The push and pull of rural-to-rural migration: Insights from Northwest Benin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines circular intra-rural migration in Northwestern Benin, focusing on labor selectivity, prevalence, determinants, and socio-ecological dynamics within households. Using mixed-methods survey data and key informant interviews, we compare households with migration participants to those without. Our findings show that migrants are predominantly young men, and that education, landholding, and off-farm income significantly affect household labor decisions. We also find no statistically significant effect of either household head or member migration on asset accumulation, suggesting that migration primarily functions as a coping strategy to address low productivity growth and income instability rather than as a pathway to long-term wealth creation. By highlighting how circular intra-rural migration operates as a household strategy to manage labor, income, and risk, our study underscores its complex role in rural livelihoods. These insights have important implications for rural development policy, particularly for designing interventions that strengthen local livelihood opportunities while recognizing migration as an embedded dimension of rural economies. • We study circular intra-rural migration in one of the rural villages in Benin. • Migrants are mainly young men; land, education, and assets shape participation. • Migration does not build assets, serving as a coping mechanism for low productivity. • Policies must integrate migration while expanding rural livelihood options.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".