Discuss some of the economic implications of a rising trend in the rural-urban migration and offer policy recommendations to reverse it.

Rural-Urban migration refers to the physical movement of people from the rural to urban centers of a
country with a view to securing perceived opportunities, especially employment.Nearly all countries
experience this movement at varying degrees. Those affected in this movement tend to be mainly the
young and educated, especially due to the highly increasing rates of population and unemployment. The
migrants perceive high chances of getting jobs in urban centers than in rural areas, and this creates the
impetus to migrate. In most countries, urban centers are very distinct from rural areas in terms of
industrial location; the concentration of production units in urban areas coupled with the white-collar job
orientation arising from the type of education systems, makes the young and educated increase their
propensity to migrate in order to get jobs. Rural-urban migration has both positive and negative
consequences in the country depending on either the area of origin or destination. A few years ago, rural-urban
migration was viewed as a natural process in which surplus labor was gradually withdrawn from
the rural sector to provide needed manpower for the urban industrial growth. The process was deemed
socially beneficial since human resources were being shifted from locations where their marginal products
were assumed to be zero to places where the marginal products were to be not only positive but also
rapidly increasing as a result of fast capital accumulation and technical progress. Further, those involved
were assumed to be remitting part of their incomes to their rural relatives which was to work towards
increasing the living standards of the rural population.

In contract of this view point, it is now abundantly clear from the experience in developing countries
that the rates of rural-urban migration continue to exceed the rates of urban job creation. It has in fact
surpassed the capacity of both industry and urban social services to effectively absorb this labor. Thus,
migration is viewed as the major contributing factor to the ubiquitous phenomenon of urban surplus
labor and a force which continues to exacerbate the already high urban unemployment problems
caused by the growing economic and structural imbalances between urban and rural areas.

Rural-urban migration disproportionately increases the urban job seekers who are young, energetic and
educated while heavily depleting the rural country side of valuable human capital necessary for enhanced
rural resource utilization. This is in fact why most resources in rural areas remain either underutilized or
completely unutilized. Consider the large pieces of land which have not been brought to any meaningful use, yet the government budget is continuously constrained by the increasingly large amount of public
consumption expenditure eg. Provision of relief food etc.

With extensive surplus of people in urban centers, dependency ratio increases, housing congestion
results and many other socio-economic problems for whose list is in inexhaustibly lengthy. Such evils like
bank robbery and other forms of thuggery discourage potential investors and even accelerates capital
flights among existing risk-undertakers, let alone the possibility of an extensive damage to the tourist
industry (the leading foreign exchange earner for most developing countries like Kenya). Talk of
leadership in elective positions (eg. members of parliament) and you find the highly educated (but
unemployed or underemployed) young people taking it as yet another source/form of employment. By all
means, therefore, the greed for material acquisitions breeds more malpractices (economic or otherwise).
In fact, corruption and the general mismanagement rooted in most economies have drawn much
international publicity and discontent from multi-lateral donor institutions such as the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund (IMF); the effect becomes either a withdrawal or increased
conditionalities for credit, which sometimes cause currency depreciation and inflationary tendencies.


In most countries today, rural urban migration is no longer a desirable phenomenon and governments
center around, first and foremost, instituting measures such as:

1. Changing job and education systems? orientation – the need for more emphasis on the
informal sector and other forms of self-employment ventures; it involves efforts to change the
attitudes of people seeking perceived opportunities in urban areas.
2. Industrial decentralization – policy frameworks that seek to encourage industrial decentralization
to minimize regional resource imbalances.
3. More supportive government involvement in the rural resource utilization programmes; include provision
of infrastructural facilities, subsidized inputs and relatively well developed and less or uncorruptive output
4. marketing institutions. The government?s implementation setups such as the
District Focus for Rural Development through the District Development Committees (DDC?s)
should be strengthened and focused towards living standards enhancing priority areas such as modern
agriculture (the ministry of Agriculture and rural Development in Kenya is now working on the Kenya
Rural Development strategy (KRDS) called the National Agricultural and Livestock Extension
Programme (NALEP) which is prepared in line with extension policy guidelines and aims at assisting
farmers to enhance food production, guarantee food security, increase incomes and improve standards
of living. NALEP prescribes alternative extension approaches and cost effective methods of
disseminating appropriate technologies to the farming community; any growth in the agricultural
sector is therefore expected to create more job opportunities.
5. Institutionalizing leadership and community development aspects – strengthening the sense of
mutual coexistence and rational social change to avoid such socio-economic and political evils like
land clashes and general mistrust between communities, a situation which tends to reduce
domestic rural resource mobilization.

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Wilfykil answered the question on February 6, 2019 at 10:04