By tracing the colonial origins and the social usages of an administrative document (the certificat d’indigence), this article argues that, in late colonial Upper-Volta and French West Africa, the “quality of indigence” served as both a bureaucratic device and a category for policing work and vulnerability. First, it was a device used by the colonial administration to hide haphazard and inchoate decision-making processes through mechanisms that appeared equitable. This had the effect of stifling the implementation of new social legislation. Secondly, the administrative mechanisms through which administrators validated indigence status reveal the bureaucratic continuities of interwar period commandement. Using the “quality of indigence,” allowed the administration surveil people who were not present in the administrative records. In the interstices of these often arbitrary decisions, at this time of imperial reconfiguration in the 1950s, claimants navigated these bureaucratic processes, by fashioning and framing their wealth or lack thereof, strategically, to signal their eligibility.

This study explores internal migration patterns in Senegal using individual panel data from a nationally representative survey collected in 2006–2007 and 2010–2012. The data are unique in that they contain the GPS coordinates of individuals’ locations in both waves. We are thus able to calculate distances and map individual moves, thereby avoiding the problems involved in using administrative units to define migration. Our results reveal highly gendered mobility patterns and confirm their durability over the last decades. Women are more likely to migrate than men, but to rural rather than urban destinations. While education increases the likelihood of migration to urban destinations, especially for women, female mobility is mostly linked to marriage, whereas labour mobility is more frequently observed for men.