Assessment of Socio-Economic Challenges of Migration on Rural Urban Migrants: The Case of Dire Dawa Administration

In developing countries like Ethiopia, rural-urban migration is an image that distresses development in both urban and rural areas. People continuously migrated to urban centers due to pushing rural problem (extreme poverty, unemployment, shortage of agricultural land and etc.) and pulling urban attractions (availability of the increasing construction activities, demand for urban domestic workers, better pay for service work etc.) respectively. The movement poses some challenges in the rural to urban migrants as well as in the urban residents even though; there are benefits derivable from it. Hence, this study aimed to assess Socio-Economic challenges of Rural-Urban Migrants in Dire Dawa Administration. As such, 203 sample were used from three kebeles which were purposively selected those kebeles are; Kebele 02, Kebele 06 and Kebele 07. These specific kebeles were selected based on the fact that the migrants were highly concentrated and found and also most of them are engaged on informal street business and related activities on the stated kebeles. Both qualitative and quantitative research approach was used in order to carry out this research. Based on the descriptive research design the study used questionnaires, observation and interviews as research data collection instrument. The study revealed that the causes of rural-urban migration to Dire Dawa City Administration were mostly related to economic reasons and most of them were found young adults who are productive both social and economically. The surveys also show that a higher proportion of surveyed migrants were male migrants and most of them suffer from high cost of living due to increasing price of food and house rent, inflation, poor housing access, and poor sanitation. Therefore, to mitigate the challenges of rural-urban migrants, launching sustainable and practical policies potential of both in the rural and urban areas through integrated different rural development policies and expanding urban infrastructures and related activities are crucial.