Understanding children’s involvement in migration & implications for accessing services in rural South Africa

Bennett, Rachel, Falkingham, Jane and Hosegood, Victoria (2014) Understanding children’s involvement in migration & implications for accessing services in rural South Africa. 'Transnational Families: Multi-actor, Multi-sited and Institutional Perspectives’ conference, Maastricht, Netherlands. 25 - 27 Jun 2014.

Abstract

Migration is an important yet unstudied indicator of children’s social and physical environments in many low and middle countries. In rural South Africa, unaccompanied parental migration, as well as children’s own migration to access caregivers and educational opportunities, support family households and/or accompany migrant family members, are commonplace childhood experiences. However, quantitative analyses of children’s migration are scarce, limiting the development of policies to support mobile families and the design of studies that seek to disentangle the circumstances in which children benefit from migration and when they may be made vulnerable. This paper uses longitudinal data from a demographic surveillance system in rural KwaZulu-Natal to describe children’s direct experiences of migration: when children themselves migrate, and children’s indirect experiences of migration: when parent(s) migrate without children. The results show that 12% of children (0-17 years) migrated at least once in a one year period; on a third of these occasions the child was ‘unaccompanied’. Over one quarter (28%) of children were indirectly exposed to migration by parent(s) who are members of their household out-migrating. However for just over half of children one or both of their parents were not known to be deceased but not considered members of their household, highlighting the challenges associated with identifying children of migrant parents in this context. Based on these findings, the paper discusses methodological considerations for family migration studies in populations with high levels of both adult and child mobility and highlights their significance for promoting access to education and child welfare services in South Africa.

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Contributors

Author: Jane Falkingham

Author: Victoria Hosegood

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