A third view is based on empirical evidence that the marginal propensity to invest from transitory income is higher than it is for permanent income (see, for example,
Bhalla, 1980 and Paxson, 1992). According to this line of argument, since remittances are a form of transitory income, marginal increases in remittance income are more likely to be reflected in increased investment in human and physical capital than in increased consumption (Adams, 1998). For example, remittances can lead to increased spending on education, which is treated as investment in human capital. In a study of the impact of exchange rate shocks in the Philippines in the wake of the Asian financial crisis on remittances and investment, Yang (2006) finds that increases in migrant remittances received by origin households from overseas as a result of the depreciation of the
Philippine peso led to significant increases in remittance expenditures on education in origin households. Similarly, Adams and Cuecuecha (2010), in a study of the impact of remittances on household expenditure and investment in Guatemala, find that households receiving either internal or international remittances spend more at the margin on education and housing compared to households that do not receive remittances.
The bulk of this literature devotes little attention to the impact of remittances on intra-household resource allocation. The studies upon which this literature has been based have generally proceeded as though the household members who remain in the area of origin act as a unit in receiving remittances and deciding how those remittances are used. At its most basic level, the assumption that migrant remittances can be analyzed as though they flow to unified households is reflected in the collection of
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remittance data at the level of the household: most migration surveys, for example, only ask the household head or primary respondent whether „the household‟ has received any remittances from the migrant.
Only a few studies of migrant remittances have considered the possibility that remittances may flow towards specific individuals or groups within the household. Posel
(2001) shows that the magnitude of migrant remittances to households in South Africa is more strongly influenced by the presence of some household members (for example, older children and spouses) than others, suggesting that migrants might be making remittances not so much to households as to individuals within households. In a recent unpublished study of remittances in multi-family households in Senegal, De Vreyer et al.,
(2009) show that not only do remittances accrue to members of sub-groups within the household, but they also alter the expenditure patterns of that group alone, while having no impact on the expenditure patterns of other sub-groups within the household.
In one of only three studies to consider the role of women‟s bargaining power in shaping the impact of remittances on households, Guzman et al. (2008), using data from the fourth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 4), find that contrary to the predictions of the intra-household bargaining literature, households receiving remittances from the head‟s wife allocate much less of their budgets to education than households receiving remittances from the head‟s husband. They interpret this as being the result of the wife‟s inability to control and monitor expenditures while she is away.
This interpretation, however, stands in sharp contrast to their other findings: households receiving remittances from the head‟s daughter allocate a higher share to food and education and a lower share to health and other goods than other households. The
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authors offer no explanation for why migrant daughters might be better able to control and monitor expenditures while they are away, and to ensure that their remittances are used for food and education, while migrant wives are less able to ensure that their remittances are used for education. The key to understanding these inconsistencies lies in the fact that the gender of the household head may be far less important in determining how remittances are used than the gender of the person who actually receives the remittances.
Due to the lack of data on the gender of the recipients of remittances in the GLSS,
Guzman et al. use the gender of the household head as a measure of women‟s bargaining power. Thus, women are assumed to have more bargaining power over the use of remittances in female-headed households, and less bargaining power in male-headed households. This approach, in effect, assumes that all migrant remittances are received and controlled by household heads, and thus ignores the possibility that, even in male- headed households, control over remittance income could have an impact on women‟s bargaining power and on the ability of women to influence resource allocation. This is the same approach taken by De and Ratha (2005) in their study of the impact of remittances on household welfare in Sri Lanka and by Malone (2007) in her study of the uses of remittances in Mexican households.
But women may, and often do, receive and exercise control over remittance income, even if they are not household heads, and this may be reflected in household expenditure patterns. If female migrants are more likely to send remittances to other women in the household, this would explain Guzman et al.‟s findings that households that receive remittances from daughters allocate a greater budget share to food and
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education, since these remittances might be directed towards their mothers, even in male- headed households. Furthermore, if household members maintain separate budgets and manage these independently of each other, then the receipt of remittances by female household members could have very important implications for household expenditure patterns, regardless of the gender of the household head. An important question worth exploring, therefore, is how the likelihood of women receiving remittances in the household is affected by female out-migration.
6.3 Social Norms and the Intra-household Flow of Remittances
A growing literature in behavioral economics points to the importance of economic and social institutions in shaping the motivations and values that underlie human behavior (Bowles, 1998). Early institutional economists like Thorstein Veblen
(1899) pointed to the importance of gender norms in shaping economic outcomes through their impact on the behavior of men and women (Veblen, (1899), 1931). Feminist economists see gendered social norms as „structures of constraint‟ that define and constrain behavior and result in unequal outcomes for men and women (Folbre, 1994; van Staveren and Odebode, 2007).
The ethnographic literature on norms of household provisioning in many parts of
Africa has extensively documented the persistence of patriarchal norms of household provisioning that place the responsibility of supplementing household food supplies on women; the household head, usually male, is required only to provide the food staple.
Once that obligation is met, these gendered social norms permit men to retain a significant portion of their income for their personal use. Although women may also keep their income for their personal use, their obligation to make up for shortfalls in
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household subsistence and nutrition makes it far more likely that women will use their income to meet household needs (Whitehead 1981; Guyer, 1988; Bruce and Dwyer,
1988). Ekejiuba (1995) notes that in much of West Africa, the male head of household is responsible only for a „statutory contribution‟ to his wife to prepare meals, but after that generally fixed obligation is met, he „acts on his own account‟… „He contributes to, but is never solely responsible for the total expenditure of the component hearthholds‟ (p.
52).2 In southern Ghana, a woman receives a regular, fixed amount from her husband to provide meals for the household; however, it is ultimately her responsibility to feed everyone, regardless of the amount she receives from her husband (Goldstein, 2000).
Among the Dagomba of northern Ghana, as I mentioned in Chapter Four, married women are required to supplement the basic staples (maize, millet, and sorghum), which are cultivated on the household farm, with „soup ingredients‟ (vegetables, legumes and protein). When food stocks run low, as often happens over the course of the year, women may even become the main providers of food. My own research in the region confirms what Warner, Alhassan and Kydd (1997) have argued, that this obligation becomes an important motivation for women to engage in various productive activities independent of the household, and results in women using almost all the income earned from these activities to purchase basic staples for the compound or to purchase soup ingredients to complement these staples.
Female migrants who are subject to these gendered norms of household provisioning may therefore prefer that their remittances be used to meet household
2 Ekujiuba introduces this concept to reflect the fact that in most polygamous households in West Africa, each wife has her own hearth, at which she cooks meals for herself and her children. Each wife is responsible for making the budgeting decisions relating to her „hearthhold‟ and for ensuring that her children are fed and clothed.
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consumption needs, or to pay for children‟s health and education. Male migrants, on the other hand, because of their normative responsibilities for farming and cultivating the food staple, may prefer to send remittances for the purpose of making investments in farming. But, more importantly, because these gender ideologies also support the notion that men have a right to keep part of their income for their personal use, male migrants may also devote a good part of their remittances to acquiring assets intended for their personal use when they return, such as bicycles, radios, and furniture.3 In addition, if household farming arrangements allow individual males to have private farms that are separate from the household farm, as is the case in northern Ghana, male migrants may earmark their remittances for investment in these farms, rather than in the household farm. To ensure that their remittances are used in ways that reflect these differing preferences, migrants are likely to direct their remittances to those household members who they think are most likely to ensure that their preferences are met – other members of the household of the same gender and at the same stage in the household‟s life-cycle, who therefore have the same normative responsibilities.
The presence of intra-household migration coalitions that I described in the preceding chapter can also shape decisions about who receives remittances from a migrant. Migrants may be more likely to send remittances to those household members who supported or facilitated their migration; if these are household members of the same
3 In many African households, items purchased out of one‟s personal income are considered personal property; thus if a migrant purchases any of these items with money earned while away, those items belong to him alone. He is not obliged to share the use of these items with any member of the family. Furthermore, in compound households where the husband lives in a hut separate from those of his wife/wives and their children, the latter may not enjoy the benefits of these items.
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gender, this may also contribute to the formation of gendered networks of remittance flows in migrant households.
6.4 The Role of Social Norms in Shaping Remittance Behavior in Northern Ghana: A Review of the Qualitative Evidence
My interviews with migrants in Accra, both male and female, as well as with migrants who had returned to the Savelugu-Nanton District for the farming season or who were simply visiting, suggested that gendered social norms of household provisioning are indeed important in determining who sends remittances, to whom remittances are sent, and what these remittances are used for. Many female migrants reported sending money to other women in the household for the purchase of food and clothing and to cover the educational expenses of their younger siblings or of the children they had left behind. Most single female migrants reported sending remittances to their mothers or other female relatives.
I send money to my mother because I know that she will use it for the other children in the house. Sometimes I send my father a shirt or a towel, but I always send money and food to my mother.
Married female migrants rarely sent remittances to their husbands unless the latter were caring for children who had been left behind. It was quite common to find married women from polygamous households making remittances to their co-wives who had taken on their domestic responsibilities when they left. As one of these women explained,
I send money to her (a co-wife) because she is doing all the work that I would have had to if I had stayed. She also has to carry all the housekeeping expenses by herself. When I was at home, we took turns buying food, cooking, and fetching water. Although I am not there to do my share of the work, I can still meet some of my responsibilities by sending her money so that she can buy food. Then she won’t be angry with me for leaving.
