he feminization of environmental migration is
already underway in South Asia but governments are slow to recognise the
role of climate change and there’s no policy action.
75-year-old
Afsa Begum sells biscuits and fryums for kids who come to study in the
madrasa housed in a crumbling 15th century mosque complex on the
outskirts of Patna, Bihar, where she, her daughter-in-law and
two-year-old granddaughter have squatted since years. Her husband is
dead and her son left for Mangalore to work for a construction
contractor after the severe monsoon floods in 2016. He has sent money
only once [image by Manipadma Jena]
Hafiza Khatun remembers one morning two years ago. Her husband had
come running back from work in a state of distress. The embankment wall
that kept the ocean at bay from their homes and fields in Cox’s Bazaar
district in Bangladesh had breached again and seawater was flooding in.
Crops could no longer be grown and homes and belongings had all been
claimed by the marauding tides, as the sea kept rising due to climate
change.
Hafiza’s husband, a manager in a betel leaf farm, was out of a job.
After days of struggle when they had to sell most of their cattle to
survive, her husband decided to leave for Malaysia for work with 20
other men from nearby villages who were to be smuggled by boat via
Myanmar.
Left with three young children, Hafeza worked as a domestic servant
in the one of the richer homes in the morning, and as a labourer in a
betel leaf farm in the afternoon. While the older boy helped her, the
younger two stayed in the house, unable to attend school. There was
never enough food for the four of them. Illness set in, sometimes mild
sometimes serious enough to keep Hafiza from work and the daily income
they so desperately needed.
A report released last month warns of the devastating and increasing impact of climate change on migration in South Asia.
Climate Change Knows no Borders,
prepared by ActionAid, Climate Action Network South Asia and Bread for
the World (Brot Fuer Die Welt) calls on national policymakers to
especially monitor impacts of climate-induced migration on women and
urgently address the policy gap.
Unsafe migration
“The rights of migrants and their families are being threatened by
unsafe migration, which is often driven by desperation and a lack of
options caused by climate disasters. The impacts of migration on women,
both those migrating and those left behind, is also not yet adequately
understood or addressed by national or international policies,” Harjeet
Singh, ActionAid’s Global Lead on Climate Change, told
indiaclimatedialogue.net.
“Environmental migration is a gendered process, but discussions
within public, policy, and academia regarding environmental migration
are often gender-neutral, few studies making the link between migration,
environment and gender,” said International Organisation for Migration
(IOM) in 2014, flagging the gap when the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) in its Fifth Assessment Report said, “Climate
change is projected to increase the displacement of people throughout
this century.”
According to IOM, vulnerabilities, experiences, needs and priorities
of environmental migrants vary according to women’s and men’s different
roles, as do responsibilities, access to information, resources,
education, physical security and employment opportunities.
The ActionAid report putting the issue in the current South Asian
perspective says, “Young females from neighbouring Nepal and Bangladesh
who migrate to India as well as internal migrants from rural areas
moving to cities are increasingly vulnerable to abuse and trafficking.
As they often use so-called ‘agents’ to help them find work, these can
turn out to be traffickers, who once they arrive in the city, force them
to work in brothels,” it cautions.
The 2016 Global Report on
Trafficking
in Persons by UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released in December
says women and girls make up 71% of human trafficking victims.
Including for the first time a thematic chapter on connections between
trafficking, migration and conflict, it underscores that trafficking in
persons and migration flows resemble each other, increasing
vulnerability of forced migration victims.
After repeated extreme or slow onset weather events have reduced a
rural family to extreme poverty, the migration of younger women, usually
daughters (even minors) increasingly appear as the best option for the
entire family, finds an IOM
study.
Pull factor
This is because the demand for labour in highly gendered but
low-skilled niche jobs, such as domestic work, child and elderly care,
is rising, as more and more educated women in South Asian cities are
taking up careers outside home. Bangladeshi migrant women are seen
increasingly in such jobs in Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai. Together with
garment and entertainment industries in India, this demand is acting as a
powerful pull factor.
Even so, available figures show male migration is more common in the
region. Millions of women like Hafiza Khatun, left behind at home, are
facing an overwhelming burden.
Increasingly, research is documenting that the workload on women left
behind is multiplied many- fold because the nature of migrant work
being uncertain, remittance from migrant males is often sporadic.
Agriculture remains critical for the family remaining at home to
survive, finds an
International Water Management Institute (IWMI) study.
Overburdened women
Not only must the women do household work and child and elderly care,
but also generate income usually by taking on their husbands’ role in
agriculture. This too without access to capital or credit, while
negotiating existing agricultural services dominated by men, where the
women have to overcome several cultural barriers.
Women are thus reporting exhaustion, poverty and illness, and fields
are being left uncultivated as they struggle to cope alone. In many
areas these single women called drought widows or flood widows by their
communities, report increased incidences of assault and violence. When
disasters happen, such as the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, the lack of men
in the village can put communities in further danger, the ActionAid
report says.
