Abstract
In the past decade an increasing number of adolescent girls in Ethiopia have moved from villages and rural towns to Addis Ababa to improve their own lives and those of their families. While girls’ migration is in a way a ‘normality’, with historically girls migrating for domestic work, the dominant discourse in Ethiopia describes the migration of girls mainly in terms of trafficking and exploitation, in particular when they are doing sex work. As a result, adolescent migrant girls are reduced to passive victims. In this paper we analyse the agency of adolescent migrant sex workers in three ‘phases’ of their migration process, namely in the decision to migrate, in their lives in the city, and in their future aspirations. We argue that the decisions of adolescent girls to migrate to Addis Ababa is a way of asserting their agency in moving forward with life, yet this agency is taking place in highly constrained circumstances which are strongly related to the gendered ideologies that affect their position in the household, their educational opportunities and their labour market perspectives. The paper is based on a qualitative study conducted in Ethiopia in 2014.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 512-528 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Journal of Eastern African Studies |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 26 May 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2 Jul 2020 |
Funding
The research project in Ethiopia was funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS), Switzerland, and Girl Effect Ethiopia. We would like to thank all the migrant girls that participated in the research for their willingness to share their life stories with us, and Katarzyna Grabska, Alice Franck and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. The research project Time to Look at Girls: Adolescent Girls Migration and Development also included Bangladesh and Sudan. The research was funded by the Swiss Network of International Studies (SNIS) and carried out in collaboration with Terre des Hommes, Girl Effect Ethiopia, Refugee and Migration Studies Unit at the University of Dhaka, and the Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan. See Grabska, de Regt, and Del Franco, Adolescent Girls’ Migration.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Swiss Network for International Studies | |
| Swiss Network of International Studies |
Keywords
- Addis Ababa
- adolescent girls
- Agency
- Ethiopia
- internal migration
- sex work
