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Migration in West Africa

In both more developed countries and less developed countries, governments are becoming increasingly more interested in the issue of migration—how it affects the overall economic and social system and how it affects the welfare of the individual. Africa, especially West Africa, offers an excellent example of a region which is witnessing sometimes dramatic shifts in population, at both the national and subnational level. Foreign workers, refugees, settlers and city-bound migrants all contribute to the changes which are occurring in the spatial pattern of population. Zachariah and Conde's Migration in West Africa seeks to shed some light on this issue. In particular, it is an account of the "demographic dimensions and characteristics of migration" in nine West African countries—Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Senegal, Mali and Togo. The book is divided into five chapters, each of which considers some specific aspects of the overall migration picture for each of the countries being considered. One chapter, for example, considers internal migration, another focuses on international migration, still another describes rural urban migration, etc. Given the difficulty involved in securing such a massive amount of data, the authors are to be commended for assuming such an awesome task. Unfortunately, however, what results from their unquestionably immense effort is simply much information regarding the national demographic characteristics for each of the countries considered and several broad general descriptions of population movements around the West African region. The subsections describing the characteristics of internal migrants, recent trends in international migration and the effects of migration, although very wellpresented, could have benefitted tremendously if they had been linked with recent findings in migration research or had been linked to each other. Without this linkage, the results of these sections lack conceptual relevance and fail to provide a comprehensive picture of what we know about migration. This is also true for the discussion of rural-urban migration. The remainder of the book is similar in its emphasis on description and continues to provide an accounting of various other aspects of migration in the nine countries studied, such as historical background, principal areas of inand out—migration, and migration between natural regions. While the authors clearly state in the preface that their purpose was not to analyze the causes and consequence of migration, they do, however, offer a few "incidental" observations. Specifically, they include under "causes of migration"