Socio-Economic Implications of South-North Female Migration

Abstract

The study examines thesocio-economic implications of South-North migration for an under-researched group of women from sub-Saharan Africa who moved to Europepriorto2010. The thesis, which uses unbalanced panel data called MAFE (Migration between Africa and Europe), examines trajectories of women who migrated to Europe for different reasons. In order to isolate the impact of migration for these women, the study also compares African non-migrant and migrant populations, treating migration as a “treatment”, with a non-migrant population as controls.

Starting with the overarching hypothesis that motives for migration are important in understanding migrants’ trajectories, the study examines first, whether active migration for work leads to favourable outcomes for women, second, whether it has an especially transformative impact on economic migrant women with the most limited prospects in their home countries, namely those with little education, and third, whether the effect of migration on distinct groups of migrant women is conditional on factors such as, for example, length of stay abroad or legal right to work.

Study results support the research hypotheses. Women who migrated to Europe for work experience significant improvements on 9 out of 10 proxy measures of women’s empowerment examined in the study. No such marked improvements are apparent when women are examined as a single group of migrants or amongst family migrants, who benefit from migration only in some respects and usually several years later than economic migrants and depending on whether they are legally allowed to work. Further, post-migration premia experienced by economic migrant women are especially marked for those with little schooling, whose trajectory was largely under studied in the previous migration literature.

The study concludes that accounting for the initial motive for migration is key to isolating the true impact of South-North migration for women. In the context of countries where women’s socio-economic freedoms - including mobility - may be restricted or may depend on men, whether women actively migrate for work is likely to also reflect their pre-migration characteristics, which may be hard to observe but which may be strongly associated with their post-migration outcomes.

Date of Award	1 Jul 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Alison Wolf (Supervisor) & Filipa Sa (Supervisor)