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:
- 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:
- 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:
- 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:
- Understand the main debates and dimensions of inclusive growth.
- Appreciate and apply some of the methodologies for trying to measure inclusive growth.
- Use the idea of inclusive growth to explain and expand upon what are considered to be the outcomes of migration for development.
- Use the idea of inclusive growth to better understand the role of migrant entrepreneurs in development.
- 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.
Transcript: Video 1 An overview of MIAG.
Migration for Inclusive Growth in Africa, or ‘MIAG’ for short, is a three-year research project that started in 2019.
The spark for MIAG was the realisation that many of Africa’s economies had recently been experiencing high levels of growth, driven by trade in commodities. Africa is known for being rich in natural resources, but the past few decades have seen a boom in both the service and technology sectors: Kenya has established itself as a hub of trade and investment in east Africa, for instance.
But the perception of Africa is that people migrate out to more developed countries, in regions like Europe and North America, in search of opportunities to improve their lives. So MIAG set out to investigate the connection between migration and development, but to flip the common perception by looking at migration within and to Africa.
This growth of African economies was also being accompanied by a dramatic increase in flows of immigrants, so MIAG aimed to understand whether, and to what extent, recent migration within and to Africa is contributing to more sustainable growth on the continent.
It did this by looking at three different migration flows:
North–south flows covered migrants from Europe, and specifically, from the country that had been a coloniser in Africa. So in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, this was the British, and in Mozambique, the Portuguese. We also included migrants from the diaspora who were returning to their country of origin.
South–south flows included both Indian and Chinese migrants, as they are the countries with some of the highest levels of investment in Africa.
And intra-continental flows, which covered migrants moving between African countries.
In development debates, the past decade has seen the rise of the term ‘inclusive growth’. It has come to command policy conversations at a global level and refers to the notion that economic growth needs to be more than just financial outcomes. Growth should also be about social and political development, and create opportunities for all in society. This can translate into supporting the development of social security systems, providing better access to education and other key infrastructure such as water and electricity supplies, or strengthening democratic processes.
While the concept of inclusive growth has become popular, it remains relatively underdeveloped within academia. So MIAG used it as the theoretical framing for trying to understand how migrants might be making African development more sustainable, lasting and inclusive of a wider section of the population in the countries to which they were migrating.
MIAG was the first multi-country comparative study of contemporary migrant communities in Africa, focusing on four of the fastest-growing economies: Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique and Nigeria. It was also a first in migration studies in focusing on migrant business owners and their operations at the firm level. By contrast, most research has tended to look at the individual or household.
While MIAG is pushing the frontiers of academic understanding of migration in Africa, it has a practical agenda. This seeks to enable policymakers and practitioners to harness this knowledge and inform migration policies, which can be more effective to leverage inclusive growth.
Now it’s time to start on Week 1 of the course.