How environmental migrants choose their place of destination in Burkina Faso?

Sabine J.F. Henry, Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix

Burkina Faso is characterized by intense mobility. For several decades, harsh natural conditions have caused large population movements characterized, to a large extent, by "environmental refugees". Very few studies have tackled the factors determining the destination of migration. The objective of this study is to understand how environmental migrants choose their destination compared to economic migrants. We aim to test three hypotheses in the Burkinabè context: (i) a favourable natural environment is a pull factor of major importance for migrants; (ii) the economic diversification of villages attracts migrants; and (iii) the level of equipment and infrastructure are not major factors in migrants' destination choice. Our study involves a combination of demographic and geographic methods. Research is based upon multi-level event-history analysis using an exceptional set of retrospective data, including a national survey on migration, a longitudinal community survey and other geo-coded data generated by GIS (e.g. rainfall data).