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Another elaborated:
In this village, the men only provide maize and they expect us to find money to pay for everything else. We women pay for everything: the men only provide the staple. We pay for the children’s clothes, food, and everything. Men don’t take responsibility for children’s upkeep or food for the house: once he has sacrificed a ram for the out-dooring4, that is it! When my husband sells his produce, he doesn’t give me any of the money. He will hide and sell it, and you won’t even see it! When I send money, it is for the children’s school fees, or their school uniform or to buy food for the house. So it is better if I send the money to my sister-in-law or my co-wife. I know that she will use the money for the children, but if I send it to my husband, the children will never see it.
The majority of male migrants, on the other hand, migrated primarily for the purpose of raising money to finance farming inputs for their individual farms for the planting season. As I have already explained, these farms are distinct from household farms, and the income that men gain from selling the harvest from these farms is considered their personal income. Men may also use their remittances to finance the purchases of personal-use assets such as bicycles, furniture and radios. Most of them kept their savings until they returned to the household. In the words of one of these male migrants,
We men, what we do is farm. I have two acres of land on which I cultivate groundnuts. Every year I have to hire a tractor to plough the land. I also have to buy the seeds and the pesticide. If I don’t get enough money from the previous year, then I go to the south to get money so that I can plant my groundnuts. If I send the money to my wife, she will spend all the money on food. Then how can I farm? So I save my money until I come home, or I send it to my brother so that he will use it to start preparing my farm for me. If I have enough, I will buy a bag of maize for the house when I am coming.
What these interviews suggest is that the remittance behavior of male and female migrants is shaped at least in part by the gender ideologies and gendered norms of household provisioning that assign primary responsibility for household provisioning and
4 This is the naming ceremony for a new-born baby.
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child care to women. Although men are responsible for providing the food staple, once this obligation is met, they can hold on to as much of their personal income as they wish.
While women may also retain control over their personal income, they are far less likely to do so when children need money for food or for education expenses. These gendered norms of household provisioning shape the differences in the preferences of male and female migrants over how their remittances are used, and influence the migrants‟ decisions over whom to send their remittances.
6.5 Gender, Remittances and Household Expenditure Patterns
Insights from the abundant literature on the role of gender in intra-household resource allocation suggest that the flow of remittances between women should have a significant impact on the uses to which these remittances are put. This literature has consistently shown that the control of resources by women results in greater spending on children‟s education, health and nutrition relative to the control of resources by men
(Thomas 1990; 1994; Haddad, Hoddinott and Alderman, 1997; Hallman 2000;
Quisumbing and Maluccio 2000; Quisumbing 2003; Quisumbing and McClafferty,
2006).
Extrapolating from these findings would suggest that if households respect the preferences of the migrants who send the remittances, or if remittances from female migrants are directed to other women in the household, then remittances from female migrants should have a positive impact on household spending on these items. I therefore advance two related hypotheses:
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1. The gender of the migrant who sends remittances matters for the impact of these remittances on household expenditure patterns. There are two reasons to expect this to be true: a. Gendered norms of household provisioning lead to differences between the
preferences of male and female migrants over how their remittances are used.
If the ability to make remittances enhances the bargaining power of the
migrant over the allocation of resources, these gendered differences in
preferences will be reflected in the impact of remittances on the household
allocation of resources. b. The gender of the migrant can also be important in determining who receives
remittances in the household. Just as gendered norms of household
provisioning may contribute to differences between men and women in their
motives for making remittances, they may also contribute to differences in
their decisions regarding to whom their remittances are made. In order to
ensure that their remittances are allocated in ways that reflect their own
wishes, migrants may direct their remittances towards household members of
the same gender who are subject to the same gender norms of household
provisioning. All else equal, women in particular are more likely to send
remittances directly to other women in the household. Alternatively stated,
female out-migration from a household increases the probability that the
recipient of remittances will be female, regardless of the gender of the
household head.
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2. The gender of the recipient of remittances also matters for the impact of
remittances on household well-being. When women have access to and exercise
control over an important source of household income, such as migrant
remittances, they will have more say over the allocation of household resources,
either because they have greater bargaining power, or because in the absence of
income-pooling, their individual budget constraints have been relaxed by the extra
income. Since men and women differ in their preferences over how their income
is used, these changes would be reflected in the allocation of household resources.
6.5.1 Variables and Econometric Models
To test the first part of my hypothesis, i.e., that female outmigration increases the likelihood that the recipient of remittances will be female, I estimate the following model:
prob (FR = 1) = prob (α + β Hi + ε Ri + ui > 0) Equation (1)
where
FR is a dummy variable that is equal to 1 if the primary recipient of a migrant‟s
remittances is female
Hi is a vector of household characteristics such as the number of adult females
and males in the household, the dependency ratio, the gender and age of the
household head, household wealth, proxied by the value of livestock owned by
the household and the acreage of land cultivated by the household, and the share
of household land cultivated by women
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Ri is a vector of dummy variables that characterize the remitter, her relationship to
household members, as well as the relationship of the remitter to the recipient.
These dummy variables are defined as follows:
Female = 1 if the remitter is female
Close relative of head = 1 if the remitter is the child or spouse of the
household head
Mother_resident = 1 if the remitter‟s mother is a member of the household
Spouse_resident = 1 if the remitter‟s wife or husband is a member of the
household
Kids_resident = 1 if the remitter has children living in the household
Married = 1 if the remitter is the wife or husband of the recipient
Child = 1 if the remitter is the child of the recipient
Parent = 1 if the remitter is the parent of the recipient
ui is the normally distributed error term
The reasoning behind this model is simple. The gender of the remitter is not likely to be the only factor that determines who receives remittances in the household.
Household wealth may be an important determinant of whether or not migrants even send remittances in the first place. Household structure may also be an important determinant of who receives remittances in the household. For example, women are more likely to be the primary recipient of migrant remittances in households in which they make up the majority of adults, or which are headed by women. The amount of land that women cultivate in the household is an indicator of the status of women in the household
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hierarchy in this particular context, since only senior married women are likely to be granted any land on which to farm. The expected sign of the coefficient of this variable is indeterminate, since it is not clear how the status of the women who are left behind may influence migrants‟ remittance decisions. Migrants are also more likely to send remittances to their closest relatives in the household, such as their parents, children and spouses, regardless of gender, making it necessary to control for the relationship between the remitter and the recipient.
To test the second part of my hypothesis, I examine the impact of the gender of the remitter and recipient of remittances on household expenditures on education per child of school-going age. Most studies that examine the impact of remittances on the pattern of household expenditures have used Engel Curve estimations to analyze the impact of remittances on the share of total expenditures allocated to different expenditure categories. However, because of the issues of measurement error to which household expenditures are subject, and the problems that this might create in a cross-sectional analysis based on a relatively small sample of households, I decided to limit my analysis to education expenditure. Education expenditure is less likely to be subject to recall errors of the type that affect other categories of expenditure. For one thing, education expenditures tend to be large relative to other categories of expenditure and are made infrequently enough that they are far more easily remembered. For example, school fees might be paid twice or thrice a year, and uniforms are usually purchased only once a year.
Collecting education expenditures at the level of the individual student also allows for greater accuracy, since it is fairly easy to remember how much was spent on a particular child‟s fees, books and so on. Finally, it is also possible to verify the accuracy of
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education expenditures at the community level, and to identify gross outliers in education expenditures such as school fees. Therefore, I estimate the following econometric model:
EX i H i Ri Ci ui Equation (2) Ni where
EXi = total expenditure on education by household i,
Ni = number of household members of school-going age (ages 6-21) in the
household5
Hi = vector of household characteristics such as household size, total number of
household members enrolled in senior secondary school or in a tertiary education
institution, age of the household head, whether or not the household head has had
primary school education, total household expenditure and value of livestock
owned
Ri = vector of dummy variables representing the household remittances category
i.e., the gender of the primary remitter/primary recipient of the remittances. The
definitions of the dummy variables are as follows:
Female Remitter Household = 1 if the household has only female remitters
Male Remitter Household = 1 if the household has only male remitters
Mixed Remitter Household = 1 if the household has both male and female
remitters
5 The decision to use age 21 as the cut-off for school-going age was based on the fact that in this part of Ghana, many children start school very late, and it was not at all uncommon to find 21-year olds still in junior or senior secondary school.
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Female Recipient Household = 1 if remittances were received only by
women
Male Recipient Household = 1 if remittances were received only be men
Mixed Recipient Household = 1 if remittances were received by both men
and women
Non-Migrant Household = 1 if the household has had no migrants in the
previous 5 years
Zero Remittance Household = 1 if the household did not receive
remittance in the previous 12 months
Ci = dummy variable representing the presence of a school in the community in
which the household is located
ui = error term
The theoretical reasoning underlying this model is primarily based on findings from the literature on the determinants of education expenditure in developing countries.
When there are multiple children in the household, for example, and limited financial resources, households may decide to educate only some of the children of school-going age. As financial resources increase, they may enroll more children in school and/or increase the amount spent on children‟s education, for example, by buying more books and other educational materials, or buying new school uniforms when children outgrow the old ones. If women are responsible for expenditure on children‟s education, an increase in remittance income may allow them to enroll more children in school or spend more on children‟s education. This will happen if remittances are earmarked for children‟s education or if remittance income frees up money dedicated to other uses to be
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spent on education. If men are responsible for other categories of expenditure, we may not see the same effect on children‟s education if the remitter or the primary recipient of remittances is male. Thus, by looking at the impact of the gender of the remitter and recipient of remittances on education spending per child of school-going age, we can see whether or not the identities of the remitter and recipient has an impact on household investments on education.
Apart from remittances, one might expect social, economic and demographic characteristics of households to have considerable influence on the levels of household expenditure on education (Deolalikar, 1997; Tilak, 2002). For example, the size of the household can be regarded as an indicator of the demographic burden on the households.
