Clemens Greiner *1 Reporting Bias in Support Network Data: A Case Study of Remittances in Namibia Remittances provide a substantial income for many poor households in devel- oping countries (de Haan, Rogaly 2002; Satterthwaite, Tacoli 2002: 64). At the beginning of the 1990s, cash lows remitted by transnational migrants already exceeded the total sum of international development assistance (Massey et al. 2005: 222). Remittances from internal, mostly rural-to-urban migration seem to be of comparable importance (de Haan 1999). Although there is a great deal of evidence on the importance of remittances, estimates on their size and value vary widely (Mazzucato et al. 2008), especially regarding remittances from internal migration (de Haan 1999: 23 – 26; Trager 2005: 23). Namibia’s burdensome colonial legacy is particularly visible in sharply pronounced intra-societal and intra-regional inequalities. Research on mi- grant remittances is rare there, and most of the existing data is of questionable quality (Hastings 1999). 12 Considering the fact that large internal population movements are a profound characteristic of the Namibian past and present, this lack of reliable data turns out to be a serious drawback in understanding contemporary migration processes. In my research on rural-urban migration in northwestern Namibia, I fo- cused on social support networks linking rural- and urban-based kin. Most of this research was carried out on farming settlements surrounding the Fransfon- tein communal area. These farming settlements are inhabited by a multiethnic population, which has been shaped by various migration processes (cf. Bollig et al. 2006; Miescher 2005). The area is located in the Kunene Region, part of which was formerly known as “Damaraland,” a homeland established in the late 1960s by the South African Government while implementing apartheid policies in their erstwhile colony. As in most former Namibian homelands, agro-ecological conditions are bad and severe droughts are endemic to the prevailing climatic regime. Most households rely on subsistence livestock * I thank Michael Schnegg and Waltraud Kokot for valuable comments on a draft version of this paper. 1 Bruce Frayne has published extensively on rural-urban transfers of agricultural products between the Ovamboland region and the capital of Windhoek (Frayne 2001, 2005a, 2005b).