Educating to Leave: The Migration-Education Nexus & Transformation of Rural Livelihoods in Jinja, Uganda

The links between migration, education and development are oft-cited yet under-researched. This thesis uses aspirations and capabilities to locate the processes of education and (im)mobility within the rural livelihood transformations of Jinja, Uganda. In so doing, the thesis examines the migration-education nexus in three ways: first, it explores how formal and non-formal educational experience informs the imagined futures of youth in rural Jinja; second, it analyses the spatial aspirations that arise from these educational processes; and third, it locates the migration-education nexus within community-wide narratives and broader processes of social transformation. The central claim of the thesis is that while many often migrate for education, the dynamics of rural educational experience can mean that youth also migrate through education. As such, the placelessness often associated with modern education has implications for the realities of rural life. When combined with broader narratives on the diminishing role of the village, youth face the potential of being ‘educated to leave’, as their uncertain futures are appropriated by a mobility imperative embedded in their experience of formal education. Through interviews, focus groups, transect walks, and social mapping, the study illustrates how the heterogeneous experiences of education influence the aspirations and capabilities of youth in rural Jinja to migrate, to stay, and in varying degrees, to develop capabilities that they have reason to value. In addition to examining the mobility imperative in formal educational experience, the study also includes an analysis of two non-formal approaches to education, that are focused on context-sensitive programmes of education. Taken together, this thesis suggests that meaningful discourse concerned with sustainable rural livelihoods should account for (i) varying forms of education that are relevant to rural livelihoods; (ii) the diverse (im)mobility patterns present in any given rural setting, both temporally and spatially; and (iii) the dynamic relationship between structural factors and expressions of individual agency.