Gender stereotypes and labor mobility in Cameroon

Henry Kam Kah, University of Buea, Cameroon

Scholarship on international or national migration in Africa has in the past three decades laid emphasis on the men as mainly the breadwinners of the homes partly due to their involvement in trade and migration from place to place. In Cameroon’s past, men dominated migration from the savannah to the littoral mainly as labor in the German and British plantations. Today, globalization, improvement in communication and infrastructure have provided opportunities for industry and business expansion in many countries including Cameroon. This has attracted a greater migration of women to the littoral quadrant than was the case before the last thirty years. This increase in female southward movement as a result of capital flow/services to this region, improvement in communication and unbalanced development in the country challenges the stereotype views that exist about female migration vis-a-vis male migration in Cameroon and enriches the historiography of the history of migration in Cameroon.