The greater the number of household members, the lower will be the levels of expenditure on children‟s education since other household members are competing for limited resources. The age and education level of the household head can also be important determinants of willingness to enroll children in school and spend money on their education. In particular, the more educated the household head, the more likely it is that he or she will be supportive of enrolling children in school. The gender of the household head may also be an important determinant of household spending on education; if female-headed households are poorer on average than other households, they may have fewer resources to devote to education; alternatively, as indicated by the intra-household bargaining literature, female heads of household may devote more resources towards children‟s education. Finally, a household‟s wealth (proxied by the value of the household‟s livestock holdings) and income (proxied by total household
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expenditure) should also have an impact on expenditure on education, as wealthier households have more resources to spend on education.
Access to schools can also be an important determinant of household expenditure on education. If young children have to walk a long distance to get to school, parents might decide to wait until their children are older before enrolling them in school.
Households in communities that have no school may therefore spend less on education.
One important determinant of household education expenditure in Ghana is the number of children enrolled in primary, secondary and tertiary education. In an effort to realize the millennium development goal of universal basic education, the government of
Ghana in 2004 implemented a grant system aimed to increase school enrollment. Under this system, all public kindergarten, primary and junior secondary schools receive a capitation grant of $3.30 per year for each student enrolled, and the charging of fees by these schools has been abolished. Thus, the only expenses that parents incur on educating children at this stage are expenses related to books and stationery and school uniforms. At the senior secondary and tertiary levels, however, parents are also responsible for tuition and boarding fees.
6.5.2 Description of the Data
The econometric analysis in this paper makes use of the household survey data that I collected during the second phase of my field research in the Savelugu-Nanton district of the Northern Region of Ghana. The dataset holds detailed information collected from 181 households in 24 rural communities on household size, demographics, household expenditures and migration history over the 5 years prior to the survey. The dataset consists of four modules – a household roster, a migration module, a module on
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women‟s economic status and participation in household decision-making, and a household expenditure module. The migration module contains comprehensive data on
250 migrants from 136 of these households, as well as on migrants‟ remittances received in the previous 12 months, both in cash and in kind, the frequency with which remittances are received and the recipients of these remittances. The data allows me to disaggregate remittances by the gender of the sender and the recipient.6
It is important to draw attention to the need for caution in interpreting figures on remittances and expenditures. It is well-known that both remittance data and expenditure data are subject to measurement error emanating from a variety of sources (Neter 1970;
Deaton and Grosh, 2000). While I made every effort to ensure that the data I collected was accurate, for example, by collecting food expenditure data at a very high level of disaggregation, and using two different recall periods (expenditure in the previous 2 weeks and usual-month expenditure) it is impossible to eliminate all the sources of measurement error.
6.5.3 Education Expenditure Data
Education expenditures were collected for all household members who were enrolled in a primary, secondary or tertiary education institution. Although parents are not required to pay for tuition fees for basic education, they still spend money on school
6 I should emphasize that due to logistical constraints, I was unable to generate a matched sample of migrants and households – although the majority of the migrants interviewed in Accra came from the district in which I conducted my fieldwork, they did not come from the households that I surveyed. Thus, for example, I do not have data on the earnings of the migrants from whom households received remittances, because the households did not have access to such information. However, in 31 households, I was able to conduct in-depth interviews with migrants who had either returned permanently or were visiting.
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uniforms, books, and other educational materials. Students enrolled in senior secondary schools or universities are required to pay for tuition, and since most students at this level are enrolled in a boarding facility, they must also pay for meals and transport. Data on household expenditure in these categories was collected at the level of the individual student. Although educational expenditures are supposed to be the joint responsibility of both parents, in the majority of the households I surveyed, women indicated that they were responsible for the bulk of education expenditure. In polygamous households in particular, where children of different women must compete for the resources of their father, mothers bear significant responsibility for the education of their children.
6.5.4 Migration and Remittance Data
Of the 250 individuals in the rural sample who had migrated in the previous 5 years, 66 (26.4 percent) were male and 184 (73.6 percent) were female.7 Only one of these migrants had migrated across the country‟s northern border to Burkina Faso; all the others were internal migrants. These proportions are fairly similar to the proportions of the male and female migrants from the northern region reported in the Fifth Round of the
Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 5), according to which men made up roughly 39 percent of people who had ever lived outside the village in which they were born for at least a year, and women made up about 61 percent.8 The 2000 population census also
7 In my survey I defined migration as leaving the community to live in another village, town or city for 3 months or more. This helps to capture short-term moves that are not captured in the Ghana Living Standards Survey or the population census. 8 The GLSS defines a migrant as anyone who has lived in another community other than the one in which they currently reside for at least a year. This definition thus captures migration for marriage reasons, since women often leave the communities in which they were born to live with their husbands.
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shows that women made up a little over 50 percent of migrants from northern Ghana living in the capital, Accra (GSS 2000). Both the population census and the GLSS confirm that migration from the three northern regions of Ghana is primarily internal.
Twenty-nine migrants had returned to the household more than a year before the survey took place. Another 55 migrants were either visiting or had recently returned to the household to take part in planting or to help gather shea nuts. The other 166 migrants were away from their households at the time of the survey (see Table 6.1). Data on remittances were collected for the 221 migrants who had been away for at least three out of the previous 12 months (see Table 6.2). Of this number, 168 migrants (76 percent of the total) had sent remittances to 105 households in the previous 12 months. 71.9 percent of male migrants sent remittances, compared to 77.7 percent of female migrants.
Table 6.1: Breakdown of Migrants by Gender
Male % of Female % of Total Total Currently away from household 45 68.2 121 65.7 Visiting 19 28.8 36 19.6 Returned for over year 2 3.03 27 14.7 Migrated in previous 5 years (Total) 66 100 184 100
Source: Author’s Survey
Table 6.2: Breakdown of Remitters and Remittances by Gender
Male % of Total Female % of Total Number of 46 27.4 122 72.6 remitters (N = 168) Average 71.58 n/a 39.78 n/a remittances (GHC)
Source: Author’s Survey
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Table 6.3 provides a breakdown of the gender of the primary recipient of remittances by the gender of the remitter.9 It is clear that female migrants were more likely than male migrants to send remittances to other women in the household.
Table 6.3: Gender of Primary Recipients of Remittances by Gender of Remitter
Gender of Remitter Gender of Primary Female Male Recipient 10 Freq. % Freq. % Male 19 15.5 30 64.4 Female 104 84.5 16 35.6 Total 123 100 46 100
Source: Author’s Survey
In Table 6.4, households are categorized according to whether or not they received remittances, and if they did, by the gender of the remitter and the recipient.
Sixty-eight households received remittances from female remitters only; 17 households received remittances from male remitters only and 20 households received remittances from both male and female remitters. In 15 households, all recipients were male, compared with 50 households in which all recipients were female. Of the 50 households in which women were the primary recipient of remittances, 46 of these households received remittances from women migrants only. Forty households had recipients of mixed gender.
9 The primary recipients are simply those identified by respondents as having received the majority of a migrant‟s remittances in the previous 12 months. 10 Only three households in the sample were female-headed households. All the households that received remittances only from female migrants were male-headed households. One female-headed household received remittances from a male migrant, and the other received remittances from both male and female migrants.
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Table 6.5 presents household characteristics by the gender of the remitter. For the most part, the households in my sample were not very different from each other.
However, households that had only female remitters were, on average, slightly larger and as one might expect, had greater total expenditure. Migrant remittances represent a relatively small share of total household expenditure in all households, although this may be partly attributable to the difficulty of recalling receipts of remittances that are made in small amounts several times in the course of a 12-month period, and the fact that a significant proportion of household expenditure also represents imputed values for home- produced food. Remittances represent a smaller share of total household expenditure in households with female remitters.
Table 6.4: Households by Gender of Remitters and Recipients and Household Status
Gender/Status of Household Remitters Recipients Female only 68 50 Male only 17 15 Both male and female 20 40 Number of receiving households 105 105 Number of non-receiving households 76 76 Total number of households 181 181
Source: Author’s Survey
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Table 6.5: Household Characteristics by Gender of Remitter
Female only Male only Male and Female (N = 68) (N = 17) (N = 20) Household size (count) 10.4 9.4 9.7 (4.12) (2.6) (5.3) Age of Head (%) 56.5 62.2 58.2 (13.2) (15.6) (13.9) Head married (%) 98 100 95
Female headed household (%) 0 6.25 5
Number of Females > 15 yrs 3.7 3.3 3.4 (2.4) (1.9) (2.8) Number of Males > 15 yrs 2.9 3.3 2.6 (1.9) (1.8) (1.2) Number of Boys < 5 yrs 0.7 0.5 0.5 (1.2) (0.6) (0.7) Number of Girls < 5 yrs 1.1 1.4 0.85 (1.2) (1.7) (1.2) Number of household 0.48 0.38 0.3 members with primary (0.8) (0.7) (0.7) education Number of household 0.32 0.31 0.15 members with middle school (0.8) (0.7) (0.5) education Number of household 0.13 0.06 0.15 members with high school (0.3) (0.3) (0.4) education Total household expenditure 3107.4 2316 2961.6 in Ghana cedis (GH¢) 11 (1479.6) (797.2) (1493.2) Migrant remittances as a 0.02 0.04 0.07 share of total household (0.01) (.042) (0.08) expenditure
Source: Author’s Survey; standard deviations reported in parentheses
11 At the time of the survey, GHC 1.00 was approximately equal to $1.00
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6.5.5 Gender, Remittances and Household Budget Shares
In the tables that follow, I examine whether, on average, the fraction of total expenditure spent on food, durable goods, housing, education, health and other goods differs among the different types of households i.e., households that receive remittances from men only and households that receive remittances from women only, as well as between households in which the primary recipient is male and households in which the primary recipient is female. Table 6.6 shows the different categories of expenditure collected in the survey and Table 6.7 shows the average budget shares allocated to the different expenditure categories by sex of the remitter and remittance status of the household. Although the difference in budget shares going to food and adult goods between households that receive remittances from male migrants and those that receive remittances from female migrants seems to be quite small, it is worth noting the differences in budget shares allocated to health, which is higher in households that receive remittances from female migrants than in households that receive remittances from male migrants only, or that do not receive remittances at all. The data do not suggest that this difference is driven by someone in these households having a significant health problem, since the average level of health spending conditional on non-zero health expenditure is only slightly higher than the mean level of health expenditure across all households (see Tables A.1 and A.2).
