Can new information improve the migration experiences of Kenyan villagers?

About the author: Travis Baseler is a PhD Student in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. and recipient of an FSI research grant, which he used in support of his field research travel to Kenya.

Many developing countries are characterized not only by widespread poverty, but by severe inequality. The income gap between a rich and a poor county in Kenya is almost three times as big as the gap between a rich and a poor US state. Kenya is a country that’s growing rapidly — around 7% per year in per capita terms since 2000. However, the benefits of that growth have accrued disproportionately to urban regions. One way for rural households to share in the benefits of growth and development is to migrate — to work temporarily or permanently in cities.

Deciding whether and where to migrate is not easy. The trip can be expensive, and there is typically no guarantee of a job in the destination. It requires a careful weighing of the costs and benefits: how easy it is to get a job, and what sorts are available? How much do they pay? How high are costs for necessities like rent, food, and healthcare? When high-tech services like Glassdoor and Numbeo aren’t available, people typically rely on information passed on from friends and family who have migrated to the city and know what conditions there are like. In work related to my dissertation, I show that these migrants face a difficult question themselves: when they pass on information about their job and earnings to their family back home, there is an expectation that they share a significant part of that income with their family. The result is that the information passed on is typically overly pessimistic, and creates severely depressed beliefs in the village about the returns to migration.

If villagers had better access to information about cities throughout Kenya, would they be better equipped to make the right migration decisions and improve their economic conditions? I set out to test this question with a field experiment in 2017. The answer was surprising: the information increased migration to Nairobi by 50%, and those who left were more likely to find a job and earned much more income. This month I went back to the field to talk to the same villagers from back in 2017. I wanted to know how their lives had changed since 2017, and how they felt about their decision to migrate to the city. For several weeks, my team and I are visiting villages, finding respondents, and interviewing them about their economic lives and well-being.