Month: February 2023

Helping migrants from Nepal and their families to benefit from safe, wise and secure use of digital tech

Hari Harindranath and Tim Unwin with migrants, migrant organisations and tech organisations in Kathmandu, January 2023

The UNESCO Chair in ICT4D leads Work Package 9 within the MIDEQ Hub (funded by UKRI GCRF) on technology, inequality and migration. This is explicitly an intervention package, designed to draw on research across the Hub to bring migrants, migrant organisations and tech developers together to craft practical interventions that can benefit their lives and reduce inequalities associated with migration. We have been working with NISER, our lead partner in Nepal, since 2019 undertaking research on how migrants already use digital tech (see our working papers), and building on this work Prof “Hari” Harindranath and Dr. Maria Rosa Lorini visited Nepal in September 2020 to initiate our intervention activities. Migrants identified two main areas where they felt that interventions could make a significant difference: appropriate training in the uses of safe, wise and secure digital tech, and creating a platform or portal as a digital one-stop-shop that would bring together the most important sources of information for Nepali migrants and ther families.

Hari returned to Nepal with Tim Unwin in January-February 2023 to convene workshops (on 28 and 29 January, and 3rd February) and meetings to take forward the implementation of these two interventions. Good progress was made in the following areas (further details here):

  • Designing the content structure for the platform, and setting in motion the work of the content team and the tech team who are going to take forward the digital one-stop-shop with a Beta version planned for May 2023.
  • Running a pilot workshop in Kathmandu for migrants based on the slide deck developed with migrant organisations over the previous couple of months. This was well received, with helpful comments having been suggested for improvement.
  • Running another workshop in Pokhara for students and staff from a Migrant Resouce Centre, which recommended that we need to develop a more basic introduction to the wise, safe and secure use of digital tech for those who have negligible prior knowledge of digital tech.

This visit to Nepal also provided the valuable opportunity to have a very productive visit to colleagues in the UNESCO Office in Kathmandu (30 January), to sign a partnership agreement and discuss collaborative research-practice with Gandaki University in Pokhara (1-2 February), to meet with tech companies including Hamro Patro and Ncell (3 February), to explore collaboration with government initiatives through the Foreign Employment Board (31 January), to engage with colleagues at the National Innovation Centre (31 January), and to meet with fellow researchers working in the field of digital tech and migration (see images below).

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who attended our workshops, and who contributed to this work. We are also grateful to the staff at the Hotel Himalaya, Lalitpur and the Landmark Hotel in Pokhara for facilitating our stay and meetings – and would recommend both for anyone visiting Kathmandu and Pokhara respectively.

Meeting with colleagues at the UNESCO Office in Kathmandu

Profs “Hari” Harindranath and Tim Unwin were delighted to visit colleagues at the UNESCO Office in Kathmandu during their recent visit to Nepal (26 January – 5th February) as part of our contribution to the work of the MIDEQ Hub (funded by the UKRI GCRF). This provided an excellent opportunity for them to brief the UNESCO Office team about our MIDEQ-related work in Nepal, and also the wider activities of our UNESCO Chair in ICT4D, including the use of digital tech in education, TEQtogether, and the Digital-Environment System Coalition. It was a real pleasure to learn from Michael Croft (Director) and his team about the various activitites on which the Office focuses, and to discuss ways of collabroating in the future.

We are already building on this visit, and are very grateful to them for their advice on developing training materials and a portal for Nepali migrants and their families to gain information about all aspects of the migration process. This visit was such a good example of how UNESCO Chairs can work closely with UNESCO’s offices around the world to help achieve the organisation’s overall goals. We were made to feel so welcome, and the conversations were full of enthusiasm and passion for how UNESCO and its Chairs can contribute together to support Nepal’s people. We very much hope that other colleagues in our UNESCO Chair as well as our partners will also consider ways through which they too can support the UNESCO Office in Kathmandu.

New partnership agreement with Gandaki University, Pokhara, Nepal

The UNESCO Chair in ICT4D at Royal Holloway, University of London signed a new partnership agreement with Gandaki University, Pokhara during a visit of our Chairholder, Tim Unwin, and Professor Harindranath to the university on 1st February 2023. The University, situated in the valley of the lakes below the Fishtail and Annapurna mountains, was established in 2019 to provide world class education in keeping with recent international trends in university education. It has particular interests in ways through which digital technologies can benefit Nepali society and economic development, and one of its first degree programmes is the Bachelor of Information Technology degree.

Signing the MoU with Gandaki University

Our partnership has five broad outputs:

  • Joint workshops, events and conferences to explore aspects of the inter-relationships between digital technologies, inequalities, social change and international development in the context of Nepal  
  • High quality research and publications on digital technologies, inequalities, social change and international development in Nepal
  • Research visits and exchanges between partners, especially to enhance the experiences of early career researchers
  • Joint funding applications to relevant funding agencies and research councils
  • Policy recommendations on areas of mutual interests

and is intended that these will in turn lead to the following outcomes:

  • Nepalese migrants and their families use digital technologies more safely, securely and wisely to improve their lives and livelihoods
  • Enhanced understanding globally, but especially in the UK and Nepal, about the creation and use of digital technologies, and their influence on social and economic inequalities
  • Wiser processes and activities implemented by companies in Nepal and the UK to mitigate the negative impacts of the development and use of digital technologies by migrants
  • Improvement in global policy making relating to the use of digital technologies by and for migrants
  • Enhanced collaboration between academics, policy makers and practitioners in effecting changes to the ways in which digital technologies are designed and used so that their potential harms are mitigated and their benefits for the poorest and most marginalised are enhanced, especially in the contexts of Nepal and migration 

The university is currently building a new campus on the eastern outskirts of Pokhara, and Tim and Hari were invited on 2nd February to see the progress on construction that has already been made, illustrated in the photographs below.

Department of Pharmacy

Valley running past the new campus

Invention and Innovation Centre

The catalyst for this partnership has been the work of the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D on technology, inequality and migration in Nepal as part of the UKRI GCRF funded MIDEQ Hub, but it is hoped that this will provide many further opportunities for future collaboration, and discussions are already underway with some of our Affiliated Members in the region exploring fiurther synergies.