Moving towards empowerment? Rural female migrants negotiating domestic work and secondary education in urban Ethiopia

Abstract

Increasing numbers of rural girls and young women in Ethiopia are migrating to urban towns and cities and taking up employment as domestic workers, some of whom continue their education by attending evening classes. For urban households, rural migrants help to fill the domestic work gaps created by the entry of urban women into employment. For rural young women, migrating as a domestic worker is an important strategy for achieving social mobility and empowerment. However, domestic workers are vulnerable and largely hidden in the city and we know little about their lived experiences. In this paper, we start to address this gap, drawing on interviews with eight rural female migrants who are working as domestic workers in the city and attending evening classes in urban secondary schools. Informed by a critical framing of empowerment, we explore the extent to which intersecting inequalities in rural areas disempower these young women, and how migration and education become important strategies for improving their lives. We show how the support of social network members is crucial in enabling participants’ migration, yet how this also leads to power asymmetries and exploitation. We reflect on how the ability of rural young women to achieve better futures is limited due to their status as poor, rural, female migrants, yet how many wait in the city in the hope of a better future. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of critical approaches to female empowerment that includes a focus on structural inequalities and power imbalances.

Keywords:

• Domestic workers
• rural-urban migration
• secondary education
• empowerment
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our appreciation and gratitude to the eight research participants who took part in this study. We would also like to thank the Centre for Policy and Development Research at Hawassa University, Ethiopia for facilitating this research. We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was received from the Irish Research Council and Oak Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Louise Yorke

Louise Yorke is currently working as a Senior Research Associate at the REAL Centre, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Her current research interests are in the areas of education system reform and equity issues. She completed her PhD at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin.

Robbie Gilligan

Robbie Gilligan is Professor Emeritus of Social Work and Social Policy at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests revolve around children and young people living in challenging circumstances. He has a special interest in certain specific groups: children and young people placed away from home in state care, children and young people who leave home due to other economic, social, or political challenges, and children and young people living with disabilities. This interest also extends to studying the later progress of young people in these categories as young adults. In his work, he seeks to understand more about the lived experience of the challenges children and young people face, and what they find supports their progress in negotiating the different adversities and transitions in their lives, in both minority and majority world settings. Professor Gilligan served as supervisor of the PhD study from which this paper draws.

Eyerusalem Alemu

Eyerusalem Alemu works as a Livelihoods and Youth Employment Advisor at International Rescue Committee (IRC) Ethiopia where she is responsible for capacity building and monitoring and evaluation. Prior to this she worked for four years with CARE International, where she has been facilitating youth targeting, training provision and self- and wage-employment for both youth and adults. She completed her BA in sociology from Dilla University, Ethiopia, and a MA in Community Development from Hawassa University where her research has focused on the causes and effects of women’s rural-urban migration.