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This chapter explores how politics of uncertainty shape mobilities and immobilities. Recognising that institutions of different types are central in producing and resisting uncertainty, the chapter unpicks how formal and informal institutions in different geographical spaces set the parameters for societal hope and how it is distributed. By juxtaposing the dominant state-driven rhetoric surrounding migration with the common perception among an increasing section of the African public that the potential for a decent life lies outside their country, a mobility paradox manifests. Cross-border mobilities have become increasingly premised on hope, wherein hope is a horizon of imaginable potentiality amid uncertainty about whether the hoped-for future can be reached. Hage's conceptualisation of societal hope highlights that what constitutes imaginable potentiality is distributed unequally. Institutions like the state, society or a transnational network provide a mechanism for evaluating who belongs to the distributional network, in which way and to what degree. Drawing on empirical evidence produced by a group of researchers in long-term and deep engagements with the field, the chapter exposes the competing forces of the formal and informal institutions. The formal politics of migration management aimed at constricting migrants' societal hope clash with the production of societal hope in the informal institutions enveloping migrants' life-worlds. The chapter unveils that risks and uncertainties encountered as migrants are highly gendered. Although migrants are afforded little societal hope where they live and work as migrants, mobilities can have transformative potential at home, especially where gender relations within families gradually change towards greater equality.

This article focuses on rural girls' aspirations of becoming migrants in a setting where girls are subjected to social constraints curtailing their movements in the midst of an otherwise mobile society, where mothers and grandmothers frequently recall their experiences in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and boys set off on their first migration in their mid- or late teens. However, the high level of mobility affects both intergenerational relations and the ways in which girls can justify their wish to migrate. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research between 2002 and 2008 in Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire, the article explores the ways in which images of success and material wealth of (trans)national migrants feed into adolescent girls ' imaginations of migration and its outcome. Furthermore, the article examines how everyday relationships in households influences girls' imagination about their own position in the family. The aim is thus to understand how local conceptualizations of womanhood and migration practices both create a frame for female youth's life worlds and provide them with a range of role models showing them how spatial and social mobility allows them to transcend boundaries but also generates new demands on their resources. The article argues that the social status ascribed to migrants in rural communities pushes adolescent girls to circumvent constraints on their mobility by marrying earlier and to avoid challenging their husband by accepting to use their economic resources for the benefit of the migrant household instead of enhancing their social status by sending remittances to their own family.

Un effort politique considérable a été fait pour tendre à l'élimination du travail des enfants et l'attention se concentre actuellement sur la question de la création d'emploi pour les jeunes. La plupart des solutions proposées partent du principe que l'éducation est une composante fondamentale de l'enfance et que le manque d'éducation constitue un obstacle majeur à l'emploi des jeunes. Les difficultés prolongées que ces derniers rencontrent pour trouver un emploi à l'issue de leur scolarisation ou d'une formation professionnelle ne sont considérées qu'en termes de programmes éducatifs mal adaptés et de barrières économiques à l'entreprenariat des jeunes. Le travail des enfants (en dessous de 18 ans) est en soi un objet de débats, tandis que les migrations de travail des jeunes sont absentes des stratégies de développement suédoises et danoises les plus récentes en direction de l'Afrique.En rapprochant les réflexions sur le travail des enfants et l'emploi des jeunes – habituellement traitées séparément et par des organisations différentes – ce numéro de Policy Notes met en lumière une série de questions à prendre en compte dans les politiques de développement contextualisées. Deux arguments principaux sont développés:-Le centrage sur la scolarisation rend invisibles les enfants travailleurs et les savoirs qu'ils acquièrent en dehors de l'école.-Le centrage sur la formation technique/professionnelle comme étant le plus sûr moyen pour les jeunes d'accéder à l'emploi ignore les inégalités entre mondes rural et urbain, ainsi que les modalités de l'organisation du marché du travail en Afrique.

This article focuses on adolescent boys' independent migration to Ouagadougou and Abidjan and aims to unpack decision-making and strategies in child relocation. Through participant observation and interviews with around 120 young male migrants from the Bisa region in south-eastern Burkina Faso, the article explores how their capacity to tap into networks of kin and peers shapes their migration and work trajectories. The article argues that adolescents' performance as social actors is central to their migration, in as much as they choose between travelling with age-mates or with senior kin, which in turn shapes the destination and the type of work that they will take up as early-career migrants. The adolescents also make choices regarding employers and where to live at the destination by tapping into particular types of social networks. Adapted from the source document.

This article addresses the intra‐household division of responsibilities among the Bisa and Mossi in south‐eastern Burkina Faso. Based on a detailed village study of the land use which revealed that women cultivated 31 per cent of all the land in 1997, gendered practices in household budgeting are investigated. Although the proportion of women's own‐account agriculture suggests that they contribute substantially to household consumption, the majority of women maintain that they only help their husbands when contributing in areas that, ideologically, are his responsibility, for example by providing food and by paying school fees and materials. In this way, women keep within the norms of showing respect for the husband but, at the same time, they may press him to fulfil his obligations.

Introduction : Studying hope and uncertainty in African migration / Nauja Kleist -- How to extract hope from papers? : Classificatory performances and social networking in Cape Verdean visa applications / Heike Drotbohm -- Sticking to God : Brokers of hope in Senegalese migration to Argentina / Ida Marie Vammen -- Zouglou music and youth in urban Burkina Faso : Displacement and the social performance of hope / Jesper Bjarnesen -- The lack of liberty drove us there : Spatialized instantiations of hope and contested diasporan identity in the Liberian-American transnational field (1810-2010) / Stephen C. Lubkemann -- Prospective moments, eternal salvation : The production of hope in Nigerian Pentecostal churches in China / Heidi Østbø Haugen -- Hope and uncertainty in Senegalese migration to Spain : Taking chances on emigration but not upon return / María Hernández-Carretero -- The migratory adventure as a moral experience / Sylvie Bredeloup -- Death of a gin salesman : Hope and despair among Ghanaian migrants and deportees stranded in Niger / Hans Lucht -- Returning with nothing but an empty bag : Topographies of social hope after deportation to Ghana / Nauja Kleist

About the authors -- Preface -- 1 Introduction: interrogating childhood and migration -- 2 Contexts of migration -- 3 Choosing to move: the reasons for rural children's migration -- 4 Journeys and arrivals: introductions to new social worlds -- 5 Navigating migrant life: processes of constructing identities -- 6 Moving on -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

This paper draws on a feminist poststructural perspective to examine gendered dimensions of sending and managing international migrant remittances in a patriarchal community in Ghana. It relies on primary data collected through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and observation in Nkoranza, a Ghanaian community with a long history of international migration and receipt of remittances, to analyze the fluidity of gendered and intergenerational power relationships associated with managing remittances. The findings show that males and females perform different roles as remitters and managers of remittances. While the patterns of sending and receiving remittances tend to conform to gender norms, which construct men as providers and women as carers, these subject positions are fluid. Although men are generally reluctant to perform traditional female roles even when their wives migrate, gendered and intergenerational power relations are being negotiated through the sending and management of remittances.