The average share of expenditure on durables in the previous 12 months is also higher in households that receive remittances from male migrants. This is not surprising, since many of the items in this category are goods typically purchased by male household members for their personal use, such as bicycles, radios, clocks and furniture. These
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goods are rarely purchased or owned by women: less than 1 percent of female household members reported owning a radio, and not a single woman in any of the households surveyed owned a bicycle. The average share of expenditure on education is also somewhat higher in households that receive remittances from women migrants.
Table 6.6: Description of Expenditure Categories
Variable Description Examples Food Purchased food Maize, cassava, meat, fish Non-purchased food Food from own production, gifts, donations Durable Household durables Expenditure in past 12 months on goods durables Housing Repairs to roofs, walls, etc. Expenditure in past 12 months on repairs to housing Education Educational expenses Books, school supplies, uniforms, fees Health Health expenses Hospital consultations, prescribed medicines (excludes hospitalization and prenatal care) Adult goods Goods (stimulants) primarily Expenditure on alcohol, pito (local consumed by adults alcoholic beverage), tobacco, kola nuts Other goods Miscellaneous non-food, non- Expenditure on cooking fuel, durable items cosmetics, soap
Source: Author’s Survey
Table 6.8 summarizes average budget shares allocated to the different expenditure categories by the sex of the recipient, which, as we know from the literature on intra- household allocation, matters for budget allocations. The differences in budget shares allocated to health and education between households noted above become even more pronounced when the gender of the recipient is taken into account. Households in which the primary recipient of remittances is female devote a much greater share of their budget to health than do households in which the primary recipient is male, or households in
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which no remittances are received. The average budget share going to education is also much higher in these households than in households in which the primary recipient is male.
Table 6.7: Mean Budget Shares by Sex of Remitter and Remittance Status of the Household
Expenditure Household Categories by Gender of Remitter and Remittance Category Status of Household (share in total Non- Migrant Households Households Households expenditure) migrant Households with male with female with both Households not remitters remitters male and receiving only only female remittances remitters Food 0.607 0.636 0.618 0.608 0.585 (0.11) (0.12) (0.1) (0.12) (0.13) Adult goods 0.011 0.01 0.013 0.011 0.009 (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Housing 0.018 0.042 0.019 0.028 0.049 (0.03) (0.07) (0.04) (0.04) (0.08) Durables 0.021 0.017 0.025 0.019 0.025 (exp. in past (0.05) (0.02) (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) 12 months) Health 0.071 0.047 0.066 0.08 0.096 (0.1) (0.06) (0.088) (0.11) (0.15) Education 0.024 0.021 0.013 0.019 0.012 (0.05) (0.04) (0.02) (0.03) (0.02) Other goods 0.248 0.223 0.244 0.234 0.222 (0.07) (0.08) (0.07) (0.07) (0.05) Number of 45 31 16 69 20 observations
Source: Author’s Survey; standard deviations in parentheses
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Table 6.8: Mean Budget Shares by Sex of Recipient and Remittance Status of the Household
Expenditure Household Categories by Gender of Recipient and Remittance Category Status of Household (share in total Non- Migrant Households Households Households expenditure) migrant Households with male with female with both Households not recipients recipients male and receiving only only female remittances recipients Food 0.607 0.636 0.635 0.616 0.582 (0.11) (0.12) (0.11) (0.12) (0.13) Adult goods 0.011 0.01 0.015 0.01 0.01 (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.008) (0.009) Housing 0.018 0.042 0.021 0.028 0.038 (0.03) (0.07) (0.04) (0.04) (0.07) Durables 0.021 0.017 0.029 0.023 0.017 (exp. in past (0.05) (0.02) (0.03) (0.04) (0.03) 12 months) Health 0.071 0.047 0.058 0.082 0.087 (0.1) (0.06) (0.06) (0.11) (0.13) Education 0.024 0.021 0.009 0.02 0.015 (0.05) (0.04) (0.01) (0.03) (0.03) Other goods 0.248 0.223 0.231 0.22 0.25 (0.07) (0.08) (0.07) (0.07) (0.06) Number of 45 31 15 50 40 observations
Source: Author’s Survey; standard deviations in parentheses
Table 6.9 compares the average budget shares in households in which the remitter as well as the recipient are female to households in which women send remittances to men and households in which men send remittances to men. It is clear that the share of expenditure going to education in households in which both the remitter and the recipient are female is higher than in the other household categories.
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Table 6.9: Mean Expenditure Shares by Remitter-Recipient Pairs12
All other Female Female Male remitter/ households remitter/ remitter/ Male recipient Female Male recipient recipient Food share 0.604 0.627 0.611 0.648 (0.119) (0.110) (0.143) (0.093) Adult goods 0.011 0.010 0.017 0.014 share (0.011) (0.009) (0.012) (0.010) Housing 0.032 0.028 0.007 0.028 share (0.059) (0.043) (0.011) (0.045) Durable 0.019 0.023 0.012 0.038 goods share (0.037) (0.043) (0.013) (0.037) Health share 0.074 0.067 0.095 0.040 (0.107) (0.102) (0.081) (0.047) Education 0.02 0.021 0.005 0.012 share (0.043) (0.032) (0.005) (0.018) Other goods 0.241 0.224 0.253 0.220 share (0.07) (0.072) (0.090) (0.061) Observations 119 46 5 10
Source: Author’s Survey; standard deviations in parentheses
6.5.6 Methodology and Results
I estimate the parameters of the probit model specified in Equation 1 using maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. Table 6.10 shows the descriptive statistics for the variables used in this estimation, and the results are presented in Table 6.11. The first column of Table 6.11 shows the coefficient estimates for male-headed households only; the second column shows the coefficient estimates for all households. The estimates do not differ greatly. There are only three female-headed households in the sample, and although my initial specification included a control variable for the gender of the
12 I do not include a category for male remitter and female recipient because only one household falls into that category.
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household head, the variable was dropped in the probit estimation because it predicted success perfectly.
Table 6.10: Summary Statistics – Determinants of Recipient’s Gender
Mean Standard Minimum Maximum Deviation Primary recipient is .714 .45 0 1 female Migrant‟s spouse is .119 .32 0 1 household resident Migrant‟s mother is .506 .50 0 1 household resident Migrant is head, spouse .482 .50 0 1 or child of head Migrant‟s children are .167 .37 0 1 household members Remitter is female .732 .44 0 1 Dependency ratio .452 .17 0 0.8 Age of head 58.3 13.87 28 88 Household size 10.7 4.71 1 23 Number of adult 4 2.95 0 17 Females Number of adult 2.94 1.64 0 11 Males Total expenditure 3016.091 1395.62 715.1 8218.7 (GH¢) Value of livestock 798.219 2034.29 0 20280 (GH¢) Women‟s share of .103 .16 0 1 household land Sender is child of .536 .5 0 1 recipient Sender is spouse of .071 .26 0 1 recipient Sender is parent of .059 .24 0 1 recipient
Observations 168
Source: Author’s Survey
The results from the probit estimation confirm my hypothesis that the gender of the remitter is an important determinant of the gender of the recipient in these
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households. Female remitters are more likely than male remitters to direct their remittances towards women in the household, even after controlling for other factors such as the number of adult females in the household, and the relationship between the remitter and the gender of the recipient. Interestingly, when the remitter is the spouse of the recipient, the likelihood that the primary recipient will be female is significantly lower, suggesting perhaps that married women are more likely to send remittances to their husbands, while married male migrants are less likely to send remittances to their wives. Women are also more likely to receive remittances when the remitter‟s mother or children live in the household.
Having confirmed the presence of gendered networks of remittances flows, I use a variety of methods to estimate Equation 2. The basic regression is an Ordinary Least
Squares (OLS) estimation, which I run on the complete sample of households. However,
32 households (about 17 percent of the sample) have zero education expenditures. Much of the theoretical and applied econometrics literature has pointed to the biased estimates that result from an OLS regression when the dependent variable is censored at zero
(Deaton, 1986). I therefore fit the model with the Tobit maximum likelihood estimator, which has been shown to yield unbiased and consistent results when observations on the dependent variable are censored at zero (Tobin, 1958).
