Returning home: migrant connections and visions for local development in rural Nepal

Jytte Agergaard, Ditte Brøgger

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Migration to domestic and international destinations has become an emblematic feature of Nepal’s societal changes. Part of this development is education migration from rural to urban areas within the borders of Nepal, an often overlooked but increasingly important aspect of contemporary migration flows. By focusing on these educational migrants, this paper explores how they connect
to their rural homes. Guided by a critical reading of the migration-development scholarship, the paper examines how migrants and their relatives make sense of educational migrants’ remitting and returning practices, and by comparing three groups of educational migrants, the migrants’ reasons for staying connected and sending remittances are scrutinized. The paper finds that although educational migrants do not generate extensive economic remittances for local development in Nepal, they stay connected to their rural homes and partake in important social remittance practices that represent a vision for impacting local development
Original languageEnglish
JournalGeografisk tidsskrift / Danish journal of geography
Volume116
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)71-81
Number of pages11
ISSN0016-7223
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Jan 2016

Cite this