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.