Young Women and Girls' Migration and Education

This chapter has mapped out the multiple ways in which youth’s migration and education interact. In doing so, youth is recognized as a period in the life course in which gender relations and identities solidify. This means that the various relations between youth migration and education are shaped by gender relations and are given meaning by young women and girls in gendered ways.

The chapter has distinguished between an intergenerational perspective and a life course perspective. The former looks at how parental migration affects the education of their children. For countries that can draw on several decades of widespread labour migration such as Indonesia and Thailand, one can also study how parental migration affects migration decision-making of adolescent children. A life course perspective entails analysing the multiple ways in which migration and education interact over the young life course of adolescent girls.

This chapter has gone beyond a focus on the effects of migration on formal schooling. Drawing on qualitative research it has argued that for adolescent girls from poor households, labour migration may well constitute a form of learning. In addition, migration may also be important for accessing informal education, such as informal apprenticeships, while the very experience of migration can be recognized as educational too.