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Table 6.11: Determinants of the Recipient’s Gender
Probit (Male-headed Probit households only) (All households) Spouse is household -0.590 -0.611 member (-0.76) (-0.78) Mother is household 1.747** 1.803** member (3.11) (3.16) Remitter is head, spouse -0.0516 -0.0955 or child of household (-0.12) (-0.22) head Migrant‟s children are 1.150* 1.252* household members (1.96) (2.21) Remitter is female 2.653*** 2.636*** (6.05) (6.14) Dependency Ration -1.975 -1.993 (-1.34) (-1.33) Age of household head 0.0109 0.0113 (0.96) (0.98) Household size 0.0404 0.0346 (0.57) (0.49) Number of adult females 0.201+ 0.203+ in household (1.90) (1.91) Number of adults males 0.138 0.145 in household (1.02) (1.07) Total household 0.000438* 0.000439* expenditure (GH¢) (2.57) (2.54) Value of livestock owned -0.0000128 -0.0000100 by household (GH¢) (-0.11) (-0.08) Share of household land 1.063 1.849* cultivated by women (0.75) (2.50) Sender is child of -0.533 -0.565 recipient (-1.39) (-1.51) Sender is spouse of -2.430* -2.494* recipient (-2.40) (-2.41) Sender is parent of 0.375 0.441 recipient (0.22) (0.27) Constant -4.035** -4.050** (-3.17) (-3.16) N 165 168 pseudo R-sq 0.592 0.594
Note: z-statistics in parentheses + p<0.10, * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001
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However, the Tobit model has also come under some criticism, because of its implicit assumption that the decision of whether to incur any expenditure on an item, as well as the decision of how much to spend is determined by the same mechanism
(Deaton, 1986.) Hurdle models, two-stage estimators that separate the decision of whether to incur any expenditure and the decision of how much to spend, have been suggested as alternatives to the Tobit model. These models allow the effect of a variable to differently affect the decision to incur any expenditure and the decision of how much to spend. The first stage of a hurdle model estimates the maximum likelihood function for positive spending and the second stage estimates the determinants of the amount of spending (Wooldridge, 2002). Following Kingdon (2003; 2005) and Masterson (2010), I estimate a probit equation for positive spending on education per capita, and then finally run an OLS regression on those households with positive spending. This technique allows the decision of whether or not to incur any education expenditure to be modeled separately form the decision of how much to spend on education, conditional on spending a positive amount on education.
I estimate the above models for all households, including both migrant and non- migrant households. To account for non-observable differences between them, I also estimate these models separately for migrant and non-migrant households. The first five columns of Table 6.12 show the descriptive statistics for the variables used in these regressions. The results from the different regressions to examine the impact of the gender of the remitter on per capita education expenditure are presented in Table 6.13.
The base case is represented by households that received remittances from males only.
All the regressions were run using the „robust‟ option in STATA, which corrects for
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heteroscedasticity. The first column of the table reports the results from the OLS regression on the full sample of households, while the second column reports results from an OLS regression on migrant households only, regardless of whether or not they received remittances in the previous 12 months. This second regression is motivated by the possibility of unobserved differences between migrant and non-migrant households that imply that the two types of households should not be pooled in a single sample.
Doing so constrains the variance of the residual to be the same in the two groups of households. If the variances are different due to unobserved differences between the two types of households, then the standard errors from the regression run on the pooled sample would be wrong (Gould, 1999). The third and fourth columns of Table 6.13 present the results from the Tobit estimation, for all households and for migrant households only, respectively. In the fifth column, I show the results from the first stage of the hurdle model; it is a probit estimation of the determinants of positive spending on education in all households. Two variables, the number of household members enrolled in senior secondary school or in a post-secondary institution are dropped because they predict success perfectly. I therefore estimate the probit without these variables. The sixth column gives the results from the second stage of the hurdle model; it is an OLS estimate of the determinants of per capita expenditure on education, conditional on education expenditure being positive. This regression is run on all households with positive education expenditure. The last two columns present the results from estimating the hurdle model for migrant households only. The higher education variables as well as the dummy variable for the head‟s education are dropped from the probit, for the reason
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given above. In Table A.3 of the Appendix, I present the results from similar regressions on non-migrant households only.
Compared to households that received remittances from only male migrants, households that received remittances from only female migrants spent more on education per child of school-going age. The female remitter variable is significant in both the OLS and Tobit specifications on the full sample of households, but becomes slightly less so when the sample is restricted to migrant households only. It remains slightly significant when the sample is limited to households with positive education expenditure only and to migrant households only. However, it is not an important determinant of the probability that a household would incur positive expenditure on education.
The most important predictor of education expenditure in migrant households is the number of household members enrolled in senior secondary school. This variable is significant in all the OLS regressions as well as the Tobit estimation. The number of household members enrolled in a tertiary education institution is also important. As explained earlier, this is only to be expected, since households incur more expenditure as students progress from primary to secondary education and higher. The variables relating to the characteristics of the household head are neither important nor significant determinants of education expenditure. The results of the probit suggest that household size has a positive impact on the likelihood that a household would incur some spending on education, a result that makes sense if larger households are more likely to include children of school-going age.
As expected, the expenditure per child is lower the larger the size of the household. Somewhat surprisingly, total household expenditure is not an important
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determinant of the amount spent on education per child, although it does have a slight positive impact on the likelihood that a household would incur positive education expenditure. Likewise, the value of a household‟s livestock holdings is also not an important determinant of household expenditure on education. However, the presence of a primary school is an important determinant of whether a household spent any money on education, and of how much is spent.
While these findings suggest that the gender of the remitter does matter for per capita household education expenditure, the results are not robust to different methods of estimation and to different specifications of the model. It appears that the positive impact of female remitters on the amount of education in the first regression may be driven by the presence of non-migrant households in the sample. Therefore, to facilitate a comparison between migrant and non-migrant households, I also run a separate set of regressions of the common variables, and report the results in the Appendix.
There seem to be some noticeable differences between migrant and non-migrant households in the effects of most of the variables in the probit, conditional OLS and Tobit estimations (see Table A.3). In particular, the age of the household head and the value of livestock owned both have a significant and positive effect on per capita education expenditure in non-migrant households, while the presence of a primary school loses its significance as a determinant of per capita expenditure.
It is not surprising that although the gender of the remitter appears to be of some importance in determining per capita education expenditures, it is not strongly significant. Although female remitters might indicate that the remittances they send are to be used for the education of their children or their siblings, so long as they are away
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from the household, they in fact have little influence over how this money is actually used, and over how much money is ultimately allocated to children‟s education.
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Table 6.12: Summary Statistics: Households by Remitter and Recipient Category
Has no Did not Male Female Mixed Male Female Mixed migrants receive remitters remitters Gender recipients recipients Gender remittances only only Remitters only only Recipients Per capita 10.26 5.110 4.483 7.521 4.145 3.527 8.379 4.967 education exp. (20.16) (4.902) (6.018) (13.71) (6.519) (4.574) (15.43) (6.923) Count of household 7.311 10.58 9.353 10.43 9.650 7.733 11.34 9.450 members (2.851) (5.445) (2.548) (4.141) (5.314) (2.987) (4.054) (4.242) Total no. in Senior 0.222 0.226 0.235 0.162 0.200 0.200 0.180 0.175 Secondary School (0.560) (0.425) (0.562) (0.371) (0.410) (0.561) (0.388) (0.385) Total no. in tertiary 0.0667 0.0645 0 0 0 0 0 0 institution (0.330) (0.250) (0) (0) (0) (0) (0) (0) Household head is 0.0222 0 0.0588 0 0.0500 0 0.0400 0 female (0.149) (0) (0.243) (0) (0.224) (0) (0.198) (0) Age of household 51.98 50.32 62.24 56.44 58.20 59.07 58.98 55.63 head (12.14) (13.19) (15.18) (13.29) (13.93) (13.39) (14.21) (13.39) 168 Head completed 0.178 0.161 0.0588 0.0735 0.150 0.0667 0.0800 0.100
primary school or (0.387) (0.374) (0.243) (0.263) (0.366) (0.258) (0.274) (0.304) higher Primary School in 0.889 0.839 0.824 0.824 0.900 0.867 0.840 0.825 community (0.318) (0.374) (0.393) (0.384) (0.308) (0.352) (0.370) (0.385) Total expenditure 2485.6 2860.7 2316.7 3107.4 2961.6 2093.8 3249.9 2900.4 GH cedis (GH¢) (934.3) (1366.9) (797.2) (1479.6) (1493.2) (583.2) (1314.4) (1622.8) Value of livestock 1018.1 986.0 461.6 778.3 990.0 465.6 1081.8 487.5 GH¢ (3158.0) (1539.8) (670.7) (2519.0) (2003.8) (707.6) (3070.8) (915.8) Observations 45 31 17 68 20 15 50 40
Source: Author’s Survey; standard deviations in parentheses
Table 6.13: Impact of Gender of Remitter on Education Expenditure per Child of School-Going Age
Education OLS OLS Tobit (Full Tobit Probit Conditional Probit Conditional Expenditure (Full (Migrant Sample) (Migrant (Full OLS (Full (Migrant OLS Per Child Sample) Households) Households) Sample) Sample) Households) (Migrant Households) Household size -0.192 -0.136 0.0689 0.0771 0.195*** -0.353* 0.196*** -0.249 (-1.34) (-0.92) (0.42) (0.49) (3.95) (-2.00) (3.52) (-1.45) Number in 18.73*** 15.72*** 19.69*** 16.63*** 18.26*** 15.42*** senior (5.64) (4.14) (5.68) (4.31) (5.70) (4.08) Secondary Sch. Number in post- 9.614* 3.044 9.748* 3.945* 9.282* 2.993 secondary Sch. (2.22) (1.50) (2.43) (2.02) (2.11) (1.29) Female headed 0.552 0.875 -1.208 -0.940 -0.338 -2.094 -0.417 -1.107 household (0.32) (0.60) (-0.35) (-0.24) (-0.45) (-0.81) (-0.45) (-1.04) Age of 0.0873 0.00584 0.0928 -0.0141 0.00616 0.0855 -0.00559 -0.00906 household head (1.38) (0.16) (1.25) (-0.31) (0.53) (1.10) (-0.40) (-0.20)
169 Head has 1.118 1.350 2.408 2.478 0.771 0.762 0.564 primary school (0.96) (0.94) (1.55) (1.52) (1.64) (0.63) (0.40) education Female 5.085* 4.093+ 5.802* 4.674+ 0.306 5.763+ 0.186 5.059+ remitters only (2.06) (1.75) (1.98) (1.77) (0.74) (1.92) (0.44) (1.79) Remitters of 0.375 -0.287 0.0421 -0.691 -0.0751 1.083 -0.171 0.487 mixed (0.19) (-0.19) (0.02) (-0.33) (-0.14) (0.42) (-0.33) (0.25) gender Non-migrant 5.550+ 6.690+ 0.513 6.502+ households (1.73) (1.80) (1.20) (1.70) No Remittances 1.270 0.485 1.735 0.567 0.624 1.158 0.478 0.661 Received (0.52) (0.26) (0.60) (0.26) (1.09) (0.41) (0.79) (0.30) Primary school 2.441* 2.737* 4.421* 4.780* 0.689* 2.937* 1.010* 2.958+ in Community (2.40) (2.31) (2.56) (2.46) (2.19) (2.09) (2.47) (1.82)
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Table 6.13, continued
Total 0.0000329 0.000411 0.000282 0.000604 0.000360* -0.000134 0.000312* 0.000304 Expenditure (0.06) (0.94) (0.52) (1.31) (2.51) (-0.23) (2.02) (0.62) (GH¢) Value of 0.0000989 -0.0000417 -0.0000218 -0.0000448 -0.0000553 0.000410 0.000146 -0.0000411 Livestock (0.31) (-0.33) (-0.06) (-0.29) (-1.46) (0.66) (0.64) (-0.33) (GH¢) Constant -5.792 -1.625 -13.36* -6.751 -2.744** -3.921 -2.269* 0.624 (-1.40) (-0.59) (-2.12) (-1.55) (-2.84) (-0.80) (-2.07) (0.19) Sigma_Constant 11.03*** 8.956*** (4.36) (4.04) N 181 136 181 136 181 149 122 113 R-sq 0.481 0.418 0.474 0.401 adj. R-sq 0.441 0.361 0.423 0.329 pseudo R-sq 0.086 0.080 0.277 0.309 rmse 10.19 8.421 11.08 9.146
170 Note: t-statistics or z-statistics in parentheses
+ p<0.10, * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001
But as I have shown, female migrants are more likely to direct their remittances to other women in the household, perhaps in the expectation that women are more likely to use these remittances for the care of children. Since women are often responsible for making expenditures on children‟s education, women who receive remittances may be able to spend more on education, either because the remittances were earmarked by the remitter for education, or because the remittances free up resources that can then be channeled towards children‟s education.
