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Keynote Paper for DFID Sustainable Development Retreat University of Surrey, Guildford 13 July 2004

Development Patterns, Mobility and Livelihood Diversification by Frank Ellis and Nigel Harris

July 2004

Professor Frank Ellis Overseas Development Group University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ email: [email protected]

Professor Nigel Harris Development Policy Unit University College London 9 Endsleigh Gardens London WC1H 0ED email: [email protected]

The views expressed in this paper are entirely the responsibility of the authors and in no sense represent official positions of the Department for International Development (DFID).

-iExecutive Summary 1.

This paper makes a number of important propositions with respect to spatial dimensions of the quest for poverty reduction in low income countries. Some of these are to do with how we interpret notions of rural and urban, and the importance of mobility in contributing to positive processes of economic and social change. Others are to do with the limitations of sector-centred approaches to poverty reduction. Still others are to do with policy environments that inhibit and stifle mobility and exchange due either to wrong notions about their negative effects on the development process, or to generalised blocking behaviours that often seem to occur at the interface between public authority and private action.

2.

An overarching proposition is that mobility has overwhelming positive impacts on processes of change. This is equally true historically as it is today. It is mobility that ensures that labour supply meets labour demand at the junctions of economic systems in which dynamic forward momentum is occurring. It is also mobility that results in the interchange of new ideas across different locations, the acquisition of new knowledge and skills by those who move, the transfer of financial resources back from more dynamic to less dynamic areas, the potential to diversify livelihoods and thereby reduce livelihood risks and vulnerability in both urban and rural areas.

3.

In the context of mobility, it is useful to recognise that the descriptions urban and rural pertain to administrative boundaries that do not reflect patterns and flows of economic activity across space within national economies. Much modern industrial activity occurs in rural spaces: on green field sites, along transport corridors, at ports that may or may not be adjacent to large cities. Likewise, cities can contain significant agricultural activities, and service sub-sectors occur in both urban and rural settings.

4.

There are good reasons for caution regarding the resurgence in interest in agricultural technology as a contributor to poverty reduction in SubSaharan Africa. We have been here before: agronomists working in Africa were no less enthusiastic than their Asia counterparts about the potential for high yielding varieties to act as a vehicle for poverty reduction in the 1970s. Rural families in Africa are heavily engaged in rural-urban interchanges, reflecting an array of disadvantages associated with undue reliance on farming: declining real output prices, limited markets, price instability, high climatic and market risk, absence of rural financial markets, declining farm sizes and so on. Better to build upon and facilitate workable rural-urban mobility than fall back on false expectations about the poverty reducing capabilities of farming on its own.

5.

Mobility is blocked and discouraged by numerous devices and behaviours in low income countries including permits, fees, fines,

- ii roadblocks, registrations and so on. Far from being isolated instances, these behaviours tend to be pervasive and systematic, reflecting deeply entrenched norms of conduct between lower level public officialdom and ordinary citizens. Indeed a powerful reason for becoming a public official is the leverage over private wealth that this bestows, since typical levels of public salaries hardly explain the popularity of these posts. Positive payoffs for poverty reduction could be achieved by recognising this state of affairs in the donor-government deliberations that surround PRSP processes, and beginning to develop an agenda for rolling back such ingrained behaviours. 6.

On policy and DFID priorities, this paper emphasises the myopia of spatially and temporally static modes of thinking about poverty reduction. The fact of large proportions of poverty being located in rural areas does not mean that it is in rural areas that reducing such poverty can be successfully addressed. Indeed, the opposite may often be true: poverty is prevalent in rural areas because economic and social dynamism is at a low ebb in those areas, and is unlikely to improve under any feasible scenario of intervention by government or donors.

7.

Growth processes can be stifled or slowed down just at the point that they might seriously take-off due to wrong strategic thinking by donors and governments about the undesirability of the side effects of growth. Thus the rapid growth of capital cities like a Kampala or a Dar es Salaam that perhaps offer the only prospects of serious poverty reduction in the countries where they are located, is often prematurely curtailed by a failure to support the urban infrastructure necessary to fuel the growth process. Instead, with heads full of populist visions of prosperous peasants, donors fail to address urban growth constraints and instead pour money into the impoverished countryside. It should not be necessary to point out that conditions in the countryside will automatically improve if rapid growth in food demand occurs in fast growing cities.

8.

In general, decisions about what and where to produce are best left to private actors exercising their own agency; what donor organisations like DFID can do is to contribute to the overall climate of facilitation that surrounds such individual decisions. This means supporting and encouraging domestic policies that improve exchange, mobility, communication, information and infrastructure, and discouraging domestic policies that have the reverse of these effects.

9.

Clearly, DFID already makes significant contributions in some of these facilitation areas. Budget support to primary education and healthcare provides valuable momentum to increasing human capital, knowledge, and the capability of individuals to make decisions from a broader set of alternatives. Elsewhere, it is likely that DFID’s contribution is more patchy and mixed; especially when it comes to human mobility and the adverse circumstances under which it typically occurs.

- iii 10. Hence, a particular area in which DFID could potentially make a big difference is that of improving the political and social environment of those on the move. At the moment, migrants, in passing between jurisdictions, are unable to call upon support from public authorities, and are more likely to attract hostility in various forms. A reversal of this thinking would imply an agenda of removing impediments to movement, and providing social protection measures for those on the move. 11. DFID might also consider developing a clear position with respect to enforced human removals from urban areas. Unfortunately there remains quite a strong tendency in low income countries to view unplanned urban settlement by the poor as a problem to be dispensed with, rather than as a challenge to be solved. In general, DFID should be supporting innovative ways of meeting the social challenges posed by the growth of shanty towns and slums and pavement dwellers, and make clear the non-acceptability of enforced removals. 12. In general, the argument of this paper reinforces recent DFID thinking in a number of strategic areas – growth, drivers of change, migration – to the effect that poverty reduction is perhaps not so much to do with supporting spatially and temporally static and stagnating sub-sectors of national economies. Rather it is about running with growth where and when it occurs, and putting DFID’s weight behind removing obstacles to such growth processes and increasing their dynamism. The poor benefit when they have more options to which to turn, and more options are created in the vortex of dynamic growth processes, not in the declining sectors that are left behind.

