Choosing a Life: Remittances and Youth Aspirations in Bangladeshi Villages

This paper considers the ways in which remittances help rural youths to project their future with regard to education, work and migration

Abstract

Remittances are special forms of economic exchange which can be transformed into or invested in order to build other forms of tangible and intangible resources. The immediate spending of remittances in smoothing household consumption, education, land and other property has long-term economic, social and generational impacts which impact youths’ aspirations and their opportunities to realise their aspirations. In its effort to establish a causal relationship between youth aspirations and remittances based on in-depth qualitative study, the paper considers the complex ways in which remittances help rural Bangladeshi youths to project their future with regard to education, work and migration whilst continuing to experience constraints and opportunities in terms of their class, gender and generation.

This paper is published under the Migrating out of Poverty programme, which is funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).

Citation

Syeda Rozana Rashid and Jalal Uddin Sikder. Choosing a Life: Remittances and Youth Aspirations in Bangladeshi Villages. Migrating out of Poverty RPC Working Paper No. 40. Migrating out of Poverty Consortium, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (2016) 35 pp.

Choosing a Life: Remittances and Youth Aspirations in Bangladeshi Villages

Published 1 September 2016