I therefore run a second set of regressions that control for the impact of the gender of the recipient on education expenditures per child of school-going age. The summary statistics for the variables used in these regressions are shown in the last three columns of
Table 6.12 and the results from the regressions are presented in Table 6.14, in the same order as before. Households in which the primary recipient of remittances is female spend significantly more on education per child of school-going age than households in which the primary recipient of remittances is male, and indeed, than all other households. This variable remains significant even when the regression is run on migrant households only or on households with positive education expenditure only, and even after controlling for the gender of the household head, although it is slightly less significant in the Tobit specification (in Column 3).
Here again, household size and total household expenditure have a positive impact on whether or not a household spends on education. Enrolment in senior secondary school or higher were also important determinants of the amount spent per child on education, as before. Surprisingly, female-headed households spent significantly less on education than male-headed households. There could be a number of reasons for
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this. First, there are only three female-headed households in the sample. One of these households is located in a community in which there is no primary school; as a result, none of the children of school-going age in this household are enrolled in school. The children in the other two female-headed households are enrolled in primary school, which, as I have noted, is free. Thus, these households may incur somewhat less expenditure than other households.
The findings from the regression analysis confirm the initial hypothesis that the gender of the remitter as well as the recipient of remittances matters for household expenditure on education. What would have been the results if I had simply assumed that the identity of the remitter and recipient did not matter for the outcome? A set of regressions that control only for whether or not households had received remittances shows that households that received remittances spent less on education per child of school-going age than households that did not receive remittances, although the variable is not significant (see Table 6.15). The conclusion following from this would have been that migration and remittances do not lead to an increase in household investment in education. However, by starting from a feminist epistemological standpoint that recognizes the role of gendered social norms in shaping decisions about remittances, by making a set of assumptions about household behavior grounded in empirical evidence, and by asking a different set of questions from those asked by the majority of studies of migration and remittances, this study has demonstrated that the gender of the recipient, and by implication, of the remitter, does matter for the impact of migrant remittances on household wellbeing. In particular, when it is women who migrate and send remittances
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Table 6.14: Impact of Gender of Recipient on Education Expenditure per Child of School-Going Age
Education OLS OLS Tobit (Full Tobit Probit Conditional Probit Conditional Expenditure per (Full (Migrant Sample) (Migrant (Full OLS (Full (Migrant OLS Child Sample) Households) Households) Sample) Sample) Households) (Migrant Households) Household Size -0.258 -0.209 0.00512 -0.000870 0.210*** -0.432* 0.221*** -0.352+ (-1.59) (-1.19) (0.03) (-0.01) (4.20) (-2.24) (3.81) (-1.72) Number in 18.78*** 15.64*** 19.66*** 16.45*** 18.22*** 15.23*** Senior (5.68) (4.24) (5.70) (4.39) (5.78) (4.21) Secondary Sch. Number in post- 9.776* 3.255 9.938* 4.179* 9.418* 3.104 secondary sch. (2.26) (1.60) (2.49) (2.33) (2.12) (1.25) Female Headed -3.382+ -4.755** -5.116 -7.429+ -0.388 -4.975+ -0.447 -7.305** household (-1.77) (-2.75) (-1.38) (-1.72) (-0.51) (-1.76) (-0.49) (-2.92) Age of 0.0711 -0.0124 0.0749 -0.0355 0.00177 0.0784 -0.0109 -0.0238 household head (1.15) (-0.37) (1.01) (-0.77) (0.15) (0.97) (-0.82) (-0.53) Head has 0.842 0.805 2.051 1.784 0.708 0.506 -0.0546
173 primary educ. (0.73) (0.55) (1.32) (1.10) (1.50) (0.41) (-0.04) Female 6.254* 5.714* 5.970+ 5.601+ -0.571 7.437* -0.624 7.120* recipients only (2.12) (2.02) (1.81) (1.86) (-1.27) (2.13) (-1.32) (2.15) Recipients of 2.621 1.859 2.000 1.306 -0.440 4.021 -0.405 2.885 mixed gender (1.25) (1.18) (0.74) (0.63) (-0.98) (1.51) (-0.89) (1.46) Non-migrant 5.939+ 6.326+ -0.0483 7.369+ household (1.86) (1.74) (-0.11) (1.90) No Remittances 1.736 1.161 1.436 0.685 0.0377 2.233 -0.0284 1.713 Received (0.70) (0.62) (0.48) (0.30) (0.07) (0.75) (-0.05) (0.76) Primary school 2.154* 2.263+ 3.995* 4.156* 0.647* 2.500+ 0.950* 2.261 in Community (2.13) (1.94) (2.31) (2.20) (2.04) (1.79) (2.34) (1.44)
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Table 6.14, continued
Total 0.0000446 0.000443 0.000341 0.000685 0.000390** -0.000136 0.000349* 0.000351 Expenditure (0.08) (1.01) (0.63) (1.49) (2.70) (-0.23) (2.25) (0.72) GH¢ Value of 0.0000641 -0.000112 -0.0000646 -0.000119 -0.0000477 0.000346 0.000135 -0.000108 Livestock (0.20) (-0.66) (-0.17) (-0.58) (-1.25) (0.56) (0.62) (-0.68) GH¢ Constant -4.482 -0.144 -11.17+ -4.416 -2.075* -3.241 -1.696 2.169 (-1.14) (-0.06) (-1.83) (-1.13) (-2.10) (-0.64) (-1.58) (0.70) Sigma_constant 11.06*** 8.936*** (4.35) (4.10) N 181 136 181 136 181 149 122 113 R-sq 0.481 0.424 0.475 0.412 Adj R-sq 0.440 0.368 0.424 0.341 Pseudo R-sq 0.084 0.079 0.266 0.316 RMSE 10.20 8.380 11.06 9.063
174 Note: t-statistics or z-statistics in parentheses + p<0.10, * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001
Table 6.15: Impact of Remittances on Per Capita Education Expenditure (without controls for gender of remitter or recipient)
Conditional OLS Tobit Probit OLS Household Size -0.267+ -0.0193 0.200*** -0.475* (-1.79) (-0.12) (3.98) (-2.45) Number in Senior 18.54*** 19.47*** 17.95*** Secondary School (5.46) (5.47) (5.48) Number in post-secondary 9.862* 10.02* 9.540+ education (2.04) (2.18) (1.89) Female-headed household -1.158 -2.88 -0.499 -2.711 (-0.89) (-0.85) (-0.67) (-1.09) Age of household head 0.0779 0.0908 0.00298 0.105 (1.2) (1.15) (0.26) (1.25) Head has primary education 0.883 2.134 0.716 0.562 (0.75) (1.36) (1.52) (0.47) Household received remittances -0.339 -0.79 -0.376 -0.138 (-0.19) (-0.38) (-1.36) (-0.06) Primary school in Community 2.247* 4.097* 0.644* 2.349+ (2.24) (2.3) (2.08) (1.78) Total Expenditure (GH¢) 0.000254 0.000526 0.000359* 0.0000734 (0.51) (1.04) (2.5) (0.13) Value of Livestock (GH¢) 0.00013 0.00000903 0.0000517 0.000384 (0.41) (-0.02) (-1.35) (0.65) Constant -1.213 -8.143+ -2.024* 0.475 (-0.57) (-1.92) (-2.56) (0.17) Sigma_Constant 11.34*** (4.34) N 181 181 181 149 R-sq 0.455 0.445 adj. R-sq 0.423 0.404 pseudo R-sq 0.079 0.272 rmse 10.36 11.25
Note: t-statistics or z-statistics in parentheses + p<0.10, * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001
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home to other women, this has important implications for household investments in children‟s education.
