This has encouraged poor rural households to put a greater value on education, especially for girls, and on girls themselves. They may also look again at the value of children and decide in favour of investing in a higher quality of opportunity for a smaller number of children. The effect of this diversification strategy is closer contact with urban centres and urban values. At the same time, for those who make the move to the city survival in urban areas may depend on rural skills such as finding a small piece of land to grow food or crops for sale. Migrants will also rely on social networks based on their places of origin, intensifying their linkages to their rural families and recreating some of their former social structures.
Remittances are an important form of exchange between urban and rural areas.
Money flows in both directions, but the bulk of it consists of urban migrants' support to their families at home. Remittances can amount to as much as 50 to 80 per cent of the families' incomes, highest in lower income families, particularly those who are otherwise dependent on farm income. Most women migrants send remittances and if they are in domestic work which provides food and lodging they send more of their cash income. For the poorer migrants remittances can be a large proportion of their total income. Recent migrants have frequently received help with their move, and they are more likely to send money home as repayment.