-1Development Patterns, Mobility and Livelihood Diversification The Misleading Urban-Rural Distinction There is a disjuncture between census data – the geographical distribution of population and workforce between various political-administrative units – and the sectoral or structural distribution of output or employment of a national economy. The geographical map of economic activity and the highly aggregated data of an economic structure have only occasional nonsystematic meeting points. Inferences from, say, the size and distribution of the urban population to the underlying economic structure are therefore necessarily imprecise and speculative. Political-administrative boundaries are not laid down to display economic activity, but the extent of political powers, competences and responsibilities. Indeed, the varying intensity of economic activity is not normally territorially bounded at all. In the same way, the political boundaries of a modern state do not encompass global economic networks, a cluster of which forms what is normally identified as the national economy. Thus, the distinction between urban and rural can only be misleading as a guide to the complex map of interdependent points of production which creates the gross output. Furthermore, the passage of time has attached associations to these terms which are additionally misleading. Thus, it is still possible in the literature to find writers assuming industrial activity has some special relationship to urban areas, when in fact most modern manufacturing is located in green field sites, is “rural” (and in developing countries, much small-scale and household manufacturing is village-based). On the surface, settlement systems appear immensely stable over long periods of time, testifying perhaps to the continuing strength of original locational decisions. However, despite the appearance of stability, what takes place within these settlements and the resultant interactions between them changes as radically as does a modern economy from its past. Settlements as economic systems constitute a set of spatially distributed competitive and complementary junctions in flows – of goods and services, of capital and firms, amd of labour. Conventionally, these junctions are ordered by size of population, and urban geographers have ordered settlements into urban hierarchies. However, size of settlement population is an imperfect proxy for economic function, so the economic role of these hierarchies is not self-evident. Settlements play at least two roles – one meeting the requirements of the local population, the other contributing a specialised output to the national system. However, specialisation is only possible if the costs of transferring goods and services within the system are low (if this is not the case, settlements seek to produce everything at home). It is the mark of a more developed economy, that the degree of spatial integration is high – the costs of domestic transfer are low. This makes possible a much greater degree of locational specialisation. By contrast, in a developing country just starting to

-2industrialise, one city may monopolise virtually all modern activity, producing unprecedented concentrations of population and activity. However, over time, as infrastructure spreads throughout the national territory and literate labour becomes generally available, more elaborate specialisation occurs along with much higher levels of transfer between centres. In developing countries, the story of settlements in the period since the second World War is in the tension between the drive to concentrate (predominant in the 1950s), and, with growing integration of the territory, dispersal. The predominant form of spatial organisation of the modern economy in the twentieth century (in contrast to the nineteenth) is neither urban nor rural , but rather the creation of large concentrated regions, covering both one or more large cities, industrialised towns and villages, peri-urban and agricultural areas (Henderson, 1988), generally clustered along transport corridors. The pattern, spurred by increasing use of motorised transport, can be identified in North America in the period between the wars, and in Europe, in the two decades after the second World War (on the US, see Hawley, 1956; on Europe, Clarke et al.,1960). A comparable pattern emerged in Latin America in the 1960s, exemplified in the emergence of the conurbated zones of Mexico City and Greater Saõ Paulo (Hamer, 1982). As urban areas extended into metropolitan zones, inner city populations declined, often accompanied by the dereliction of the original city core. In the late 1960s, as one of the emerging effects of internationalisation, a boom in offshore export manufacturing reinforced new regional concentrations. For example, the creation of a free trade zone on Mexico’s northern frontier led to a rapid growth in manufacturing for export to the north. This was accelerated by the 1982 depreciation of the peso, and hence the dollar value of Mexican wages – employment in border export production rose from some 200,000 in 1982 to over one million a decade later. Shortly afterwards, the creation of Special Economic Zones to encourage offshore export-manufacturing in China had comparable effects. In the best known case, the new policy led remarkably swiftly to the creation of a large light industrial region, stretching between two very large cities, Hong KongShenzhen and Guangzhou, with a scatter of smaller and larger industrial cities towns and villages between them. In many cases, the laying out of transport corridors led the way to dispersal of manufacturing and population. This appears to be the case in the emergence of a large industrialised region in central India, bounded by Pune, Nasik and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (Harris, 1984; Centre for Policy Research, 2002). Once established, activity and population fills in between the corridors. Higher incomes – in contrast to the 1960s – and so higher levels of bicycle and motor scooter ownership, use of buses, collective taxis etc – permits greater distances between homes and workplaces and increased commuting. The process of dispersal has been encouraged by the spread of infrastructure, of health and educational services, as well as other policies on, for example, the location of industrial estates etc.

-3-

However, the emerging spatial economy rarely corresponds to the old demarcation of administrative boundaries , and thus the distribution of public powers. This powerfully impedes effective public action and planning initiatives, often consigning them to endless disputes between overlapping public agencies (as in the cases of Delhi’s Capital Region or the Central Valley of Mexico). National integration – the spread of communications (and in the case of mobile telephony, to the remotest areas), of power supplies, and of literate labour (through the spread of primary schools), removes some of the factors encouraging economic concentration. It also facilitates much enhanced migration of workers and redistribution of manufacturing capacity from richer to poorer areas. Box 1 presents some examples of the second phenomenon. Box 1 The redistribution of manufacturing capacity. The redistribution of manufacturing capacity is, historically, a key factor is shifting income from richer to poorer areas. Take, as an example, the relocation of the textile and garment (RMG, ready-made garment) industry in India. The industry was heavily concentrated in a few of the largest cities up to the 1960s – Mumbai (with over 200,000 employees), Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Chennai etc.. Over the following two decades, the large mills declined, leaving area of inner city dereliction. Simultaneously, a small scale power-loom industry arose (supplying cloth to a small scale RMG industry), in, for example the peripheral townships of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (Bhiwandi, Malegaon, Ishalkaranyi etc), in Surat near Ahmedabad, and in five urban-rural clusters near the old mill city of Coimbatore. Simultaneously , the location changed (inner big city to metropolitan periphery townships or rural areas), the scale (from large to small), the size of company, the relationship to village household outsourcing, the communal affiliations of the workforce and the source of migration. Surat – in Gujerat – recruited some 200,000 migrant workers from the other side of India, Orissa. It is not clear why Orissa, with some of the lowest wages in India did not, in reverse, attract Gujerati businessmen. The locational changes cannot easily be separated from (i) a government reservation of RMG manufacture to the small-scale sector; (ii) tight control of imports (Roy, 1993, 1996, 1998).