6.6 Conclusion
Migration is yet another arena in which gender determines the distribution of benefits. The central premise of this chapter has been that gendered social norms of household provisioning are important in determining who receives migrant remittances as well as the uses to which these remittances are put. This argument finds strong support in the qualitative data presented in the chapter. At the same time, the quantitative analysis confirms that women migrants are significantly more likely to send remittances to other women within the household, and that both the gender of the remitter and the recipient are sufficiently important statistically that they should be taken into account in an analysis of the impact of remittances on household expenditure allocations. The finding that remittances from female migrants positively impact investments in children‟s education has important implications for migration policy in developing countries.
It is a fact that in many countries, women who migrate, whether within borders or across them, live and work in challenging, frequently exploitative circumstances: circumstances that are sometimes made even more difficult by the official stance taken by authorities towards their migration. In Ghana, rising female migration from rural communities in the north of the country has been viewed in a largely negative light and the policy response has been to discourage women in these communities from migrating.
The findings presented here provide a compelling argument for government and civil society organizations in Ghana and elsewhere to rethink their current positions on female migration and strengthen the case for pursuing policies that will improve the conditions
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under which migrant women in many cities around the world live and work. In the following chapter, I explore some of these issues and the policy implications that follow from the research findings presented in this chapter.
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CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
7.1 Introduction
The results of this study hold important implications for economic analyses of the determinants of migration and the impacts of remittances on economic development.
They also have implications for data collection as well as for public policy.
The central premise of the dissertation has been that social norms are important in shaping the determinants and outcomes of migration, and in particular the impacts of migrants‟ remittances on economic development. The analysis of female migration in a context in which men have long dominated migration flows, as is the case in Northern
Ghana, is particularly helpful in understanding how social norms impact decisions about migration and remittances within the household. My research reveals that female migrants, by sending their remittances to other female members of their origin households, such as their mothers, sisters, daughters, female in-laws and even co-wives, contribute to female-centered networks of remittances flows, even in male-headed households.
Given the fact that female control of income is associated with increased household spending on children‟s health, nutrition and education, this has important implications for how remittances are used. Furthermore, in the African context in which household members have separate budgeting arrangements, and where norms of household provisioning assign women significant responsibility for feeding household members and caring for children but give them limited resources for meeting these obligations, the feminization of migration flows, if it leads to increased remittances
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directed to women, may help to relax the budget constraints that women face. This in turn will be reflected in increased spending by women on children‟s well-being.
In Ghana and in many other African countries, internal migration, and in particular, rural-urban migration, is generally regarded as an undesirable social phenomenon that needs to be controlled. In Ghana, the migration of women from the north of the country in particular is seen in a mostly negative light, not only by the general populace, but also by government officials and by non-governmental organizations. Research that reveals the important contributions that female migrants can make to the household and to the welfare of children requires us to rethink these views and reinforces the case for implementing policies and programs that expand the capabilities and choices of women in northern Ghana – not only those who stay, but also those who migrate.
7.2 Implications for Economic Theorizing about Migration and Remittance Decision-Making and Data Collection
Economic theorizing about migration for a long time viewed the decision to migrate as being motivated purely by individual self-interest. In response to criticisms that this view of migration ignored the role of the household in migration decisions, an alternative approach has evolved that analyzes migration and remittances as part of a household strategy arrived at through consensus or through intra-household bargaining.
These household models of migration ignore the role of social norms in shaping decisions about migration, and in particular, in determining who migrates and who stays.
Moreover, they also treat remittances as being motivated by altruism or as part of an intra-household contractual arrangement: for example, remittances are treated as
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payments for services rendered, as intra-family insurance payoffs meant to counter the effects of negative income shocks, as returns on parental investments in the migrant, or as a means of ensuring migrants a stake in parental bequests. In these models, norms are relevant only to the extent that they act as an enforcement mechanism, ensuring that migrants adhere to the terms of the contractual agreement. Underlying these models is the implicit assumption that non-migrant household members act as a unit in receiving and making decisions about how remittances are used. In contrast, my research has shown that social norms, and gender norms in particular, should be taken seriously in theorizing about migration and remittances. Social norms, as I have argued throughout the dissertation, play an important role in determining who migrates as well as who sends and receives remittances.
Existing household models of migration and remittances have been instrumental in shaping the collection of data on migration and remittances. Most large-scale surveys on household receipts of remittances simply ask the household head about household receipts of remittances. Even when migration surveys collect data on the identity of migrants, they are unlikely to ask who in the household actually received the remittances made by migrants; instead, all information about remittances is obtained from the household head, or the head‟s designated representative. Underlying this approach to the collection of data on migration and remittances is the assumption that the household head, by virtue of his or her position, receives and exercises control over all remittances that flow towards the household from migrants, or at least has full knowledge about all remittances received by household members. As I argued in Chapter Six, flawed data resulting from questionable assumptions about how households work can lead to
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mistaken conclusions in empirical analyses of the impact of remittances on development that rely on this data. The benefits for empirical research of an intra-household approach to the collection of data on migration and remittances as well as the use of qualitative methods to analyze how social norms shape decisions about migration and remittances would far outweigh the extra cost incurred in collecting this kind of detailed data.
7.3 Policy Implications
Women who migrate from rural communities in northern Ghana to urban areas in the south experience a double burden of marginalization and exploitation. This is at least partly due to the negative official stance taken towards internal migration, which contributes to the stigmatization of internal migrants in general, and of female migrants in particular. Although the dissertation has focused mostly on the role of social norms in shaping migration and remittance behavior, a discussion of the policy implications of this research is also warranted. A brief examination of the conditions under which female migrants from northern Ghana live and work in the south will shed light on the sorts of policies that are necessary to expand the choice sets not only of these migrants, but also of internal migrants in general.
In Chapter Five, I explored the negative perceptions held by communities in northern Ghana of female migration to the south. To a certain extent, the concerns expressed by their family and community members about their health and safety while in the south are justified by the hazards that the migrants face. The majority of women migrants work as porters in the markets. As self-employed workers in the informal sector, they are often exploited by their clients, who refuse to pay the agreed-upon fee after the porter has carried their goods to the client‟s desired destination. Like other
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informal sector workers in the cities, the porters are required to pay a daily flat-rate tax to the city, regardless of whether or not they have earned any money on a given day.
Despite paying these taxes, they are subject to the negative official stance taken towards internal migration discussed in Chapter 1. They are easily identified by the basins they carry on their heads, and are often accused of loitering and are prevented from plying their trade on the streets and in the lorry stations. Many of the porters describe being whipped and chased off by city officials if they are caught working in a prohibited area, or having the basins in which they carry their loads seized: in order to get their basins back, they have to pay a fine, the amount of which depends on the whims of the official who collects the fine. Unable to find or afford decent housing in the city, many of them sleep in bus shelters or on the streets. If they are lucky, they might be able to join with other migrants to rent a shack in one of the city‟s many squatter settlements, where they are subject to frequent threats of eviction by city officials and to sexual harassment from their landlords or neighbors.
The policy and program response to this has been to encourage female migrants to return home and to discourage women from migrating to the south. For example, in
2009, the Ministry of Women‟s and Children‟s Affairs, with funding from the United
Nations UNICEF, began registering female porters in the city. This initiative is part of a program code-named „Operation Let‟s Send Them Home‟ the goal of which is to repatriate female migrants under the age of 16 to the north for „rehabilitation and vocational school enrolment‟ (Tufuor, 2010). Program interventions by non- governmental organizations have focused on encouraging women migrants to return home, and on discouraging female migration from the north to the south by enrolling
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young women in skills training programs in hairdressing, dressmaking, catering and crocheting, services for which there is little demand in rural communities in northern
Ghana. Not only have these efforts failed to reduce the outmigration of women, but they also lend credence to the negative perceptions surrounding the migration of women from north to south, contributing to the stigmatization of migrants and serving to legitimize attempts by family members to force migrants to return home or to prevent migrants from leaving. In August 2007, for example, a national newspaper, the Daily Graphic, carried a front page headline story of a young woman found chained to the floor of a bus at a bus depot in Accra. The bus was destined for Tamale, the capital of the Northern Region, and the woman had been kidnapped by her uncle and two other male relatives, all of whom had come to Accra at the behest of her father to force her to return to her village.
Policy and program interventions must begin by recognizing that the majority of women who migrate are choosing from a very limited set of options. Migration is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. What matters, from a human development perspective, is whether it is freely chosen or whether people feel compelled to migrate because they feel they have no other alternative. In northern Ghana, patriarchal gender norms assign significant responsibilities to women, but restrict their access to the resources they need to meet these responsibilities. In the context of declining agricultural livelihoods, migration holds the potential to give women access to the resources they need to meet these obligations. However, given the current conditions under which they live and work in the south, the fact that a growing number of women consider migration to be their best option for patching a life together only serves to emphasize just how limited their choices are. Thus, policy and program interventions should be geared
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towards expanding the options available to women in northern Ghana, as well as improving outcomes in the south for those women who do migrate. The ultimate goal of these policies should be to alter the gender norms that limit women‟s options, so that when women do decide to migrate, their decision reflects a genuine freedom of choice rather than a choice made from a very limited set of viable alternatives.
