• Introduction

Introduction to livelihoods and migration

What role does migration play in maintaining livelihoods? How can policy and institutions enhance the positive effects of migration? This paper sets out to provide a livelihoods platform for new policy thinking about national and international migration, and to provide an integrated framework within which policy impacts on migration can be traced back to their livelihood and poverty effects. It points out that although global remittance flows from migrants are estimated to exceed official development assistance, public attitude and internal and international policies tend to view migration in negative terms.

The paper emphasises that:

• migration is an important form of diversification, hence helping to reduce seasonality, risk and vulnerability, and enabling investment in a range of livelihood assets
• the institutional contexts of migration are often discouraging, in part because of past negative policy positions on internal migration, and in part because of strongly entrenched sectoral policy thinking. Recent Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) hold few new ideas on migration.
  

Enhancing the contribution migration can make to local level livelihoods requires policy action of the following kind:

• reversing generally negative attitudes to internal and international migration, and recognising and protecting migrants’ civil rights
• providing efficient and cheap systems for remittance transfers; harnessing the potential of migrant diasporas towards poverty reduction objectives; and lifting migration up the PRSP policy agenda in a positive way.

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