G EOESTADÍSTICA M ULTIVARIANTE (C O K RIGEADO )

Introduction

The interrelationship between urban livelihoods and transnational networks has been advanced as an important point of departure on which to focus urban research. Thus Smith (2001) argues that cities need to be understood as nodal points that connect local actors with other actors who operate at regional, national, transnational and global levels. This view holds for cities in developed and developing countries. After all, in both contexts the immersion of urban actors in ‘transnational socio-cultural networks’ would have similar bearings on the relations these local actors maintain with local and regional actors. In this research we shift from the theoretical, holistic readings on transnationalism and globalism in relation to urban economies (Amin 2002; Sassen 2002a; Smith 2001) to an empirical analysis of influences of transnational ties on economic activities of urban actors. In this, we also shift the focus away from the current bias in urban studies on cities of the northern hemisphere towards the southern hemisphere.

For urban actors participation in transnational networks provides opportunities to gain access to resources that may be relatively scarce in the local economy. This explains why urban respondents seek to gain the interest of migrants and hope to become involved in the investments of these migrants. To develop their ties with migrants, some of our respondents sought to take responsibility for local interests of migrants, representing them at socio-cultural events or supervising

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their investments in Accra. Through their efforts, urban actors hoped to secure the interest of migrants for their own situations, especially seeking reciprocal support from migrants through return investments and/or by helping urban actors overcome difficult situations. The extent to which urban actors explained their investments in migrants as the outcome of some kind of cost-benefit analysis weighing their efforts supporting migrants against support they could expect from the migrant, differed considerably between respondents. We will show this in the case studies we provide later on in this chapter.

The objective of this chapter is twofold. The first objective is to give insight into the heterogeneity of our research population by examining individual and network characteristics. With individual characteristics we mean the respondents’ wealth, level of education, gender and age. For network characteristics, we focus on the size and density of the respondents’ social networks, the composition of their networks by location, and their relationships with alters. We argue that differences in personal and network characteristics influence what kinds of activities respondents are able to engage in. As we also explained in Chapter 2, our choice to take social networks as our starting point for this research derives from arguments of urban and transnational scholars that social networks, rather than territorially bound units of analysis, allow researchers to better understand how urban actors pursue economic activities, notably when these also involve migrants (Amin 2002; Portes 1995; Roberts 1997; Smith 2001;Vertovec 1999).

The second objective of this chapter is to develop a typology of the respondent population based on two central transnational characteristics. This typology will support analyses of the role of migrants through transnational ties with respondents in three important economic domains, namely, housing investments, business investments and social security arrangements. This is the focus of the next three empirical chapters.

Outline for the remainder of this chapter

In the next section we discuss how social networks, and in particular trans- national ties, influence the economic behaviour of urban actors. In the section thereafter we explore how individual and network characteristics influence the manner in which urban actors organise their economic activities. In the fourth section of this chapter we provide our typology, explaining how we have established this and how it assists in the analysis of transnational influences on urban actors. In the section thereafter we provide cases of respondents for each of the four types. In the last section, we discuss the main findings of this chapter and establish the link through the typology with Chapters 5, 6 and 7.

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The role of transnational networks for Accra respondents

Bebbington (1999) argues that the urban domain offers few opportunities for people to develop social capital. This, according to Bebbington, is due to the population of cities being too heterogeneous, too mobile, and largely uncon- nected. This is in contrast with rural regions where social capital is of strategic importance to rural actors. Thus Bebbington (1999) concludes that institutions that are able to support social capital development in rural contexts are far less appropriate for the urban context. Other scholars nuance this view (Moser 1998; Rakodi 2002; Tacoli 1999; Woolcock 2001). In the view of these scholars opportunities do exist for urban actors to develop social capital with alters in support of their lives. Institutions like ethnic associations, saving clubs, neigh- bourhood associations and churches, which provide members with opportunities to develop social capital at various levels, are testimony to this. Furthermore, although some of these institutions may only function within the urban context, others can also play a role for urban actors outside the city. In Ghana church support to respondents who are organising family funerals is an example of an urban institution that extends its role to the rural domain. These authors also point to the importance of other forms of capital, notably human, physical and financial capital for urban actors, helping them reduce the vulnerability of their urban livelihoods.

Beyond urban-derived institutions, respondents in Accra also maintain ties with their family and other relations in their region of origin, which points to the continued relevance of ‘rural’ institutions such as the extended family and hometowns. Communication with their rural alters may take the form of phone calls, letters and personal visits, and may also consist of money and goods that they remit to rural alters on occasion. These transactions not only provide urban actors with their families’ social respect, but also help them maintain their entitlement to such rural resources as family land and the family house. Finally, these ties may also provide urban alters with a safety net should their urban livelihoods collapse. With the implementation of the Structural Adjustment Programme in the 1980s, which increased poverty amongst city dwellers, the importance of the rural safety net has increased (Owuor 2004). Migrants may also be alternative sources of support to urban actors at times of crisis.

