Tag: Inequalities

Launches of our MIDEQ WP9 interventions in South Africa

We were delighted to convene public launches on 15th January in Johannesburg and on 18th January in Cape Town for the interventions on which we have worked with migrants and migrant organisations in South Africa. The same format was followed in each location and included four main elements:

  • Premiere of a documentary film about the lives of the migrants with whom we have been working, entitled Through Their Eyes and produced by Simone Zanetti and Maria Rosa Lorini;
  • Presentation of videos made by the migrants following training by our work package, and introduction to their YouTube channel Fusion Avenue which features all the videos that they have made;
  • Information about the training they have been doing for others on the safe, wise and secure use of digital tech, following the training that they have received from our work package; and
  • Refreshments and networking.

These interventions were conceived and facilitated by the Digital Technologies and Migration work package (WP9) of the MIDEQ Hub funded by the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).  WP9 is led by Professor G. “Hari” Harindranath and Professor Tim Unwin CMG, with the support of Dr. Maria Rosa Lorini (who led the work in South Africa), based at the ICT4D Collective (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK).  The resources were created collaboratively with migrants and organisations in both the Johannesburg and Cape Town regions, including the Scalabrini Centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg, the University of Cape Town, UNISA’s Information Systems Department, Stoneintheshoe, Rainbow Media, and SIHMA.  Other organisations involved in the initiative have included Adonis Musati, Cape Town TV, Ubunti-Bethu, and JL Zwane

Johannesburg launch, 15th January

The Johannesburg launch was held at St Patrick’s Catholic Curch in La Rochelle (press release), and attracted people from the local community, migrants, universities and international organisations (click on arrows to go through the slide deck).

Cape Town launch, 18th January

The Cape Town launch was held at Bertha House, Mowbray (press release), and likewise attracted people from the local community, migrants, universities and international organisations (click on arrows to go through the slide deck).

Resources

For further information:

Our documentary film

Click on the image below to watch a small sized (low resolution) version of Through Their Eyes (full high resolution version to follow)

Our session on “What works for migrants: reflections on intervention dissemination, outputs and outcomes” at MIDEQ Symposium

Hari Harindranath, Maria Rosa Lorini and Tim Unwin from the ICT4D Collective (and Work Package 9 of MIDEQ), together with Guilia Casentini from SOAS (and Work Packages 1 and 3 of MIDEQ), convened a working session at the MIDEQ Symposium held in Rio de Janeiro on 21st September on “What works for migrants”. This focused especially on the ways through which members of the UKRI GCRF funded MIDEQ Hub have worked with (rather than “on” or “for”) migrants in the 12 countries where we have been working since 2019. It also addressed how we have sought to understand what migrants themselves have thought about our research-practice, and the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms we have used.

The workshop addressed four main themes:

  • How do we really know what migrants think about our work? (led by Maria Rosa Lorini)
  • What have we found to be effective ways of gathering empirical evidence about outcomes experienced by migrants? (led by Hari Harindranath)
  • What have we found to be effective ways of disseminating our outputs so that migrants benefit from them? (led by Giulia Casentini)
  • What are good forms of “output”/intervention to improve migrant lives? (led by Tim Unwin)

The enthusiastic group of researchers shown above from many different countries contributed to a very lively discussion that generated the mind map below (click on image for larger .pdf file).

We hope that this may become a useful tool for others wishing to undertake research-practice that aims positively to enhance the lives of migrants.

Research-practice update South Africa, August 2023

Tim Unwin visited Cape Town between 23rd and 30th August to carry forward our work led by Maria Rosa Lorini with migrants in South Africa as part of the MIDEQ Hub. This visit focused especially on dissemination, monitoring and evaluation, and training skills, but it also provided an excellent opportunity to work with other colleagues in MIDEQ from the South African lead team at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and also the work package on creative resistance and well-being from the University of Glasgow

We held two workshops at the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town with the group of migrants who have been trained in video production and in the safe, wise and secure use of digtital tech through our MIDEQ intervention. The first of these concentrated on ways through which these videos can be disseminated more widely, as well as the importance of rigorous monitoring and evaluation for us to understand the impact of these videos. Key ideas to emerge from the workshop were: that it is better to produce something of, say, 60% quality, rather than aiming to produce something of 95% quality but failing to deliver anything; the ways that short videos on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok can be used to direct other migrants to their Fusion Avenue videos on YouTube; and the need for individuals in any loosely knit organisation to take responsibility for some aspect of its work. We also explored the top five tips on Instagram success that Michelle Carlin had suggested.

The migrants had recently held a training workshop on safe, wise and secure use of digital tech for other migrants at Rugby, and so our second workshop was to draw out lessons from this and provide them with additional advice on how to train others. This involved them in delivering short training segments and having feedback from each other on what went well and what aspects they might try to improve.

As part of our dissemination strategy and in order to help make our work sustainable beyond the duration of funding from the UKRI GCRF, we also used the opportunity to have very productive practical discussions with organisations working at the interface between migration and digital tech about ways through which the migrants’ skills in video production could be used to make further videos for these organisations in the future. Among the organisations with whom we explored future collaboration on a range of modalities are the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town, the Adonis Musati Project, the University of Cape Town’s Refugee Rights Unit, Cape Town TV, Phillipi TV, Africa Unite, Ubunthu-Betu in Samora Machel and JL Zwane in Gugulethu.

Finally, this visit provided an excellent opportunity to work together with colleagues from other work packages within MIDEQ, namely our South African country lead team ked by Dr. Faisal Garba at UCT, and Dr. Gameli Tordzro from the Univeristy of Glasgow. Gameli is a highly engaging and charismatic artist and musican whose research is in creative arts and translating cultures, language and education with a focus on African diaspora music, video film production, story and storytelling. He was in Cape Town working with about 25 migrants at Africa Unite to weave a story in words, music and culture about the experiences of African migrants, and it was truly humbling to watch them develop their very moving collective story and performance.

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.