ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the flow of knowledge or ideas and their actual and potential transformational role in places of origin through a case study of Hadiya migration to South Africa and drawing on the social remittances literature. These include expanded economic horizons that enable business ventures in sectors, that are otherwise shunned or overlooked; diffusion of liberal economic ideas that are used to critique Ethiopia’s historically entrenched statist conception of development; enhanced networking capacity; culture of saving; resilience, and the belief in oneself. These new ideas and sets of skills acquired during the migratory experience, coupled with the newly found financial resource, have helped generate a collective energy that is enabling a place of origin hitherto at the margin of the Ethiopian society to redress the historically shaped regional inequality within Ethiopia and turn it into a migration-animated economic hub.
