Enhancing the Welfare of Migrant-Sending Households in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Zimbabwe is experiencing ongoing migration from rural areas to destinations both within and outside the country. International destinations include South Africa and Botswana, as well as Europe and the Americas. It is estimated that over 3.5 million Zimbabweans are living in South Africa alone. The transformative potential and economic value of this mobility for Zimbabweans has been questioned, however. While some scholars indicate that remittance flows have a significant impact on gross domestic product, others argue that the impacts of migration at the household level do not match those at the macro level. Studies in this latter tradition have not indicated the nature of the policy interventions required to make migration more beneficial to migrant-sending households. The study that forms the basis of this Policy Brief (Dzingirai et al., 2019) was conducted as part of the Migrating out of Poverty intra-household research programme, which seeks to understand the relationship between migration and households that send migrants away to earn money. The ultimate objective was to test if indeed migration was moving households out of poverty, and if not, to identify the factors preventing this. This Policy Brief presents a summary of the study and pulls out issues for policy consideration.