2. Mobility, Migration and Labour Markets A key feature of the interactions of rural and urban areas in developing countries is human mobility. It is migration of labour, and the associated flow of remittances, that contributes simultaneously to the growth processes observed at the junctions of the spatial economy and improves the livelihood security of those who remain resident in rural or urban areas. Contrary to popular conceptions, permanent rural to city migration within nation states, or

-4south to north migration internationally, comprise small proportions of labour mobility overall. By far the greatest proportion of mobility comprises daily, weekly, variable, commuting, circular and seasonal movements, of varying distances and durations, within national space and across the borders of adjacent countries. Patterns of labour movement are more aptly characterised as ‘ceaseless circulation’ between different and changing workplaces and occupations (Harris et al., 1996) rather than by reference to stereotypes like rural-urban migration, even though such typologies may be useful for some purposes. Patterns of mobility reveal much about the labour markets that stimulate them to occur. In agrarian settings, a considerable proportion of economic activity is seasonal in character, to do with the cultivation and harvesting peaks of different crops in different locations. This can create circumstances in which truly massive seasonal movements of labour occur, as exemplified by the travel of harvesting labour from poorer Indian states to West Bengal for the rice harvest (Rogaly & Rafique, 2003). However, just as peak labour demand in agriculture stimulates both rural and urban workers to move to the locations of these peaks, so also does the agricultural slack season create conditions in which rural workers seek temporary non-farm jobs in the urban, industrial or service economies. Circular migration of this type is prevalent and welldocumented for many parts of the world. Examples are movements in West Africa from the interior to the coastal zones in the agricultural off-season (David et al., 1995) and migration of poor workers with their families to Delhi’s brick kilns (Gupta, 2003). In theory it might be useful to be able to separate circular and temporary movements of people from those occurring permanently due to structural economic change. However, neither data nor the realities of migration correspond to such a neat dichotomy. For one thing, at the individual or family level, successive temporary movements may lead to eventual more permanent relocation. For another, at the sector level, the establishment of a rapidly growing manufacturing sector has also been dependent on migrant labour, for example, the textile mills of Mumbai, or those of Shanghai (Davin, 1999: 99) or Mexico’s export processing zones. The gender composition of mobility is a separate issue. It cannot readily be deduced from prior principles (Schenk-Sanbergen, 1985; Sharpe, 2001). It is true that some distinguishing patterns occur: in Sub-Saharan Africa migration of all types is a predominantly male phenomenon, much of it temporary in character, with a tendency for female migration to be restricted to particular labour markets like domestic service in urban centres. In general here women, the elderly and children stay at the farm residence while men circulate for varying periods. Elsewhere, the rising demand for domestic labour long dominated migration in Latin America, as it also does today in migration from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to the Persian Gulf. Where growth in manufacturing processes occur that are considered by employers to require female aptitudes (“nimble fingers”), migration opportunities for women into the urban or non-farm economy can outstrip that of men. However, there are infinite variations between these experiences. Women sometimes dominate in

-5seasonal migrations related to particular types of agricultural harvest – for example, Lesotho women to South Africa for the asparagus season (Crush & Macdonald, 2002) - while men may dominate in types of manufacturing in some countries that in other countries are dominated by women. There is growing evidence of the importance of remittances in supporting the livelihoods of those that stay behind when some family members migrate. A comparative review of empirical work on rural household income portfolios in Sub-Saharan Africa by Reardon (1997) found that on average 15 per cent of rural incomes was accounted for by remittances. The same review came up with the then surprising figure that 50 per cent of rural household income portfolios in Sub-Saharan Africa were accounted for by “non-farm” activities or income sources of one kind or another. This average proportion has subsequently been verified by new studies (e.g. Ellis & Freeman, 2004). A study of remittance income in the circular migration to the Persian Gulf from rural Sri Lanka found that this corresponded to 25 per cent of rural incomes in the sample (reported in von Braun & Pandya-Lorch, 1991). Replacement migration may occur as a result of this type of international migration, as exemplified by Bihari farm labourers migrating to the Punjab to cultivate the land of emigrants, or Tamilnad migrant construction workers moving to Kerala to replace Malayalam emigrant construction workers in the Gulf (Zachariah et al., 2002) A ‘back-of-the envelope’ calculation helps to indicate the potential significance of remittances (Ellis, 2003). For the 1.2 billion people living on or under US$1 per day (World Bank, 2002); 15 per cent of income would represent about US$50 per person per year; or US$60 billion aggregated across all of them. Of course, this leap in the dark has flaws: remittances accrue unevenly to poor and not-so-poor people so only a proportion of aggregate flows would represent the difference between destitution and getting by for people in the vicinity of the poverty line. However, it illustrates rather forcefully how an apparently quite small amount of remittance money (US$50 per year) can tip the balance between being persistently poor and being able potentially to exit from poverty. Separately, remittances to countries of origin of the 175 million people living and working outside their countries of birth (UN, 2002) are estimated at around US$100 million per year or more. Probably around 60 per cent of this figure represents financial transfers to developing countries (Nyberg et al. 2002a; 2002b). Several observers make the point that this is more than official development assistance flows (US$51 billion in 2001: OECD, 2002: Table 1). Unrecorded flows and transfers in kind could more than double the orders of magnitude cited. Furthermore, differences in purchasing power parities substantially raise the real value of these transfers in destination countries. The multiplier effects of the expenditure of such funds can thus be of considerable economic significance. For some Chinese evidence on domestic transfers, reported by the Financial Times see Box 2. In rural settings, mobility holds the key to solving the twin vulnerability factors of seasonality and risk that predispose poor people to high degrees of livelihood insecurity. Seasonality causes what is known as the ‘consumption smoothing’ problem (Morduch, 1995), meaning that income flows, for example

-6from crop production, are highly uneven relative to the constant needs of food consumption. Migrations of household members to take advantage of differing seasonal patterns of farm production, and of non-farm jobs in the off-season, are routine responses to the seasonality problem. For food insecure households, out-migration of family members in the peak food deficit season may be essential for the survival of the resident group that stays behind by reducing the number of people to feed (Toulmin, 1992: 51; Devereux, 1993: 53)

Box 2 : Remittances in China A Chinese Ministry of Agriculture sample survey of 20,089 rural households estimates that, in 2004, the remittance contribution by migrant workers to rural household incomes is about to overtake earnings from agriculture. The estimated 98 million rural out-migrants remitted in 2003 some Rmb 370 billion (at the official exchange rate, £24 billion), an 8.8 per cent increase on a year earlier, or 40 per cent of the average rural household income of Rmb 2,618 (to which agriculture contributed just over 60 per cent). Remittances sustained rural consumption, and in particular demand for manufactured consumer durables (television sets, air conditioning units, washing machines, motor cycles etc), the rural demand for which increased by 17 per cent in 2003. The average annual earnings of migrant workers were put at Rmb 3,768. Financial Times, 26th Feb. 2004).

