Rural to Urban Migration and Its Impact on Gender Inequality

Eleanor Keeble, Overseas Development Institute (ODI)
Collins Opiyo, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
Yohannes Kinfu, University of Canberra

We argue that the economic opportunities available to rural-to-urban migrants are found disproportionately by men. Our research will seek to establish whether gender inequality is worse among “movers” relative to “non-movers”. We will use data from the Democratic Health Survey (DHS) conducted in sub-Saharan Africa within the last five years. We will do a cross-country analysis, dividing countries into three categories to explore if the relationship changes with economic development. To increase data points we will also do an intra-country study, creating a gender inequality index within different regions of the countries. To complement this we may also do a difference in difference where the data allows. It is envisaged the results will show significant disparities in the gender inequality index between movers and non-movers. We believe that we would find greater gender inequality among movers compared to non-movers due to gender bias in economic opportunities found by rural-to-urban migrants.