By Priya Deshingkar
For millions of poor rural people
across the globe, accessing urban labour markets is critical for survival and
coping with seasonal adversity. Their first point of arrival
in a city is often an informal settlement or slum such as Dharavi in
Mumbai (with a population of 6.5 million) or Kibera in Nairobi (population of
1.7 million) and their first jobs are often in the informal sector. Early
migration models viewed urban informal sector employment as a temporary staging
post for new migrants on their way to formal sector employment. But decades of
experience in developing countries has shown that the informal sector has
persisted and grown, and graduation to the formal sector has been elusive.
In fact, recent assessments by UN-HABITAT indicate that the
proportion of people living in slums exceeds the proportion of people living in
officially authorised parts of the city in many parts of Africa and Asia.
According to the State of the World Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the
Urban Divide, the number of slum dwellers globally has increased from
roughly 776 million in 2000 to roughly 827 million in 2010, despite the fact
that 227 million people were rehabilitated through slum improvement
projects.
Most governments view informal
settlements as hotbeds of crime, filth and disease that cities need
to be rid of. The policy response has been negligent at best, with slums
continuing to have no services for decades, and demolition at worst where
people are threatened with eviction without the provision of any real
alternatives, as recent reports from Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Ghana
indicate. There are also (failed) efforts to keep migrants in rural
areas through employment creation programmes – for example watershed
development projects in India aim to reduce migration. According
to the UN Demographic Yearbook 2009-10 an astonishing 67 per
cent of all governments had policies to halt or limit rural-urban migration
even in 2009.
This policy position is eloquently captured by Hernando De
Soto, the Peruvian economist and author of The Other Path:
When they arrived in the cities, however, migrants encountered a
hostile world. They soon realised that, while formal society had a
bucolic vision of Peru’s rural world and acknowledged its right to happiness,
no one wanted that other world to descend on the cities. Assistance
and development programs for rural areas were designed to ensure that the
peasants improved their lot where they were, well away from the cities.
Civilization was expected to go to the countryside; the peasants were not
expected to come looking for it.
The genesis of these negative perceptions can be traced to
theories of migration, urban unemployment and slum formation as well as
ignorance related to the richness and dynamism of the urban informal
sector. Although participatory mapping of slums is gaining momentum,
we have little understanding of the microenterprises that the urban poor are
engaged in.
Despite the persuasive arguments put forth by De Soto
urging governments to recognise the economic contribution of workers in the
urban informal sector, little has been done to address these concerns in
developing regions of Asia and Africa. Where efforts have been made
the results are impressive as in the case of research by Sumila Gulyani and
Debabrata Talukdar in the slums of Nairobi: their results show that the urban
poor engage in a range of micro-enterprises (retailing food and household
appliances, small scale manufacturing, etc.). Contrary to older narratives that
view the economic activities of the urban poor mainly as survival activities,
their research indicates that such microenterprises can put people on a
trajectory out of poverty.
Nor is there any understanding of the amount of money that
poor migrants to urban cities are able to send to their families back
home. Recent calculations by Adriana Castaldo, Priya Deshingkar and
Andy McKay in 'Internal Remittances and Poverty', based on
household surveys, comparing internal and international remittances in Ghana
and India, two countries with marked regional inequalities and high levels of
internal migration, show that the total sum of internal remittances far exceeds
international remittances.
Given that these remittances are from
poorer migrants than those migrating internationally, and reach a larger
number of poorer source families, the impacts on poverty are likely to be
significant. Remittances are critical for families in rural areas
where credit and insurance markets are weak – the new labour economics of migration
argument – and it helps them to eat regularly, send their children to school,
improve housing and to pay for health care.
Finally, systematic efforts are needed
to understand and appreciate the economic contribution of migrants. Doug
Saunders argued in his book Arrival City that migrants are the
economic engines in cities across the world; indeed Deshingkar and Akter
calculate that the economic contribution of migrants in India is 10% of the
GDP.
Governments would do well to recognise people’s own efforts
at managing risk and adversity in rural areas by migrating to towns and
cities. Urban and rural planners need to work together and recognise
the reality of multilocational livelihoods and accept mobility rather than
fighting it.
Priya Deshingkar is the
Research Director of the Migrating Out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium
at the University of Sussex
