Rural-Urban Migration, Gender, and Poverty in Ghana

Abstract Rural-urban migration is trend that is quite common in the developing countries because of the disparities in the standard of living and at the rural area as compared to the urban area, nonetheless of this much remains to be learnt about their welfare that migrants seeks to achieve. This paper extends the discussion on rural-urban nexus by examining the case of Ghana two with a specific focus on the reason of movement and the impact. The study explores factors influencing migration flows by, evaluating the impacts of these linkages on poverty and consumption welfare, using data from the 2012/13 Ghana Living Standards Survey. Counterfactual is a key feature of analyses that this paper employs to construct scenarios thus apply the methodology by adjusts for selectivity bias. The evaluations of migration gains show different mean welfare impacts on our two types of in-migrants. Even though some urban-to-rural in-migrants derived welfare gains from migrating, urban-to-rural migration generally prove a negative impact on the welfare of in-migrants. In the case of rural-to-urban migration, a small percentage of in-migrants incurred welfare losses, but on the whole, migration enhanced significantly the welfare of in-migrants. Moreover, there is indication to suggest that on the whole, rural nonmigrants would have incurred a reduction in welfare if they had migrated to urban areas. By the result, migration flows often have impact on the poverty status of a person that embark on migration. For many of these migrants, they motivation of escaping the situation of being disadvantage cause of their movement.