Risk mitigation is also a critical factor that predisposes households towards mobile livelihood strategies. For urban households, risks tend to be related to job insecurity. For rural households, risks are particularly related to natural shocks (floods, drought etc.). All households, whether rural or urban, are prone to the personal shocks of chronic illness (incl. HIV/AIDS), accidents, and death. Risks are reduced by diversifying livelihoods, and mobility is the main, but not the only means of doing this. Diversification can, to some degree, occur in situ, for example by diversifying cropping patterns on farms or by combining farm and non-farm activities in the same location; however, there may in practice be limited potential to do this, so that migration offers the only effective alternative to reduce risk. For rural dwellers, risk reduction can only occur by spreading risk across assets and activities that have different types of risk associated with them, and local diversification can rarely achieve this, because agriculture-related activities like crop processing or trading also collapse when harvests collapse. In order to move out of poverty, poor households have to increase the assets that they can deploy productively in order to generate higher incomes. Numerous studies have observed that moving out of poverty is a cumulative process, often achieved in tiny increments, and constantly vulnerable to counter factors which threaten a return to poverty (Krishna et.al, 2003). Assets are traded up in sequence, for example, chickens to goats, to cattle, to land;

-7or, cash from non-farm income to farm inputs to higher farm income to land or to livestock (Ellis & Mdoe, 2003). It is also well established that a critical constraint slowing down or preventing such ‘virtuous spirals’ is the inability to borrow or to generate cash (often discussed under the rubric of credit market failures). Earnings or remittances from migration therefore can play a pivotal role in initiating and sustaining such cumulative processes. As illustrated above the cash flows in order to do this do not have to be large. When the poor are defined as those getting by on under the equivalent of a dollar per day worth of consumption per person, very small amounts of additional cash can make huge differences to the options available to people to get a toehold on ladders out of poverty. The connections discussed in preceding paragraphs are summarised in Figure 1 below, which attempts to display the fundamental ways that migration and remittances can help to reduce vulnerability and poverty for people trying to put together adequate and improving livelihoods. With respect to assets in rural areas in particular, the following list represents some of the positive ways that earnings and remittances from migration can strengthen livelihoods: (a) investment in land, or land improvements, incl. reclaiming previously degraded land (Tiffen et al, 1994 provided one of the better-known examples of this) (b) purchase of cash inputs to agriculture (hired labour, disease control etc), resulting in better cultivation practices and higher yields (Evans & Ngau, 1991; Carter, 1997) (c) investment in agricultural implements or machines (water pumps, ploughs etc) (d) investment in education, resulting in better prospects for the next generation (Francis & Hoddinott, 1993; Hoddinott, 1994) (e) investment in assets permitting local non-farm income to be generated (bicycle taxi, motorbike, milling machine, kiosk etc.) In a recent set of rural livelihood studies in east and southern Africa, Ellis & Freeman (2004) found that net farm income per hectare (a measure of agricultural productivity) was closely correlated with household per capita incomes that were in turn closely correlated with the proportion of total household income obtained from non-farm sources. The summary results by income quartile across four countries are provided in Table 1. It is observed that the net farm income of the top income quartile varies between 3 and 6 times of the bottom income quartile, illustrating the cumulatively beneficial effects of mobility and diversification on the different components of diverse livelihood portfolios. The consensus of recent literature on migration is to emphasise these positive rather than negative attributes of mobility (de Haan, 1999; Skeldon, 2002; 2003). This is not to say that there are never any downsides to mobility, rather that careful consideration of its positive effects on livelihoods outweigh purported negative effects, and adverse factors are susceptible to being

-8Table 1: Net Agricultural Output per Ha, by Income Quartile, Four African Countries (US$/ha)

Country

I 131 81 18 135

Uganda Tanzania Malawi Kenya

Income Quartile II III 215 295 108 156 44 84 266 358

IV 487 381 109 430

Ratio IV:I 3.7 4.7 6.0 3.2

Source: Ellis & Freeman (2004: 18) addressed by policy. Mobile populations are the norm in human history, not the exception. Mobility contributes to the cross-fertilization of ideas, it changes the skills and capabilities of those who travel, it provides labour to growth processes when and where they occur, and it strengthens the livelihoods of those who stay at home through remittances and theie potential to broaden the asset base. Figure 1: Positive Links Between Migration and Improving Livelihoods MIGRATION REMITTANCES increasing

HUMAN CAPITAL (LABOUR)

reducing

ASSETS

RISK SEASONALITY

reducing

VULNERABILITY

POVERTY

LIVELIHOODS IMPROVING

Source: Ellis (2003) Recent literature has also emphasized mobility as a social process, not just a matter of economic decision making (de Haan, 1999; de Haan & Rogaly, 2002; Kothari, 2003a). Migration patterns are often observed to correspond more closely to historical and cultural criteria than to short-term economic

-9calculation (for example, dockworkers in a particular port will often originate from a cluster of adjacent rural villages, and their circulation is facilitated by being able to replace returning workers by new ones from the same communities; for a century, the same phenomenon governed Mumbai’s textile mills and the migrant source area, Ratnagiri). Likewise, the nature of implicit contracts between migrants and their resident families is deeply rooted in culture and society, and consequently vary substantially in different places according to these norms. These views are comparatively recent, and have not necessarily taken hold amongst opinion formers and policy advisers in national governments. An earlier literature tended to be negative, seeing permanent settlement as the acceptable norm and movement as resulting from unacceptable stress (chronic deprivation and livelihoods collapse), and leading to negative social and economic consequences. To understand this position, it is necessary to revisit development preoccupations of the 1960s and 1970s, and the strategic policy recommendations that flowed from them (e.g. Todaro, 1969). There was a powerful perception that migrants from rural areas would flood into cities, putting unmanageable stress on urban services and infrastructure, swelling the ranks of the unemployed (where ‘employment’ was defined as a full-time job in a modern industry), and causing rising crime and civil disorder. Allied to this was a growing conviction through the 1970s that in a low income economy growth and poverty reduction were simultaneously best achieved by investing in technical change in small-farm agriculture (Mellor, 1976; Lipton, 1977). This proposition is enjoying a current resurgence in relation to tackling rural poverty in Africa, and we return to it in due course. The particular argument was also advanced that migration would deplete the rural economy of its more skilled and innovative individuals, leaving the less forward-thinking behind (Lipton, 1980). This is evidently quite at odds with the evidence cited earlier regarding the skills enhancing effects of mobility, and reflects the limited view then held of migration as a one way process rather than the continuous interchanges that are nowadays understood to characterise spatially and temporally different labour markets. These earlier overarching policy ideas cast long shadows and it is not unusual to see them restated in PRSPs written in the early 2000s. As revealed in a survey of PRSPs conducted by the Centre for Migration Research at Sussex University and reported by Black et al. (2003: pp.18-19), mobility is especially ill represented in PRSPs. Out of 48 PRSPs examined, 21 made no mention at all of migration. Nearly all the remaining PRSPs referred to migration in negative or pejorative terms. Nine of them, for example, blamed international migration for causing “brain drain”, 17 posed internal migration as a problem for development, eight cast migration as a cause of urban poverty, and others pointed to the negative effects of migration in spreading HIV-AIDS and contributing to crime. Eight PRSPs expressed the need for internal migration to be actively controlled by the state i.e. for rural-urban migration to be curtailed or reduced.

