Contexts of migration across childhood: evidence from rural South Africa

Bennett, Rachel (2013) Contexts of migration across childhood: evidence from rural South Africa. British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference. 09 - 11 Sep 2013.

Abstract

Exposure to migration is an important yet unstudied indicator of children’s social and physical environments in many low and middle countries. In South Africa, migration to access caregivers and educational opportunities, support family households and accompany family members are commonplace childhood experiences. Existing studies have found evidence of positive and/or negative relationships between measures of migration and child wellbeing. However analyses and understanding of the patterns, triggers and experiences of children’s migration are limited. The aims of this paper are (i) to propose an approach to measuring children’s migration focused on relationship to co-movers, origin household structure and childhood stage and (ii) to present empirical results on the contexts of children’s migration in South Africa using longitudinal data from a demographic surveillance system in rural KwaZulu-Natal. The empirical work uses event history techniques to describe migration behaviour during infancy, preschool, middle childhood and adolescence, and to examine the relationships between propensity to migrate and individual and parental characteristics and life events, wider support networks, housing quality and household composition in relation to the migration typology. Key results include (i) strong relationships between measures of support networks and moves which do not involve the whole household, (ii) increasing relevance of paternal characteristics for propensity to migrate during later childhood stages, and (iii) the importance of individual characteristics and life events such as gender, childbirth and educational status for moves during the final childhood stage, adolescence. The paper contributes to efforts to conceptualise and measure children’s migration and documents the circumstances in which children migrate in rural South Africa

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