The struggles of women environmental migrants have been documented
but there is no statistical data to formulate effective policies. The
crux of the problem is that while disaster-driven forced migration is
likely to increase further, there is no systematic data and statistical
record of internal and cross-border migration on which governments can
base their policies.
A 2016
IWMI infograph
says as many as 3.23 million migrants from Bangladesh are in India.
India’s Minister for State for Home informed Parliament in November that
20 million
illegal Bangladeshi immigrants,
equivalent to Australia’s population, were in India. This is a volatile
political issue; in 2004, Parliament was told the 2001 figure was 12
million. A recent report from
The Economist
quotes a former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) saying
15 million Bangladeshis are living in India. A 2016 IOM study, titled
Migrant Smuggling Data and Research: A global review of the emerging
evidence base, says 25,000 Bangladeshis are thought to enter India each
year.
While there is no available age or sex-disaggregated data of
irregular migrants to India from neighbouring countries, particularly
Bangladesh and Nepal, estimates can be surmised from a UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 2015 study, which found that irregular
migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal into Middle
Eastern countries, such as Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Libya, Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are predominantly women. They work
as housemaids.
UNODC South Asia Office said in 2012 that no systematic data on
irregular migration is maintained in India either at the state or
national level. But globally, there is better clarity on the gender
dimension of migration. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs
(UNDESA) in 2015 estimated there were almost 244 million migrants in the
world, approximately half of whom were women and girls. The
International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimated in 2013 that out of
150 million international labour migrants 44% were women.
IOM’s 2016 Atlas of Environmental Migration, the latest and most
exhaustive study on the subject, claims that in 2015, 19 million people
were newly displaced due to climate disasters globally. This figure does
not even include displacement from drought and slow onset environmental
degradation. Overall, one billion out of the planet’s 7 billion people
are presently on the move, either within countries or beyond borders.
The increasing participation of women of various skill levels in
regional migration, whether forced or voluntary, driven in large part by
socioeconomic factors underpins the greater gender sensitivity and
attention that needs to go into laws, policies, programmes and even
climate migration studies.
Slow response
Aside from lack of concrete data and figure what is also obstructing
South Asian governments from according the urgency that climate
migration requires is that economic migration, also known as South-South
migration, has been happening since long.
For a poor Bangladeshi who wants to better his income or escape
poverty, irregular migration to India costs only USD 40 to USD 60
including the payment for the migrant smuggler, finds the IOM’s Migrant
Smuggling Data and Research study.
“Migration has always taken place in South Asia, for long before
climate change became an issue. Push factors include conflict, poverty,
land access and ethnicity; while there are also many pull factors such
as development, livelihoods, seasonal labour, kinship and access to
health or services,” ActionAid’s Singh said. “Therefore, South Asian
countries are slow to recognise the role of climate change as an
additional push factor, and the extent to which it is driving migration.
Climate change is thus still largely invisible in the migration
discourse in South Asia.”
When forced migration triggered by extreme climate adds to the
economic migration, clashes over resources and jobs, political seclusion
and xenophobia would not be far off, as is seen in the on-going
European crises. “There is need for clear definitions of climate
migration and displacement which national governments should use, to
gather and analyse data on the role of climate change in migration, and
develop appropriate policies accordingly,” Singh said.
In South Asia as also in most countries now, disaster risk reduction
and building resilience to climate-induced hazards is a key policy
component to reduce distress migration. With high levels of poverty, low
development indicators and large-scale dependence on agriculture in
South Asia, building resilience within a timeframe will remain a major
challenge. A challenge, which Hafiza Khatun will brave for many more
years, for the sake of her three children.
As the boat reaches the jetty near Hariakhali village, Hafeza stands
jostling with several other hopeful women, scouring the faces of the
worn out, weather-beaten men who had been rescued from a Myanmar jail,
caught while trying to land on its shores on a fishing boat without
legal papers One by one, the men are reunited with wives and joyous
children, excited to have their fathers back. After everyone had left,
for Hafeza there was just the sound of the waves
breaking on the shore.
Manipadma Jena is a journalist based in Bhubaneswar. She is on Twitter as @ManipadmaJena. This article was originally published on indiaclimatedialogue.net https://www.thethirdpole.net/2017/01/09/women-bear-the-brunt-of-climate-forced-migration/?utm_content=bufferade05&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Students will be engaged
in searching for material so as to compose their own research. There will
be different sub-topics in each team. Awareness
of climate change that affect migration is
extremely important, especially in an era where the phenomenon of
migration is leading younger generations towards forgetting. Activities
will be aimed at promoting environmental migrants, human rights, the
idea of the
school as a place for constructive and creative learning, participation
in life
as an aware citizen of the particular country and of the European and
international community.
After: The participants will evaluate the program and
will continue to interact online, after the face-to- face session, in
dissemination and follow-up actions. 