The predominant focus of Moser (1998) and other authors concerned with urban livelihoods in major cities of developing countries is on the poor, as they are the most vulnerable. These authors therefore explore whether and how the urban poor seek to reduce their vulnerability so as to become less prone to crises. In our research we also examined the vulnerability of respondents to crises,

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studying their social security mechanisms, albeit with an emphasis on trans- national ties with migrants. This is the focus of Chapter 7.

Our research, however, does not merely focus on the vulnerability of urban dwellers, nor is it confined to social security issues. Such an approach would provide incomplete insights in the multiple kinds of influences of migrants on the local economy. Thus, we also look at the role of transnational ties with migrants in activities relating to housing and business of urban actors.

As we will show in subsequent chapters, not all our respondents sought or derived benefits from their transnational ties with migrants. This finding counters the dominant argument in most migration literature, which is that all alters in the country of origin of migrants benefit, and even depend on migrants to support them in their livelihoods. Thus the main worry of these scholars concerns the sustainability of the support that migrants give to their families and other alters in their country of origin (Ammassari & Black 2001; Anarfi, Kwankye & Ahiadeke 2005; Faini 2002;Tanner 2005). Our findings nuance the argument that migrants are beneficiary to all who relate to them in their country of origin. Some of our respondents indicated that they had not received any form of support from migrants. This was something they did not necessarily find problematic as they felt that they were much more well-off than the migrants’ rural counterparts, and therefore migrants should first heed the needs of rural alters, notably those who are their family.

Concerning the sustainability of support from migrants a number of respond- ents raised worries that migrants might become dissuaded by the non-abating demand for support from rural alters, notably family members. Raphael, one of our respondents, put this as follows:

In our culture we should not go to greet a person who is coming, but wait for this person to come to you to greet him. However, in the village, people now rush to meet and greet you whenever you arrive, feeling that those who come from outside [the village] have all the resources. [Thus] whenever migrants call them they demand that they help pay for hospital bills, food, education and that they send clothes… they just burden them with letters. But we in Accra know these migrants are not having an easy life. (Interview, 1 December 2003 The concern of these respondents also related to the fact they had a fairly good notion of the financial struggle and difficult lives many migrants faced while living abroad. This information also made them more hesitant to call on migrants for financial support. Knowledge of the conditions that Ghanaian migrants faced in foreign places might come from respondents’ own migrant experiences or from their trips to foreign places for education or business purposes, or it would come from accounts of migrants about their ‘life over there’. Not all respondents were equally aware of the difficult circumstances faced by many migrants. Some claimed that they did not know much about the social circumstances and economic situations of their migrant alters. While migrants may not have been

65 very forthcoming about their situations, this lack of information also allowed respondents to more easily lay claims on migrants to provide them with support, without needing to feel morally compromised.

The Transrede research programme, conducted by the Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex and the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana looked at the economic impact of migrants on the economy of Ghana. From their research they con- cluded that the overwhelming majority of transactions of migrants with counter- parts in Ghana took place through conjugal, paternal and extended family relationships (Anarfi, Kwankye & Ahiadeke 2005). In our research we arrived at different conclusions, namely that both friendship and family membership were important in transnational exchanges between urban actors and migrants. How can we explain this difference in the findings between the two programmes? We feel that this relates primarily to the level of aggregation in the analysis of transnational exchanges. In the Transrede programme differences in relationships in the transaction data were examined at country level. In the Ghana TransNet research programme we focused on the influence of migrants on specific local economies, thus examining how migrants influenced actors in the rural economy Kabki (2007) and urban economy (this research), with Mazzucato providing insights on migrant perspectives on these influences. By making this differentia- tion we were able to establish that for the rural economy family ties were dominant. We also found that transnational ties between urban actors and migrants are much less dominated by family ties, though.

Differentiating between these types of transnational relationships is important as this relates to different institutions that influence how transnational relation- ships may develop and to what activities they relate. Thus, we argue in the housing chapter (Chapter 5) that respondents who are trusted friends of migrants played instrumental roles in enabling migrants to invest in houses in Accra, without involving their families.

This brings us to our last comment regarding the role of transnational ties of migrants with urban actors, and vice versa the role of urban actors for migrants, which is that transnational relationships between urban respondents and migrants are rarely unidirectional. While urban respondents did benefit from their relation- ships with migrants, since they provided them with access to resources that were scarce in Ghana, this access was seldom achieved without some prior or future investment in the urban respondents. In remittance literature little reference is made of such reciprocal investments. We found that some respondents attempted to strengthen their economic relationships with migrants by assuming certain responsibilities for migrants’ concerns and investments in Accra or elsewhere in Ghana. Some respondents invested time in supervising migrants’ projects such as

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businesses and houses; they took care of children of migrants; or they took on a representative role at important occasions. Although respondents did not always explain whether and how they expected migrants to reciprocate the support they had provided, most respondents did seek to gain some kind of return investment. This is also evident in the words of one of our respondents:

All those things I am doing for him will help me to, at some moment, ask him to do something big for me in return. (Francis, interview 12 March 2004)