What Survival Strategies for Sub-Saharan Migrant Women? Networking Competences in a Gender-Aware Perspective

As suggested by its title, the main objective of the LeFamSol Project is to pave the way for a community “Self-Help-Desk” service to be run by network facilitators coming from the concerned communities. Being simultaneously the point of departure and arrival, the idea of producing a community Self-Help- Desk channels the upcoming stages of the Project and their planning, including methodologies and concomitant activities and sub-activities to be pursued with women native to the Sub-Saharan African region: broadly speaking, the former include network building, elicitation, fieldwork, focus group and training activities, being underpinned by identification of beneficiaries, stakeholders and strategic partners, activity planning, preparation, and implementation. Furthermore, the paper elaborates methodological indications adopted in the frames of the LeFamSol Project, which are interrelated with the dynamics and roles of social support and change networks in relation to social capital, gender roles, migrations and social mobility (cf. Bourdieu, Burt, Lin, Coleman, Granovetter, Curran & Saguy, Podolny & Baron), with particular attention to learning patterns (cf. Becker, Haraway, Helliwell & Putnam, Jarvis).