- 10 The contemporary approach identifies a rather different set of downsides to migration than the earlier literature, and ones that do not lend themselves quite so much to generalised negative strategic views. The adverse experiences of migrants themselves (weak social status, harassment, violence, debt bondage, lack of redress against mistreatment by employers and public officials) are usefully distinguished from the roles that migration can play in reducing vulnerability and poverty, as detailed earlier. They are susceptible to reversal by changes in social policy that recognise migrants’ rights and elevate their social status in the policy domain; and by the growth of NGO, trade union and press monitoring activity. Interestingly, the Chinese public authorities have embraced the potential benefits of migration with enthusiasm, even to the point of training would-be migrants at locations of origin (see Box 3), a phenomenon so far restricted to international migration, with the Philippines training numbers of nurses and merchant navy personnel well in excess of expected local demand. A different argument is that the truly poor are unable to participate in labour markets that require mobility, due the transaction costs involved (transport, food, bribes, permits). It is inferred that the gains from labour mobility accrue to the better off rather than the poor. This argument has some merit: migration requires resources itself to occur, and the more distant the migration contemplated, the higher the initial investment that must be made. However, it over-emphasises costly migrations (especially international ones) relative to the types of migration in which the poor are heavily engaged (seasonal and circular migrations). It also excludes possible indirect benefits to the poor (more employment, more cash in circulation), that occur when some members of their communities receive and spend remittance income from relatives in cities or abroad. The proposition has also been made that under certain circumstances migration may impoverish, or keep going the chronic poverty of, those who stay behind (Kothari, 2003b). This argument chiefly applies to societies where male out-migration predominates, and where fragmentary evidence points to low levels of remittances. However, in poor rural societies prone to food insecurity, such migration is almost always found to ensure the food security of those left behind even if it does not appear to achieve much else (e.g. David et al, 1995). The counterfactual problem looms large in such discussion, since the circumstances that would prevail in the absence of migration and remittances remains obscure. Flows of remittance income are often underestimated, since they are returned home through multiple channels, and neither senders nor recipients have an interest in declaring to outsiders (i.e. researchers) the full amounts that are involved, even if accurate recollection permitted this to happen. In summary of the arguments of this section, mobility is an integral part of the livelihoods of the poor (and the not-so-poor) in low income countries. This mobility reflects the spatial and temporal mismatch between the residential location of individuals and families and the location and dynamics of labour markets. In predominantly agrarian societies, seasonality on its own helps to explain a considerable proportion of such mobility, as also does risk

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Box 3. Training Migrants in China The provincial labour bureau of Anhui province (population 63 million) estimate the province contains 6 million “surplus workers” (in addition to the six million already working outside the province). Major efforts are therefore being made by various provincial agencies, led by the Employment Service Centre in Hefei, to train and place workers in employment outside the province; thus, for example, offering training schemes for maids to work in Shanghai and other big cities. The province maintains agents in six major cities with responsibility for identifying job opportunities (particularly factory and construction work), notifying the province to identify and train workers for these jobs, supplying them and offering the workers some measure of protection against abuse. Efforts began in 1996, when two provincial officials were sent to Shanghai to “cold call” companies listed in the telephone directory, offer workers, and place advertisements in the Shanghai press. The province estimates the resulting remittance flow at roughly Rmb 24 billion in 2002. The province sees itself as competing closely with two other provinces: Henan: 11.64 million migrant workers (4.5 million working outside the province) and Rmb.40 billion remittances; Sichuan: 13.07 million migrant workers (6 million outside the province) and Rmb.43 remittances; Anhui : 6.03 million migrant workers (5 million outside the province) and Rmb.24 billion remittances. Ben Dolven (2003), Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong), 27th Feb

mitigation. An emerging view marshals an overwhelming array of arguments in favour of mobility, and therefore places emphasis on facilitating migration and improving the social conditions under which it occurs, rather than placing barriers in its way. This view runs counter to earlier orthodoxies in development policy that were opposed to migration, and that tend to resurface in strategic documents like PRSPs, revealing significantly unhelpful policy stances for poverty reduction. 3. Poverty, Economic Sectors and Location In general, the central junction points of the system usually reflect the overall growth of the economy most directly. Even where the source of growth is

