Hi, Alice,

I will suggest a framework that was originally developed to understand coping in the face of natural hazards and has been extended to use by researchers working on climate change adaptation.  However, I think you may find that the access-to-resources approach will be useful in your work on strategies used by African women migrants.  Do please let me know what you think.  I attach the framework.  It appear as chapter 3 in Wisner, B., Gaillard, JC and Kelman, I., eds, The Routledge Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction, London: Routledge, 2012. Cheers, BEN

With more written on South-North migration than South-South migration, I am afraid that writings on South Africans migrating to the West instead of other Africans migrating to South Africa are more common.

That said, there are some shared challenges in the coping and adaptation processes faced by different diaspora groups. See the attached article which uses a mixed-methods framework to study Ghanians' coping mechanisms in London's low-wage economy, especially pp. 413-415.

Article From Coping Strategies to Tactics: London's Low-Pay Economy ...

Interesting and appropriate source, Emmanuel! Cheers, BEN

How about resilience and vulnerability? See work by Deborah E. Bender, including paper attached.

Kenneth Miller's book does this very well

The Mental Health of Refugees: Ecological Approaches to Healing and Adaptation

Hi Ben

I use At Risk extensively and I have read the article you attached. I will use it though I still feel there is a gap on African situation. Africa migrants to South Africa are driven by governance issues in their countries. Natural issues are there but there is more of the human factor. I have tried to adapt the SLF.  

I agree that there is a paucity of research on migration within Africa, and particularly female migration.  You don't say what capital (social, economic and physical capital) these women carry with them, but there are a number of contexts within which they need to be explored, and a mixed methods approach is certainly viable.  Though not geographically relevant to the 'African Experience' you might like to look through: Umut Erel's, Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship, (Ashgate,2009) and Morkovasic, Erel and Shinozaki, Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries: Vol. 1, Gender. (Springer, 2003) 

 In general, migration, and leaving one's culture, psychologically, is similar to loosing one's loved-one: first, he or she stocks in denyle; next step is to accept, with an inner anger, or sorrow, for the passed-on favorite culture. Time passes, and the individual starts the steps of adjusting, in a very gradual way; not that the person will be the same as before. Merely, the sense surviving, and hope for the best, for one's next generation, would be the dominant motivation, no matter what the current condition is. Other variables of environment, time, as well as space (educational or so) and gender would be an additive outer window-dressing for the inner stresses.