Development aspects of internal migration in Sierra Leone.

This study attempts to elucidate aspects of the complex relationship between internal migration and development in Sierra Leone, a country marked by pronounced dualism. It argues that internal migration and its developmental facets such as remittances should be examined within their socio-economic and ecological context. The major findings can be summarised as follows: 1. Interregional migration was shown to be positively and significantly correlated with a composite index encompassing social and economic dimensions of development. 2. Since the trends in migration and development in the two sets of regions delineated positive net migration/more developed and negative net migration/less developed - have been in force for at least two decades and show no signs of narrowing regional inequality, suggest disequilibrium rather than equilibrium tendencies. This feature of the migration process was confirmed by analysis performed at the local level, which explicitly took into account, socio-economic and ecological factors along with the effects of government policies on rural outmigration. 3. A study of the determinants of interregional migration for a whole system, Sierra Leone, and its component economic sub-systems underline the importance of taking into consideration development dimensions in such analyses, 4. Finally, on the role of remittances in development, the study established that - a. Overall, that there was a net transfer of resources from the urban to the rural areas; b. In-remittances were found to be important to poorer rural households; c. Remittances received were used mainly for consumption purposes; and d. For the decision to send remittances, the common, significant variables for rural and urban households were those showing ties with origin areas; while for the decision on the size of remittances, they were the income of the head of the household and whether an unskilled manual worker or not.