Staying connected: remittances and ties to home among young adult rural-origin South African migrants

Carren Ginsburg , MRC/Wits Agincourt Unit, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand
Michael White, Population Studies & Training Center, Brown University
Chantel Pheiffer, Department of Urban Public Health, University of Massachusetts
Sangeetha Madhavan, Departments of African American and Africana Studies and Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Xavier Gómez-Olivé, MRC/Wits Agincourt Unit, School of Public health, University of the Witwatersrand
Mark Collinson, MRC/Wits Agincourt Unit, School of Public health, University of the Witwatersrand

South Arican rural-origin residents often migrate to urban areas as a livelihood strategy to diversify income sources and reduce household vulnerability. Using data from a young adult cohort of internal migrants from the sub-district of Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, this paper aims to 1) describe remittance patterns among migrants over time, 2) characterise migrants’ connections to their origin households (in terms of frequency of visits and communication with home) and 3) identify the sociodemographic determinants of remittance behaviour, focusing on individual, child, and migration-related factors. The paper uses waves two through four of data from the Migrant Health Follow-Up Study, a nested study of the Agincourt Health and socio-Demographic Surveillance System. Levels of remitting among migrants varied across waves with the share of migrants remitting dropping to 32% in Wave 3 from 44% in Wave 2 and increasing to 51.7% of migrants in Wave 4. Remitting is significantly related to employment and frequency of visits home. Connections between migrants and their households of origin are strong with most migrants reporting recent communication and visits either regularly or consistently over holidays. In the random-effects logit model, greater likelihood of remitting is associated with older age, male gender, longer duration of migration and movement to the Gauteng Province. Migrants who co-reside with their children are less likely to remit to origin households. Understanding migrants’ remittance behaviour and ties to home can offer important insights into how migration can support rural communities, and ultimately promote poverty reduction, economic development and social cohesion.

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 Presented in Session 25. Economic Drivers of Internal Migration