Horizons of expectations and imaginings regarding life in the transnational marriages of Ethiopians in the Amhara Region

ABSTRACT Transnational marriage involving urban women from the Amhara Region, Ethiopia, and migrant husbands from abroad has been common in the region since the 1990s. The purpose of the article is to analyse the causes behind the women’s marriage to migrant husbands. Triangulated data were collected through interviews, focus group discussions, observations, archive analysis, and questionnaires in Gondar Municipality and Bahir Dar Municipality, from which migrants husbands predominantly originate. The study approached multiple experiences as intersecting mechanisms and revealed transnational marriage as a multicausal process. The findings revealed broad effects, including how poverty was gendered and how gendered economy denied social prospect to induce women to enter into transnational marriage. As economic causes were considered, the phenomenon was not simply about poverty but about information concerning prospects abroad and the recognition of transnational marriage as a migration path without risky options. A further finding was that the ongoing patriarchal order and the pessimism of improved status of women were vital determinants of transnational marriages. The author concludes that given the fragile bargaining power of young women in the Amhara patriarchal setting, marriage to migrants also constitutes the agency and enactments of fathers.