Is Destination Safety a Non-Monetary Friction to Women’s Rural-Urban migration?

This project investigates whether violence, harassment, and assault in urban spaces (“street safety”) are non-monetary frictions to women’s rural-urban migration in South Africa. It addresses two key research questions: (1) Does providing objective information about street safety in urban destinations increase rural-urban migration, employment, and earnings? (2) To what extent is the gender gap in rural-urban migration explained by differences in beliefs about, preferences for, and actual exposure to street safety at destination? The research is motivated by the puzzle of persistently low female rural-urban migration in the Global South despite large potential gains. In South Africa, whilst internal migration remains high due to historic regional inequalities, it is markedly gendered. It contributes to the literature on non-monetary migration frictions and the impacts of safety on women’s economic outcomes; it has implications for spatial misallocation, productivity, and female empowerment. This study uses a randomized information intervention that provides “objective” safety data— constructed from crime records, SafetiPin data, and surveys with an urban sample—to test whether belief correction shifts migration and employment outcomes. To better understand the mechanisms, it employs a discrete choice lab-in-field experiment, where rural participants choose between migration scenarios with varied destination characteristics, allowing separate identification of the effects of (i) objective destination safety, (ii) subjective beliefs, and (iii)
preferences for safety on migration decisions. This will be the first study to quantify the salience of urban safety as a gendered migration barrier and test a policy-actionable intervention. Proposed partners include J-PAL Africa, Harambee, and SafetiPin.