By Patience Gbeze
Accra, March 15, GNA-A two-day regional conference on Migration for Development is underway to create a platform for project partners, policymakers, and civil society groups and practices in Africa to develop a work plan to inform policy formulation.
It is being organised by the Centre for Migration Studies (CMS), University of Ghana (UG) on the South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub (MIDEQ) project.
The MIDEQ project is being funded by UKRI/ GCRF to provide an avenue for the intensification of lesson drawing, knowledge sharing, and purposive interactions among researchers, public officials, and migrants on how to harness the benefits of south-south migration for socioeconomic development.
MIDEQ project works with a global network of partners in twelve countries in the Global South, organised into six migration corridors to enhance the understanding of the relationship between migration, development and inequality.
The CMS is an implementing agency and is working on the China-Ghana corridors.
Other corridors being handled by other partner countries include Burkina Faso-Cote d’Ivoire; Egypt-Jordan; Ethiopia-South Africa; Haiti-Brazil, and Nepal-Malaysia.
Professor Mary B. Setrana, the Director of CMS, said for the past two years, the project has been focusing on the following thematic areas along different migration Corridors globally, namely; Gender inequalities, Poverty and income inequalities and Resource flow.
She said the objective of those researches was to examine how those processes along the corridor were stimulating the economy in the global south, and how trade was changing the patterns of migration in global south countries.
“We also explore the impacts of migration, employment and financial flows on gender inequalities.”
She said the workshop aimed at providing the appropriate platform for the MIDEQ researchers and stakeholders to discuss the findings and policy implications.
“It is anticipated that the findings will be relied upon by relevant stakeholders to develop context-driven, concise, and specific recommendations for sustainable migration management on the African continent and beyond.
“We also expect that the stakeholders will identify areas of collaboration together with the researchers, “she added.
Prof. Joseph K. Teye, Co-Director of the MIDEQ Project, said the Ghana team has been working on the China-Ghana corridor, focusing on the migration of Chinese to Ghana and the return migrants to from China.
“We are trying to see their experience while in China and now that they are back what they must do.
“What we realised was that media narratives on Chinese portray most of them as irregular or illegal migrants, but our data on the Chinese…we surveyed 1,268 Chinese and we realised that less than two per cent of them do not have working documents.
“The majority of them are regular migrants who are well documented and are working in different sectors of the Ghanaian economy, such as trade, hospitality, mining and construction,” he said.
Prof Teye said the research also found out that despite the negative media narratives on Chinese migrants, they are contributing to the socio-economic development of the country through employment and job creation for the indigenes.
He stressed the need to continue working with the media to highlight the positive sides of migrants to protect their rights.
“We are also working with the artistic organisations to use drama to promote migration and migrants’ rights,” he added.
Professor Heaven Crawley, MIDEQ Director, said the project seeks to shift the production of knowledge about migration and its consequences towards the countries where most migration takes place.
That, she said, they tried to do by engaging with contested concepts and definitions, decolonising research processes and generating new evidence and ideas.
The project aims to translate knowledge and ideas into policies and practices, which work to improve the lives of migrants, their families, and the communities in which they live.
Whiles south-south migration constitutes more than 70 per cent of human mobility globally, it is not given much attention in both policy and academic circles.
This is partly because media narratives tend to portray an exodus from the Global South to the Global North.
In recent years, it is widely acknowledged that if managed, south-south migration can reduce inequalities and contribute to development.
GNA