- 12 spatially remote from the cities – in, for example, the opening up of new raw material sources. revenues flow back through the cities, sustaining the supporting services and consumption for such activities. Fluctuations in the national economy are reflected in the rate of growth of cities, in the volume of migration, and, depending on the urban housing and land markets, in the rate of growth of slums and shanty towns (and in variations in district population densities, see Harris, 1978). Location is thus critical to the ability to exploit the opportunities of growth. Those of the poor population who are concentrated in and around the great junction points of the system (or in the regions or corridors associated with those junctions) have, other things being equal, the greatest opportunity to gain from higher rates of economic growth, to be able to earn and accumulate assets, to escape the problems of debt and improve household welfare, which improves their capacity to further exploit the opportunities of growth (and insofar as the density of educational facilities is higher in urban areas, the next generation has much greater chances to escape poverty). In addition, the dynamic opportunities of urban areas give greater protection against the deleterious effects of economic shock. Furthermore, a diversified urban labour market offers unrivalled opportunities to change jobs and occupations, to diversify income sources and secure upward mobility. Thus, the urbanisation of the poor implicit in general urbanisation has the potential to bring many more of the poor to the locations most favourable to overcoming poverty. However, this is not saying very much. Economic growth is never a uniform expansion of all sectors together (but rather the disproportionate growth of some, the relative contraction of others). Precisely where a particular poor family stands, by skill as well as by opportunity, relative to these changes of structure becomes therefore more important than simply being urban-based. Furthermore, the bulk of the urban poor, by aptitude, experience and education, work in what we might call the “secondary economy” - jobs which depend on the multiplier effects of changes in the industries which export goods and services - construction, market loading and portering, water carrying, cleaning, rag-picking and scavenging, hotels and restaurants, domestic services and other activities included under casual labour. Despite their spatial location, many of the urban poor may not be able to take full advantage of the opportunities of growth. On the other hand, spectacular growth, by world standards, as with India’s Bangalore, has gone with a doubling in the slum and squatter population – from 1.12 million in 1991 to 2.2 million in 1998/9, a period in which poverty in the State of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is a part, fell from 54 to 33 per cent (Chowdhury, 2003). The slum or squatter population is not a reliable measure of poverty so much as an indication of the malfunctioning of housing, land and/or construction industries; but it is often a clear indication of the failure of public authorities to anticipate the timely provision of basic infrastructure. Poverty was also identified as crucially related to location in the past, but in a different sense. Overcrowding was seen as fundamental to poverty , whether

- 13 in terms of overcrowded city slums or densely populated rural areas (with a high ‘man-land ratio’). More generally, maldistribution of population was seen as the primary source of those deleterious “imbalances” plaguing developing countries – the shortage of adequate services, congested streets, poor housing, squatting and slums. In general, cities suffered from ‘overpopulation’, ‘over-urbanisation’, ‘population saturation’. Some planners devoted themselves to identifying the ‘optimum size of city’ as an intellectual foundation to reducing their size. In sum, poverty and other manifest urban problems were locational questions, and could be answered, or at least ameliorated, through population relocation. Remedies flowed from diagnosis. The control of land uses, the creation of functional urban zoning and population density targets in the city, attempts to limit in-migration (and in some cases expel in-migrants) went with attempts to decentralise economic activity (particularly manufacturing) and population to smaller settlements and/or remote rural regions. A UN survey in 1981 (UN, 1984) found that of the 126 governments in developing countries surveyed, 123 were dissatisfied with their existing population distribution – seeing it as one of the most important problems facing them. Three quarters of them claimed to be pursuing policies to slow or reverse migration and pursue population decentralisation. Draconian resettlement policies were followed in some countries and historical periods, notably in Cambodia (under the Khmer Rouge), Indonesia (the transmigrasi project), and China. For the unwilling recipients of these policies – slum dwellers, for example, lifted up by force and dropped in a remote rural area – it was a painful and costly process. Many trickled back to where work was available, in the big cities. New towns and improved small and intermediate cities turned out to have high costs per household rehoused and limited ability to attract a viable employment base. In sum, the spatial economy had an economic logic which defied the theoretical aspirations of the planners. Shifting populations to places where they did not want to be was expensive and yielded negligible economic benefits; even though they may have served particular political ends at the time. A more sophisticated approach to these issues emerged in the structural adjustment lending programmes of the 1980s. If import-substitution programmes turned the urban-rural terms of trade so that rural output was artificially rendered cheap compared to urban output, then export-oriented marke liberalisation would restore the proper differentials leading to either a reduction in rural-urban migration or migration in the opposite direction (see for example, the ‘Berg Report’ – World Bank, 1981). Empirically, whether this indeed occurred is difficult to test, but such evidence as exists does not verify that liberalisation had these effects, and indeed the removal of agricultural support policies almost certainly caused opposing consequences – an acceleration in the exodus from rural areas (on the Tanzanian case, see Cowan, 1992; also see Bryceson & Jamal, 1997; Bryceson, 2004). The arguments of much of this paper show that it is not very helpful to treat ‘rural areas’ as undifferentiated territories that exhibit definitively distinct

- 14 features from ‘urban areas’. Global poverty data tends to suggest that 70 per cent of the world’s poor live in rural areas i.e. about 0.8 billion people (IFAD, 2001; World Bank, 2003). But what exactly does this mean? Aside from the classification problem (the definition of an urban area, an arbitrary administrative entity, may vary from 5,000 to 50,000 people in different countries), a main argument put forward in this paper is that patterns of growth, dynamism and opportunity vary across space in both rural and urban areas. This also suggests that no single formula can guarantee rapid poverty reduction in either urban or rural areas. For at least thirty years, if not more, it has been thought that poverty in rural areas would best be tackled by raising productivity in agriculture. Intellectually, the origins of this emphasis can be traced to influential agricultural development economists such as John Mellor whose writings from the early 1960s focused on small-farm agriculture as a source of economic growth (Johnston & Mellor, 1961; Mellor, 1966; 1976). Mellor went on to be Director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) during the 1980s, and IFPRI remains to this day an organisation that consistently advocates rural poverty reduction through rising agricultural productivity on small farms (e.g. Delgado et al. 1998; IFPRI, 2002). The interlocking components that comprise this agriculture-centred argument include the labour-intensity of small farm production, the scale neutrality of yield increasing new seeds (Lipton & Longhurst, 1989), and the linkages to other sectors that can result from agricultural growth, namely forward linkages (marketing and processing of farm outputs), backward linkages (supply of inputs to farmers) and consumption linkages (expenditure by farmers on nonfarm consumption goods). Taken together these components comprise the ‘regional growth linkage’ or ‘rural growth linkage’ model (e.g. Hazell & Haggblade, 1993), and they lead to the notion that small-farm agriculture could be the driver not just of agricultural growth itself, but indeed of much larger, economy-wide, processes of economic transformation (e.g. Johnston & Kilby, 1975; Tomich et al., 1995). The Green Revolution in rice and wheat that occurred from the early 1970s onwards in Asia and Latin America seemed to provide substantive verification of these propositions about the ‘growth with equity’ attributes of small-farm agriculture. When transposed to the present day, and particularly when applied to SubSaharan Africa, this conventional wisdom runs into some serious difficulties. First, real international prices of agricultural commodities have halved since the 1970s, partly but not only due to industrial country farm support policies and export subsidies (Maxwell, 2004). Second, domestic markets for food grains in fact turn out to be rather limited: in an average sized African economy it only takes a reasonably good harvest of a food staple like maize to occur for prices to decline to levels that make farming relatively unattractive amongst competing activities. While international food security experts are preoccupied with those instances when food output fails to meet national requirements, the more common occurrence of quite sufficient domestic food production even without ‘Green Revolution’ yield gains passes relatively

