The effects of migration in Nepal: Household food security status and women's intra-household decision-making roles
Kim, Jeeyon.
2018
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Abstract: International organizations have been promoting migration as a tool for global development, and recently rallied for a concerted effort to harness the developmental potential of migration. Yet, the evidence on the effects of migration on households, and, in particular, women who stay behind, remains limited and inconclusive. With these gaps in mind, this mixed methods dissertation invest... read moreigates the effects of migration on household food security status and women's decision-making roles in Nepal. Between October 2016 and February 2017, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with over 150 respondents in the mountains of Far West Nepal. Based on these interviews and focus groups, Chapter 2 examines the effects of migration on the three core cross-cultural domains of household food insecurity experience. Migration, a central livelihood strategy in households' efforts to realize food security, does not contribute sustainable or substantial improvements to household food insecurity through the traditionally examined domains, namely quantity and quality. It does, however, provide much - albeit short-lived - relief to households' worry and anxiety about having enough to eat and balancing the demands for food with other basic needs. Drawing from the same interviews and focus groups, Chapter 3 explores the effects of male out-migration on women's intra-household decision-making roles. In Far West Nepal, the patriarchal intra-household decision-making roles are largely preserved despite men's extended absence and women's de facto headship in nuclear households. Women experience a slight expansion in their authority and are able to make decisions about "small" tasks such as market purchases in their husbands' absence. However, these effects bypass women who live with their in-laws and are reversed upon the migrants' return. In fact, migration appears to maintain, and at times reinforce, the very social, material and human conditions which limit women's ability to expand their intra-household decision-making authority in men's absence. In Chapter 4, the dissertation investigates the relationship between migration remittance income and household food security status using a nationally representative panel data. Households with migrant members who are sending back remittances have higher odds of being food secure compared to households without migrants, conditional on household-level fixed effects (n=981, p<0.1). However, once analyses are stratified by region, there are significant positive effects in the hills but not in the mountains or the terai. Household migration effects are also larger for higher caste households, holding constant asset-based wealth. Moreover, the remittance amounts received by households from their migrant members is not associated with household food security at the national and regional levels and by caste (OR~1), ceteris peribus and conditional on household-level fixed effects. These findings are statistically significant at the one percent level at the national level, for the hills, and for both higher and lower caste households. To date, this is the first nationally representative effort to quantitatively assess migration's effect on household food security in Nepal and the only qualitative exploration of the effects of male out-migration in the mountains of Far West Nepal. In an agrarian context such as Nepal, where an unprecedented number of men are migrating while food insecurity remains widespread, the limited evidence-base on the effects of migration is a major knowledge and policy gap. While this dissertation provides insight on the challenges and opportunities migration may create for households and the women who stay behind, there remains an urgent need to further investigate the ways in which the development potential of migration may be better harnessed for at-origin households and individuals in Nepal.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2018.
Submitted to the Dept. of Food Policy & Applied Nutrition.
Advisor: Daniel Maxwell.
Committee: Elizabeth Stites, Mark Constas, and Patrick Webb.
Keyword: Nutrition.read less - ID:
- t435gq944
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