In late 2021, a team of survey enumerators conducted a baseline survey of over 2000 migrants, over 1000 existing residents, and around 500 chiefs. This survey asked about income, employment, family structure, education, migration plans, attitudes toward migrants, politics, and more. The roughly 500 blocks in the city were divided up randomly into three groups. The first treatment arm (“T1”) would receive the proposed migrant integration package, administered technocratically by program officials on behalf of the municipality. A second treatment arm (“T2”) would receive the program, but administered alongside the block chief and with the block chief’s involvement. The control group would receive no program.
After a few months, a follow-up sampling procedure was conducted to increase the sample size, and program administrators began conducting visits among the migrants sampled in T1 and T2 blocks. These visits consisted of information about municipal services such as health and education; help setting up mobile money accounts and learning to send remittances via mobile money; and a job matching program. The job matching program was created by our research team, and involved our enumerators conducting a job census of the city, knocking on the door of every business establishment that could be found to ask if they were hiring and whether they would consider migrants for the job. Phone numbers from jobs that fit the desired jobs of treated migrants were then provided to the migrants; this constituted the job matching program. This process was repeated various times, with new job censuses and new rounds of visits by program administrators.
In mid-2023, a “midline” survey was conducted among all migrants surveyed at baseline.
The next steps are to analyze data from the midline survey, conduct a final (fifth) round of treatment visits, and conduct a final endline survey, in November 2023 just after municipal elections.
As of the writing of this summary, because the data collection period has not concluded, results of the intervention are not available. Therefore there are no results to exploit or disseminate. Within the next few months, the data collection will complete, and the results will be revealed. After that, they will be disseminated.
That said, because the population we study is so rarely surveyed, even the descriptive statistics from the baseline survey are instructive. In this paragraph we provide some of these descriptive statistics. Among the 2320 migrants we surveyed in the city – consisting of people who had moved to the city in the preceding 18 months – 22% had some paid occupation, highlighting the need for labor market integration. 25% had sent money home in the previous 12 months, highlighting the important role of remittances in this population and their continuing links to their place of origin. 35% said they had asked a local leader for help with some issue since moving, highlighting the capacity for the local government to alleviate labor market frictions.
So far this project has not led to dissemination and exploitation activities, as there are no final results for dissemination yet.
Communication activities: 1 workshop organized, 1 website.
