Address by L. Alan Winters, CEO

I’m sorry I cannot be with you all in person for this, the first workshop within the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium directed towards media professionals. However, every September I have to justify the existence of the Consortium to our funder – the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) – by producing an Annual Report, and that is absorbing me more or less full time at present. Nonetheless, on behalf of the Consortium, I’d like to thank you all for your interest in our work and for making the time to find out more about our research and our findings, and about the issues more generally that we are exploring.

I don’t need to tell you that migration is a highly sensitive issue in political circles, or that this is true whether we are talking about migration from Africa to Europe, within west Africa or internally within Ghana. But there is a strong belief, certainly among those who migrate and their families, that migration can offer a passport to a better life. And again, that is just as true for those who migrate within a country or within a region as for those who cross continents. The UNDP estimates that there are about three quarters of a billion internal migrants in the world compared with fewer than a quarter of a billion international migrants. Since moving internally is cheaper and more easily arranged than moving internationally, it is internal migration that is most relevant to the poor, and it is this that the Migrating Out of Poverty Consortium focuses on.

The Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium is a partnership with 6 core partners – the Centre for Migration Studies your host is our West Africa partner, and we have partners in East Africa (the African Migration and Development Policy Centre – AMADPOC – in Kenya), Southern Africa (the African Centre for Migration and Society – ACMS – in South Africa), Southeast Asia (the Asia Research Institute – ARI – in Singapore), and South Asia (the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit – RMMRU – in Bangladesh).

We are funded by UK Aid, channelled via the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), to investigate the link between migration and poverty in Africa and Asia. Each core partner, like CMS, leads a programme of research in their own region that emphasises local priorities within the Consortium’s overall themes. We are just winding up our first phase of research which explored broad issues of rural-urban migration and urbanisation, migration policy issues and the ways in which migration impinges on women and girls. During that phase, as you will hear later, CMS worked on a project looking at migration into urban slums in Ghana, and we also conducted surveys in Ghana, