Introduction to the course

Migration and the inclusive growth of Africa’s economies looks at key debates and critiques surrounding inclusive growth to try and unpack the latest thinking amongst academics and policymakers. Over the four three-hour sessions, we will look to answer three guiding questions. The first is:

  1. What is inclusive growth and how can we measure it?

At the same time that growth has been increasing, so has migration within Africa, with numbers doubling in little more than ten years. Attention on migratory patterns and flows in Africa have historically focused on emigration from the continent to the Global North. Yet Africa’s economic dynamism is reflected in more complex flows of migrants to, between and within African countries (Flahaux and de Haas, 2016).

In 2015, more than 90 million international migrants born in developing countries were living in other countries in the Global South, while 85.3 million born in the south lived in countries in the Global North (IOM, 2016). North–south and south–south migration has received relatively little attention, so what motivates this mobility and how migrants might be contributing to African economies is poorly understood.

The second question is:

  1. Is recent migration within and to Africa contributing to more sustainable and inclusive growth, and to what extent?

Inclusive growth to date has largely been the remit of policymakers and it has become a powerful idea in international policy. There is debate, however, about whether inclusive growth remains largely a normative and ideological concept. Analytical and policy approaches tend to take a regional or macro-national perspective, and so lack any nuanced application about how more inclusive growth can be built into various aspects of a country’s development strategy. This is particularly evident when it comes to migration policies, which are typically divorced from other growth-related policies (de Haan, 2011; IOM, 2017).

The third question is:

  1. How can migration policies in Africa effectively encourage more inclusive growth?

Learning outcomes

By addressing these questions, this course will help you to do the following:

  1. Understand the main debates and dimensions of inclusive growth.
  2. Appreciate and apply some of the methodologies for trying to measure inclusive growth.
  3. Use the idea of inclusive growth to explain and expand upon what are considered to be the outcomes of migration for development.
  4. Use the idea of inclusive growth to better understand the role of migrant entrepreneurs in development.
  5. Support the design of appropriate policies to enhance migration’s contribution to inclusive growth.

In addition, this course draws on the evidence and findings from a three-year research project called Migration for Inclusive African Growth [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] (MIAG, n.d.).

Now watch Video 1, in which Natalie Chaponda, a project researcher based in Kenya, talks about the project.

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Video 1 An overview of MIAG.
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Now it’s time to start on Week 1 of the course.