Migration in Tanzania: Patterns, Characteristics and Impact

In recent years, there has been a growing interest on the subject of migration, not only on issues of scale, structure and regional trends, but more so on the socio-economic impact of migration. On the economic consequences of migration a lot of emphasis has been placed on remittances. This is understandable for two main reasons. One, remittances have emerged as a major source of external development finance in recent years. Given their large size, governments from developing and developed countries have focused attention on both the development impact of remittances and on regulatory issues in sender and receiver markets. Two, remittances do affect positively poor people's livelihoods to the extent that they now constitute a major source of income, insurance and capital accumulation. This being the case, direct and indirect linkages unfold between migration and poverty reduction strategies. These linkages become of interest to academics and development practitioners in Africa given the on-going poverty reduction initiatives, in almost all sub-Saharan Africa countries, aimed at achieving one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing poverty by half by the year 2015. In this context, migration constitutes one of the strategies for attaining the goal. This is more so when one views remittances as private financial aid that flow directly into the hands of households and the fact that they tend to be counter-cyclical. This suggests that very often they serve as an important source of both income and consumption smoothing strategies for vulnerable poor and non-poor households.