Migration, Employment and Child Welfare in Ho Chi Minh City and the Surrounding Provinces

The present study has been designed to help fill the gap in our understanding of the relationship between mobility, employment and the well-being of children and young people. The study focuses on families dependent on earnings from casual wage employment. The research introduces several methodological innovations that we consider important to the study of the migrant poor: i) purposive selection of migrants working in low wage occupations as a means of identifying the poor; ii) replacement of the conventional definition of the household with a roster of “economically linked individuals”; iii) surveys of primary carers in originating households in selected Mekong Delta provinces; and, iv) tracing of a sample of rural-to-urban migrants from their location of origin in the Mekong Delta in order to link the living conditions of their left-behind children to the working conditions of parent migrants.