Effects of residential mobility and migration on standards of living in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: A life-course approach

Rural-to-urban migration and intra-urban residential mobility often lead to improved living conditions. However, it is not clear if this is true for all, especially in cities in developing countries, where inequalities persist and upward mobility remains elusive for marginalized populations. We investigate the effects of intra-urban residential mobility and rural-to-urban migration on standards of living in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We examine the entire residential history of individuals and assess temporal changes in living conditions in their respective housing careers. We use four different aspects of housing as indicators of living conditions from a survey conducted by the World Bank Group that captured the residential history of 2,397 individuals in Dar es Salaam from a spatially representative sample of households. We find that improvements in housing conditions are uneven, a considerable proportion of individuals remained perpetually deprived of adequate housing despite migrating from rural areas to Dar es Salaam and changing multiple homes within the city during their tenure. Our findings indicate that housing disparities persist over time for many. Socioeconomic groups such as migrants tend to experience significant improvements after moving to the city but show limited upward mobility afterwards, an aspect that is rarely addressed in policy discourse on equitable access to adequate housing.