What kinds of policies can be used to advance these objectives? It is generally acknowledged that faster economic growth that helps to reduce poverty in the north would help to reduce the flow of migration to the south. This requires macroeconomic polices that will protect and sustain rural livelihoods in this part of Ghana. However, if policies to increase economic growth and reduce poverty are based on conceptualizations of the household that assume that gains in household wellbeing will be enjoyed equally by all in the household, they will do little to improve the structural position of women. In fact, they may even cause women to lose the few entitlements they have. For example, in
2001, a private company, Integrated Tamale Fruit Company (ITFC), began cultivating organic mangoes in the Savelugu-Nanton District for export. The project is based on an out-grower model in which ITFC provides individual farmers with loans and technical assistance to cultivate mangoes. By 2008, nearly 600 acres of land had come under mango cultivation. However, according to the Savelugu-Nanton District Assembly, women have complained that the shea nut trees from which women gather shea nuts for processing are being felled to clear the land for mango seedlings (SNDA 2008). Since these shea nut trees are an important part of women‟s livelihood portfolio, and since women cannot enter into mango cultivation because they have very limited access to land, this project is actually making them worse off, and further limiting their livelihood
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options. What women need are policies that give them greater access to productive resources, generate viable employment opportunities for them, and support the industries that provide a source of livelihood for women, such as the shea butter processing industry.
Given that the success of such policies is likely to be felt only in the medium to long-term, women will probably continue to migrate to the south in the interim. Thus, there is also a need for a constructive policy on internal migration that seeks to improve the conditions under which internal migrants, and women in particular, live and work.
Naila Kabeer (2004) has called for the institution of a „social floor‟ that guarantees access to the basic means of survival for everyone, regardless of their employment status. She argues that this would give poor women the leverage to challenge their subordination both at home and at work. The institution of such a social floor in Ghana that guarantees access to a basic income, as well access to health services and adequate shelter in Ghana would go a long way towards expanding the options of the poor in general, and women in particular.
But there are also other policies specific to migrants that, if implemented, would contribute to better livelihoods for migrants and their households. These include the creation of migrant support programs based on a recognition that migrants, like everyone else, have the right to just wages, fair working conditions and freedom from personal danger and risk. Migrant support programs will provide a means of redress for migrants whose rights are violated. Ensuring that these migrant support programs pay attention to the specific needs of women migrants should be an integral part of their design.
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Migrants also need access to health services. Providing mobile health care facilities is one way to ensure that migrants are not prevented by high costs from accessing decent health care. Ghana already has a national health insurance scheme in place. Expanding the reach of this scheme and ensuring that migrants have access to health insurance that meets their needs would go a long way to improving health outcomes for migrants. Providing health care to meet the needs of women should be also be an important component of a healthcare policy for migrants.
Women migrants have special needs: in Ghana, many of them have their babies on their backs while they work, or leave toddlers in the care of a slightly older child who may have been brought from the village for this purpose. Providing child care services for them should be an important part of any migrant support program. They also need access to decent shelter in the area of destination, in order to avoid the problems of personal security that they are confronted with when they live on the street or in squatter settlements.
Protecting their savings from theft and sending money back home present major challenges for migrants. Although most banks will allow clients who cannot read or write to open a savings account with a thumbprint, many of the women migrants I encountered did not know this or were too intimidated to go to a bank on their own. As a result many of them kept their savings on their persons or gave them to a friend or relative for safekeeping. Others gave them to informal financial intermediaries known as
„susu collectors‟ for safekeeping. They often complained of being robbed, or of having to pay prohibitive fees to the susu collectors. Many of them complained about the difficulty of sending money back home. Often they would have to wait until a trusted
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person from their village was going home, or until they were going back home for a visit.
Providing migrants with improved channels for saving and remitting, such as a wider network of rural banks and post offices, would make it easier for migrants send money back home. This would also expand the reach of formal financial institutions and communications infrastructure and contribute to the development of poorer parts of the country.
Policies that provide migrants with improved information on opportunities, improved facilities for remittances, and greater protection of their rights would contribute to better livelihoods for migrants and their households. However, all of these would be useless if migrants do not know of their existence or do now know how to access their services. Resources can also be devoted to strengthening the capacity of existing migrants‟ associations to act as migrant resource centers that provide information about migrant support programs and other services.
These two sets of policies – policies designed to expand women‟s choices at home, and policies designed to improve outcomes for women who migrate – are not contradictory: rather, they are mutually reinforcing. Properly designed and implemented, such a policy approach will reduce the „push‟ factors that lead to migration while simultaneously increasing the likelihood that the potential of migration for human development will be more fully realized by those who do migrate.
7.4 Limitations of the Study and Suggestions for Future Research
One of the challenges of the quantitative aspects of this study has been the limitations of available secondary data for an analysis of the impact of the identity of the remitter and the recipient on the household expenditure patterns in different countries.
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Thus, I was compelled to collect my own household level data on migration, remittances and household expenditures. Collecting high quality household expenditure data of the kind available in larger surveys such as the Ghana Living Standards Surveys (GLSS) generally requires visiting households multiple times over the course of the year to eliminate the problems that arise from seasonality and recall error. Given my limited resources, I was not able to do so, and the quality of my data reflected this. I was therefore compelled to limit my quantitative analyses to the impact of migrants‟ remittances on education. However, it would have been interesting to explore the impact of the identity of the remitter and the recipient on other components of household expenditure, such as food, health, consumer durables and capital investments. If secondary data become available that contain better information on the identity of the recipient and the remitter, this would be an interesting line of research to pursue.
This study points to the importance of taking social norms seriously in any analysis of migration and remittance behavior. However, my study focuses on the norms that prevail among a particular ethnic group in Ghana. Although the norms of household provisioning in this context are similar in many ways to the norms of household provisioning that have been documented in other parts of the country and even the continent, it would be hasty to conclude that my findings can be easily generalized to other contexts. Thus it would be useful to examine the role of social norms in shaping migration and remittance behavior across ethnicities and nationalities. Are there differences in migration and remittance behavior among migrants from different ethnic groups and different nationalities? What commonalities cut across ethnicity and nationality? For example, is the pattern of women sending remittances to other women
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found among other groups of migrants? How does this shape the use of remittances?
How do these norms change over time, if they do? What are the implications for development? These are all potentially interesting directions for future research.
7.5 Conclusion
This dissertation examines the role of social norms in shaping migration and remittance behavior, and contributes to the burgeoning scholarly literature on gender, migration and economic development. As I stated at the outset, it is also a political project in that it is intended to give voice to a group of migrants whose stories are generally overlooked in scholarly work on migration. By bringing a marginalized group to the forefront of academic research, and by using the experiences of this group as a lens to examine current theorizing about migration and remittances, this work has questioned a number of assumptions that underlie the models of migration decisions and has raised questions that are relevant to development policy. Insofar as this research affords useful insights into the social processes and development outcomes of migration that would not have been gained otherwise, the goals that motivated the study have been achieved.
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APPENDIX
SUPPLEMENTARY TABLES
Table A.1: Average Share of Health Expenditure in Total Expenditure by Remitter Category (conditional on positive health expenditure)
Remitter Summary of Health Share in Total Expenditure Category Mean Std. Deviation Frequency Not migrant 0.082 0.106 39 household No remittances 0.051 0.61 29 received Male remitter 0.067 0.87 16 household Female remitter 0.087 0.114 63 household Mixed Gender 0.107 0.15 18 remitter household Total 0.080 0.107 165
Table A.2: Average Share of Health Expenditure in Total Expenditure by Recipient Category (conditional on positive health expenditure)
Recipient Summary of Health Share in Total Expenditure Category Mean Std. Deviation Frequency Not migrant 0.082 0.106 39 household No remittances 0.051 0.061 29 received Male recipient 0.062 0.063 14 household Female recipient 0.089 0.116 46 household Mixed gender 0.094 0.135 37 recipient household Total 0.079 0.107 165
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Table A.3: Regressions on Non-Migrant Household Observations only
OLS Tobit Probit Conditional OLS Household Size 0.153 0.517 0.141 -0.640 (0.31) (0.86) (1.56) (-0.93) Number in 26.72** 26.13** 25.74*** Senior (2.96) (3.08) (5.00) Secondary Sch. Number in post- 7.880 7.855 5.306 secondary (1.06) (1.17) (1.02) education Female-headed -11.04 -7.157 -4.524 household (-1.00) (-0.75) (-0.74) Age of 0.324 0.458+ 0.0564* 0.324+ household head (1.62) (1.81) (2.03) (1.78) Head has 3.494 3.888 0.358 -3.289 primary (1.23) (0.97) (0.49) (-0.55) education Primary school 0.848 0.380 -0.525 4.058 in community (0.37) (0.11) (-0.71) (1.08) Total -0.00363 -0.00246 0.000903* -0.00480 expenditure (-0.98) (-0.73) (2.10) (-1.53) (GH¢) Value of 0.000206 -0.000148 -0.000198* 0.00920+ livestock (0.23) (-0.14) (-2.53) (1.72) (GH¢) Constant -6.474 -20.60 -4.281* -3.182 (-0.81) (-1.40) (-2.44) (-0.31) Sigma_constant 14.24** (2.76) N 45 45 45 36 R-sq 0.614 0.783 adj. R-sq 0.515 0.708 pseudo R-sq 0.109 0.342 rmse 14.04 11.79
Note: t-statistics or z-statistics in parentheses + p<0.10, * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001
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