Young South Africans move for work and opportunity. What happens to their health when they do?

Moving between rural homes, towns and cities is a normal part of life for many South Africans.

Young adults often move in search of work or education, sometimes settling elsewhere for long periods and sometimes moving repeatedly between rural homes and urban destinations .

These patterns of temporary and circular migration are particularly prevalent in South Africa.

They have deep roots in the country’s labour system and apartheid spatial planning .

But changing the place where someone lives can also change the conditions that shape their health: whether they have a job, what they eat, the environment they live in and the healthcare they can access.

Despite high levels of internal mobility in South Africa, we still know relatively little about what happens to people’s health when they move and spend more time in urban areas.

Read more: African cities are diverse and thriving, but face many challenges.

How to make them healthier This is the question behind the Migrant Health Follow-Up Study .

Since 2018, a team of public health and social science researchers from the South African Medical Research Council/Wits Agincourt Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand and Brown University in the US have been following about 3,000 young adults aged 18 to 40 from the Agincourt sub-district in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga in the rural north-east of the country.

The study compares the health of young adults who remain at home with those who move away, including people who later return or move repeatedly between destinations and their rural homes.

Using home visits and telephone interviews over five rounds approximately one year apart, the research team gathered information on migration, education, employment, household characteristics, health and health service use.

Health measures included general health, chronic conditions, diet, depression risk and resilience.

During home visits, blood pressure, height and weight were measured, and HIV status was determined through dried blood spots .

Following the same people over time helped to distinguish between the migrants’ pre-migration characteristics and changes that may occur after migration.