Countries such as India, Nigeria, and Turkey are becoming increasingly urban, with many people moving from rural areas into large cities such as Lagos.
The data, which comes from social networking site Facebook, found that Lagos grew almost 20 per cent in the last 12 years as a destination city a report in the UK’s Daily Mail has stated.
Over 15 per cent of the Earth’s population use Facebook, with 1.19 billion users logging on each month.
The social network knows intimate details about most of these people – whether it be what they eat for lunch or who they spend.........
most of their time with.
While a lot of people would be unnerved by the vast amounts of data available to Facebook, personal data can also provide interesting detail about the world we live in and how it’s changing.
Facebook data scientists recently compared users’ home towns with their current residences to uncover the top 10 cities that had ‘coordinated migrations’- or the movement of large numbers of people from one place to another.
Table showing the major destinations of coordinated migration in ten rapidly urbanising countries.
The top destinations were found throughout the world in countries that are rapidly urbanising. In these areas at least 20 per cent of the population of one city had moved to another city.
The data found that Lagos in Nigeria grew 18.6 per cent between 2000 and 2012. In November 2011, the Lagos State government put the population of the state at around 21 million. That increase from 18 million recorded in the 2006 Census to 21 million in 2011, implies that the state’s population increased by an average of half a million annually.
Also according to the state government, these 21 million souls are crammed in a liveable area of 356,861 hectares, of which 75,755 are wetlands. With its strategic position as the nation’s commercial capital, people continually migrate to the city hoping to find work and make a fortune.
A United Nations report projects that the city’s population would hit 23.2 million in 2015; which means that an estimated 1200 people enter Lagos every day. This huge population has continued to strain the already inadequate housing available in the city, resulting in more cramped space for most inhabitants.
Other top cities
Istanbul was the second most popular city. A large proportion of migrants came from other parts of Turkey, with the rest originating from Eastern Europe.
“We believe that these migrations have cultural and political motives, on top of economical ones,” said Facebook.
“For instance, we observe migration from Bulgaria (with a considerable Turkish minority) and from majority-Muslim Bosnia.”
According to this data, countries such as India, Nigeria, and Turkey are becoming increasingly urban, with many people moving from rural areas into large cities such as Hyderabad and Chennai in India and Lagos.
For most of the cities on the top 10 list, the megacity migrations are coming from within the same countries.
One of the effects of mass migration is a struggle for jobs as displayed in this rush for a few vacancies at a job interview in Lagos.
But there are a few interesting patterns. Kampala in Uganda, for instance, is absorbing a significant number of people from towns in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the U.S. coordinated migrations tend to come from other countries, such as from Cuba to Miami and from Mexico to cities such as Chicago, Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
The Facebook data, however, excludes China, where the social network is banned but which has undergone the largest migration in human history.
This isn’t the first time scientists have used Facebook to analyse migration trends. Two years ago, former Apple developer Pete Warden published a blog revealing data he scraped from public Facebook profiles.
He initially shared the data with the world but later took it offline after a legal threat from Facebook. The social site said he had failed to obtain prior written permission.
Source:The Nigerian Telegraph
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