All too often, research-practice initiatives come to an end when project funding runs out, and organisations move on to pastures now. As an intervention package of the UKRI GCRF MIDEQ project (2019-2024), we were especially interested in trying to understand not only the immediate outputs of our work, but also some of the longer term outcomes. We wanted to know how our interventions had begun to change lives, and what was necessary to help ensure that these changes could become sustainable. MIDEQ had brought together researchers and practitioners from 12 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Latin America to examine diverse aspects of the experiences of migrants along six corridors (see Unwin, Casentini, Harindranath and Lorini, 2023). Our package, focused especially on how migrants use digital technologies and what interventions we might help them develop to reduce inequalities in Nepal and South Africa. Through subsequent funding from a Research England Block Grant, the ICT4D Collective, and our own personal resources, “Hari” Harindranath and Tim Unwin returned to South Africa in September and October 2024, eight months after MIDEQ funding had ceased, to meet with organisations and migrants to learn from them about the outcomes of our work so far, and what lessons we mght learn from our engagement together, so that we can improve similar work that we might undertake in the future.
The words of the migrants among whom we worked speak powerfully of their experiences, and how their experiences with us about digital tech and migration have already begun to change their lives. The following short video extracts capture some of the most important outcomes that we have achieved together.
Dadirai (Cape Town): “I’ve now gained my self-confidence“
Daniel (Johannesburg): “It opened a lot of opportunity for me, it really did”
Glodia (Johannesburg): “I’ve been able to respond to certain questions that my siblings may have“
Lydia (Cape Town): I did a marketing video for a friend in Dubai running a restaurant “and for that I get profile and some money“.
Memory (Cape Town): “It’s integral to my personal life, and I have even begun to expand my business“
Michael (Cape Town): “For me it was an investment … It gives me exposure to more new things“
Pascale (Cape Town): “For me this project is more like a seed that has been planted … I’m pretty sure that with the seed planted, the tree will come out, the fruit will come out, and you might not even be there to see it“
For earlier videos by the migrants with whom we worked, do see:
ICT4D Collective 