Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2012
Abstract
Women throughout the Somali diaspora are renowned for their commitment to provide financial support to their families abroad (see, for example, Horst 2007). Although it has only been in recent years that women have been migrating to South Africa, their sense of responsibility to remit is equally as strong as those women’s who left Somalia in the early 2000s and before. The author conducted research in Mayfair, a suburb near downtown Johannesburg in Gauteng Province, where the Somali community is most densely populated, and in Columbus, Ohio, where several pockets of Somalis are dispersed around the city. Study results indicate that Somali women living in Mayfair have fewer educational and employment opportunities than those in Columbus, but they nonetheless maintain kinship ties and provide much needed support to family and friends living elsewhere. The Columbus study consists of professional and otherwise employed women, whereas research in Johannesburg is part of a larger ethnographic study that includes employed and unemployed women.
College/Unit
Office of Research, Scholarship and Writing
Publication or Event Title
Migration and Remittances during the Global Financial Crisis and Beyond
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Shaffer, M. (2012). A Comparative Examination of Women’s Remittance Practices in Two Somali Communities: Johannesburg, South Africa, and Columbus, Ohio. Migration and Remittances during the Global Financial Crisis and Beyond Retrieved from https://fuse.franklin.edu/facstaff-pub/57