- 15 unremarked. Little point, then, in pushing for higher yielding technologies when markets do not exist for the increased outputs that would then pertain. Third, the Asian Green Revolution was predicated on comprehensive agricultural support policies that have been dismantled and disallowed in the post-liberalisation dispensation originating in the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s. In those days there were fixed prices, floor prices, buffer stocks, fertilizer subsidies, credit subsidies and public irrigation schemes, all paid for by the state or by donors, and none of these policy instruments are available in the current lexicon of acceptable public sector interventions in rural areas. Fourth, in many of the more densely settled agricultural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, successive land sub-divisions at inheritance have had the effect of bringing agriculture to the point where even under the best conditions it can only provide a part livelihood, and is certainly unable to provide a livelihood for the next rural generation. Rural livelihoods research in Sub-Saharan Africa arrives at a different conclusion from the agriculture-centred enthusiasts. A combination of all the disadvantageous factors accruing to reliance on agriculture – subsidy removal, low prices, unstable prices, elevated risks, too small farm sizes – result in a process that has been described as ‘deagrarianization’ (Bryceson & Jamal, 1997; Bryceson, 2004). People, as they say, ‘vote with their feet’ and in SSA, agriculture tends to be taking a secondary role as the occupation of choice whenever plausible alternative present themselves, such that members of rural resident families are increasingly mobile and involved in rural-urban interactions. In addition, the relationship of poverty and vulnerability to these livelihood patterns turns out to be less obvious than is sometimes supposed (Ellis & Freeman, 2004). The rural poorest and most vulnerable are those most dependent on agriculture, and, indeed, those most dependent on food crop production within agriculture. As discussed in the previous section, the rural best off are least dependent on agriculture, but they also attain by far the highest levels of farm output per hectare since they are able to utilise cash generated from non-farm activities in order to hire labour and purchase cash inputs to farming. The agriculture-centred thesis is in effect stood on its head: rising farm yields follow rather than initiate non-farm employment and earnings, due to the circular flow of financial resources that non-farm incomes facilitate. Clearly, poverty policies should be seeking to address these realities, and to discover within them levers that can support mobile people in their own efforts to improve their livelihood circumstances, rather than trying to impose the theoretically neat but empirically dubious elevation of agriculture as the primary motor of poverty reduction in rural areas. It seems particularly clear that rising crop production cannot be a vehicle for poverty reduction in economies where urban and non-farm growth has stalled, providing negligible growth in demand either for food staples or for higher value crops. Moreover, stalled non-farm growth also constrains the poverty and vulnerability-reducing impacts of mobility described in the previous section.

- 16 -

4. The Policy Environment: Barriers to Rural-Urban Interactions Several things are established so far in this paper. Perhaps the most important of these are the overarching beneficial effects of mobility and ruralurban interchanges. In policy terms, it is disastrous to seek to prevent the poor escaping poor areas. In parallel with this is the important notion that rapid economic change takes place at junctions and flows and corridors, and is neither described by nor usefully distinguished for policy purposes into mutually exclusive zones that separate the urban from the rural. Then various reasons are advanced for mistrusting a conventional narrative that equates rural poverty reduction with technical efforts to raise yields in agriculture. We have already seen that except in rare cases (recent experience in China being one of them) there is an overwhelming policy disposition to discourage mobility and migration. This occurs most evidently on the international stage where negative connotations abound. International labour mobility is truly the Cinderella of globalisation (Ellis, 2003). While worldwide agreements and treaties cover mobility of goods, services and capital, and are refined and updated continuously at regular global meetings, no such global institutions exist for labour. Instead there is a patchwork quilt of differing organisations covering different categories of populations on the move, and a host of bilateral and individual country policies that operate in different ways in different places. Over the past twenty years, the overall tone has turned to one of hostility, and, from the viewpoint of opinion-forming amongst industrial country citizens, confusing and contradictory images of international migrants emanate from government press notices and the media. Refugees and legitimate asylum seekers are confused with so-called illegal immigrants, and these are confused in turn with the deliberate recruitment from abroad of nurses, doctors, teachers and IT specialists (Nyberg et al., 2002a; 2002b). Unfortunately, this position scarcely improves on moving from the international to the national scale. Reference has already been made to the generally negative perceptions of internal migration that appear in PRSPs (Black et al., 2003). Migrants are often regarded as second-class citizens to permanent residents, their human rights when on the move are trampled upon, and public officials implicitly connive with private agents in perpetuating the degrading conditions in which migrants frequently find themselves. The problem goes wider, however, than the fairly well-documented harassments of people who are instantly identifiable as migrants from their places of origin and destination, and the kind of work that they go to do. There is a far more general, but much less obvious, tendency to block the mobility of people and goods in normal times and local areas, and on a daily and weekly basis rather than just when large scale movements are going on. An instinct for control overrides any consideration of the positive contribution to economic dynamism of people on the move.

- 17 Recent research on rural livelihoods in selected Sub-Saharan African countries (Ellis & Freeman, 2004) suggests that local level institutional contexts often hinder and block rather than facilitate and encourage people’s own efforts to move out of poverty. Blockages can be divided between two main categories: those that are legally sanctioned, such as by-laws, licensing regulations and local level taxes; and those that take the form of arbitrary small-scale abuses of power between people in authority roles and ordinary citizens e.g. payments required in order ‘to stay on the right side of authority’ when starting up or continuing a small business, fake prohibitions on livestock movements or fishing boats created in order to extract fees, gratuities demanded by chiefs for rights of access to certain resources, fees required to secure public services that should be delivered free and so on. Detailed work undertaken on local taxation systems in several African countries (Fjeldstad, 2001a; 2001b; 2002) found that the relationship between officialdom, including ‘traditional authority’ (chiefs, village leaders), and private citizens often has the aspect of predator and prey rather than the governmentcitizen guise in which it is typically cloaked. In low income SSA countries there are causal factors that help to explain this. The period from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s saw a most profound real erosion in public sector salaries and conditions of service in all SSA countries (Jamal & Weeks, 1993). One of several downstream side-effects of this has been an ubiquitous propensity to view private sector activity, however small and fragile, as a potential source of supplementary income generation. It has been observed in a South Asia context that the institutional arrangements that arise under such conditions are full of contradictory behaviours on both sides of the public-private divide, with detrimental implications for poverty reduction in the long run (Wood, 2003). Blockages often take the form of impediments to mobility and to engagement in spatially diverse transactions. Mobility of people is discouraged by permits, fees, fines, roadblocks, harassment, and, for women, cultural and religious prohibitions. Mobility is also discouraged by lack of security, theft, and physical assault that are more likely to be experienced by the poor than by other strata of rural or urban society. “Multiple shaking down” is an expression encountered in Kenya that captures the numerous small costs and indignities that ordinary citizens, and the poor in particular, confront as they go about trying to construct better livelihoods for their families (Freeman et al., 2004). It summarises rather aptly an attribute of government-citizen relations that stifles the kind of dynamic rural-urban interactions that could lead to more people finding exit routes from poverty. A question mark has to be placed over decentralisation as a vehicle for overcoming these public sector behaviours towards private mobility and exchange. Decentralisation policies are currently being pursued with varying degrees of enthusiasm, or lack of it, in a large number of Sub-Saharan African countries. In the literature, a major reason given for decentralisation is the political demand for greater autonomy arising from distinct localities within a country (Manor, 1999; Blair, 2000; Johnson, 2001). This provides a feeble explanation of an apparent rush to decentralise across countries with distinct

