Rural-Urban Linkages: Guinea

Rural-urban linkages in Guinea are surprisingly
strong even among poor households.
Development planners must analyse urban and
rural contexts as one unified economic sphere.

Rural-urban linkages are characterized by
pronounced seasonality. Urban migrants send
cash to rural relatives in the hunger season, and
rural producers send food immediately
post-harvest, as expected, but there are
important exceptions to the rule.

Food insecurity persists even among households
with strong rural-urban linkages. Both rural and
urban households exercised a wide range of
potentially harmful coping strategies.

Without stable underlying livelihood
systems, strong linkages may only succeed
in redistributing poverty. Strengthening
livelihoods is an important complement to
leveraging linkages for sustained food security.

Understanding that migration is not only driven
by economic distress but also by intangible
factors like the lure of the city for young people,
is important in order to design interventions that
work with the priorities and decisions of the
poor, instead of trying to change them.

Key interventions for leveraging rural-urban
linkages to improve food security include:
providing information and skill training to new
migrants; increasing the value and utility of
transfers by taking advantage of the seasonal
pattern of linkages; making flows of cash, food,
and goods more efficient by decreasing the cost
and providing secure means of transport.