“When Rainclouds Fail to Gather:” Exploring the Gendered Nexus of Drought, Food Security and Migration in Urban Botswana

This project aims to explore the gendered nexus of urban drought, migration and food insecurity from the perspective of migrant women and men in Gaborone. The resultant research objectives are to: (1) Identify key dimensions of urban droughts to better understand how they manifest spatially and temporally in the city; their core characteristics (for example, an excess or shortage of water; extreme heat stress) and the continuum/disjuncture between rural and urban events; (2) Building on this, examine gendered experiences of food insecurity among migrant women and men in relation to food access, availability, utilization, agency and stability, and shifting urban diets and nutrition; (3) Explore migrant households’ responses to urban drought paying particular attention to remittance practices, how these shape rural-urban links and urban food security. Relatedly explore how mobility within and across Gaborone, and to rural areas, is shaped by drought and hunger; and (4) Investigate the scope for cross-sectoral governance to drought and food security that is cognisant of the significance of urban spaces as well as rural-urban connections. The methodological toolkit adopted will comprise: Desk-based review of grey and literary literatures (GoB, SADC, third sector reports, AU); Stakeholder mapping informed by the desk-based review and other sources; Key informant interviews (10 in total); In-depth interviews with migrants (30 in total, 15 each with women and men); Body mapping (10 in total, 5 with women and 5 with men) where successive maps of how heat, hunger, and mobility are experienced and overlay each other are produced to inform interventions; Knowledge exchange workshop with key stakeholders using focus group format.