Gendered Environmental Migration, Land Rights, and Environmental Change in the Lake Chad Basin: A Multi-Sited Longitudinal Study

The interacting pressures of Lake Chad shrinkage, desertification, conflict, and demographic growth are producing complex migration dynamics in the Lake Chad Basin that are poorly understood from a gendered perspective, particularly regarding how women navigate environmental migration while maintaining or losing access to land and livelihood resources. This doctoral research investigates gendered environmental migration processes, land rights outcomes, and their relationship to environmental change trajectories in the Nigerian Lake Chad Basin through a multi-sited longitudinal study conducted over three years. The research follows 240 households at six sites representing origin, transit, and destination communities in Borno, Yobe, and Jigawa states, collecting three-panel survey data supplemented by 80 in-depth biographical interviews with women migrants. Land rights trajectories are tracked through repeat land tenure assessments. Environmental change characterisation employs time-series remote sensing and local ecological knowledge elicitation. The study deploys feminist political ecology as its primary theoretical framework and incorporates a gendered migration systems theory to analyse multi-scalar determinants of mobility decisions. Original empirical findings document that women-headed migrant households face systematically greater land access insecurity at destination compared to male-headed households, attributed to customary tenure systems that condition women's rights on spousal and family relationships disrupted by migration. Environmental push factors interact multiplicatively with conflict and socio-economic stressors in ways that standard income-based migration models fail to capture. Theoretical contributions include a gender-differentiated environmental migration typology for Sahelian West Africa. Policy implications address land rights protections in humanitarian programming and climate migration governance frameworks. Keywords: environmental migration, gender, Lake Chad Basin, land rights, feminist political ecology.