Youth Migration in Togo

The following are the results of a two month long research investigation on youth migration and child trafficking in the village of Farendé, Togo. I began this project by doing nearly 70 qualitative interviews and then I moved toward gathering more quantitative information. I was hearing all kinds of personal accounts, but I wanted to get a sense of just how pervasive this migration/trafficking phenomenon was at present in this village and more statistically useful information about the age, gender, destinations, and motivations of young migrants.

First I used the local hospital’s registre of villagers to count out how many people in Farendé fell into my target population of people from 9-25 years old (see section 1). I sought to answer my question in three different ways. This first was to interview all six chefs du quartier (“neighborhood” chiefs”) and ask them the same 6 questions (See section A)—how many young people have left the village in the last year? 5 years? Estimated % males/females? estimated average age? Most cited destination? Most cited motivation? This method proved very subject to the chief’s mood and memory and doesn’t appear to be too statistically accurate.

The second method was to interview the principals of the three village primary schools and the village middle/high school and ask them each the same 6 questions (See section B)—How many students dropped out of school this year? in the last 5 years? How many of those are boys/girls? Which of those cases were motivated by migratory activity? Of those, how old were they and where did they go? How many cases of trafficking have you seen in the last 5 years? This method yielded much more detailed and useful information, but the principals often had limited knowledge of each individual dropout’s reason for leaving school.

The third method was to go “door-to-door” to a random sample (roughly 10%) of households in the village and interview the heads of  house about the migration history of their families by asking them each the same 7 questions (See section C)—How many people in your household are between (9-25 years old)? Of those, how many of them have migrated in the last year? 5 years? Of those, where did they go? How old were they when they first left? What was their motivation? How many cases of trafficking has your family experienced? This method resulted in what seemed to me the most accurate and detailed information of the three strategies, but there may have been errors in calculations resulting from mistranslations, bias on the part of the interpreter, or dishonesty on the part of the subject. This last method could be further improved by doing 25% of households and extrapolating the results to fit the total subject population. The results are listed by geographic sector of the village (Farendé—Mountain, Farendé- Plain North, and Farendé- Pain South) as well as for the village as a whole.