Wang Sonne Soazic Elise

A growing body of the literature has investigated the consequences of remittances on various types of development outcomes at the household level in Sub Saharan Africa. Most of these studies report strong positive effects on consumption, education, poverty and inequality reduction of money sent back home by those who migrated abroad. However, few of these studies have taken a gender perspective, trying to see whether the gender of the sender(s) or the receiver(s) matter whilst assessing the welfare effect of those remittances. Using a quasi-experimental micro econometric analysis framework with the 2014 World Bank LSMS data, this paper examines the gender differentiated impact of remittances on household welfare in Burkina Faso. We focus on four 'less-investigated' development outcomes: Technology adoption, under five years old children's anthropometric outcomes, food security and vulnerability to income poverty. The finding suggest that the probability of households adopting labor saving technologies increases by 10 percentage points if they receive remittances. A gender differentiated effect is found between male and female headed household. Also, the food security index improve by 0.5 points on a scale from 0 to 5 for household-receiving remittances, with a gender bias between male and female head of the house. Last but not least, a more pronounced positive effect of remittances is found for under five years old girl as opposed to boys. Overall, these effects are even higher in households where the core senders are women. Moreover, there is a significant difference of the effect of those remittances when disentangled between intercontinental and intra-African migration.

Overall, a gender bias has been verified in the effect of remittances on Household welfare and that's point out to the necessity for the government of Burkina Faso to provide incentives to attract more remittances sent by women and make sure they are used in a productive manner so that they can bring the expected social change. A promising avenue for future research might be directed towards the understanding of why households with women as the core senders are having a greater impacts on various development outcomes but also why these welfare enhancing impacts tend to be more pronounced for female headed households as compared to male headed households.