- 18 economic, political and social histories. Rather, decentralisation in SSA seems to represent for donors a line of attack on poor governance, partly by reducing the command over resources of central government, and partly with a view to creating space for ordinary citizens to have more ‘voice’ in public decisionmaking processes (Crook & Manor, 1998). Governments in SSA countries are going along with this to the extent that they have found it convenient to do so, and in forms that have suited their own political strengths and weaknesses. While on the face of it decentralisation is about devolving power to district levels, improving democracy and participation, and adapting service delivery to local priorities, decentralisation also creates political and bureaucratic entities that are able to pass and enforce by-laws and collect taxes in order to contribute to their budgets and running costs. Most of the literature views these powers from the viewpoint of strengthening nascent district councils, and improving the revenue “yield” that will enable them to function with increased autonomy from central government in the future (Bird, 1990; Manor, 1999). Yet these powers may result in increased tax and license burdens that still further impoverish local citizens, and stifle exchange and mobility in the district economy (Francis & James, 2003). Recent investigations in Uganda (Bahiigwa et al., 2004), found that local taxes distorted relative prices, fell more on the poor than the better off, were prone to massive leakage between collection and delivery, failed to create linkages to service delivery, and were mainly (90 per cent) used for councillor’s sitting allowances rather than provision of new or improved services. 5. Policy Priorities Arising Many policy conclusions relevant to DFID priorities as an aid donor flow from the ideas and analysis contained in this paper: (1)

Poverty can seldom be addressed simply by going to the residential location where particular concentrations of the poor are found: routes out of poverty fundamentally involve exchange and mobility, and there is no point in trying to support particular sub-branches of production at the micro scale, whether in rural or urban areas, with incomplete knowledge of the spatial flows and economic networks that may, or may not, make such sub-branches viable. For example, a classic and oft-repeated mistake is to promote enthusiastically the adoption of a new high value crop by farmers that turns out to have a severely limited market, and therefore has no future as a serious motor of rural poverty reduction. Parallel efforts in slum areas to train people in particular skills rarely relate to what is needed in the labour market.

(2)

In general, decisions about what and where to produce are best left to private actors exercising their own agency; what donor organisations like DFID can do is to contribute to the overall climate of facilitation that surrounds such individual decisions. This means supporting and encouraging domestic policies that improve exchange, mobility,

- 19 communication, information and infrastructure, and domestic policies that have the reverse of these effects.

discouraging

(3)

Clearly, DFID already makes significant contributions in some of these facilitation areas. Budget support to primary education and healthcare provides valuable momentum to increasing human capital, knowledge, and the capability of individuals to make decisions from a broader set of alternatives. Elsewhere, it is likely that DFID’s contribution is more patchy and mixed; especially when it comes to human mobility and the adverse circumstances under which it typically occurs.

(4)

Growth processes can be stifled or slowed down just at the point that they might seriously take-off due to wrong strategic thinking by donors and governments about the undesirability of the side effects of growth. Thus the rapid growth of capital cities like a Kampala or a Dar es Salaam that perhaps offer the only prospects of serious poverty reduction in the countries where they are located, is often prematurely curtailed by a failure to support the urban infrastructure necessary to fuel the growth process. Instead, with heads full of populist visions of prosperous peasants, donors fail to address urban growth constraints and instead pour money into the impoverished countryside. It should not be necessary to point out that conditions in the countryside will automatically improve if rapid growth in food demand occurs in fast growing cities.

(5)

A particular area in which DFID could potentially make a big difference is that of improving the political and social environment of those on the move. At the moment, migrants, in passing between jurisdictions, are in general unable to call upon support from public authorities. Local authorities in source areas have no interest in – and little capacity for tracking the outward movement of their citizens, and local authorities in receiving areas are as likely as not to regard in-migrants as a blight, to be resisted or expelled. Only specialised NGOs are likely therefore to assume any responsibility. A key policy issue here is to persuade the relevant levels of government of the vital importance of migration to sending and receiving areas, to the country as a whole and to the migrants themselves. This would imply an agenda of removing impediments to movement and a commitment to avoiding enforced human removals, as in the clearance of squatter settlements, pavementdwellers or relocation schemes (this is now generally accepted in developing countries although sometimes over-zealous public officials still repeat the same errors).

(6)

A more precise agenda of social protection measures for migrants can be drawn up, bearing in mind that the relevance of these will differ widely across different situations: 

health problems of migrants and their families; the possibility of mobile clinics and health workers;

- 20 

  

(7)

educational issues for the children of migrant workers (and care services for working migrant mothers – as with Indian construction sites);the possibility of mobile out-service primary schools (and the problem of language in India); problems of temporary housing of migrant families and access to services (particularly safe drinking water, sewerage, power etc.) the defence of the legal rights of migrant workers – at work (health and safety), in living conditions and legal access to public services; educating the host population. problems of security – protecting earnings in temporary settlements, and ensuring their transfer to home families without high losses or costs.

In general, the argument of this paper reinforces recent DFID thinking in a number of strategic areas – growth, drivers of change, migration – to the effect that poverty reduction may in the end have very little to do with supporting spatially and temporally static and stagnating sub-sectors of national economies. Rather it is about running with growth where and when it occurs, and putting DFID’s weight behind removing obstacles to such growth processes and increasing their dynamism. The poor benefit when they have more options to which to turn, and more options are created in the vortex of dynamic growth processes, not in the declining sectors that are left behind.

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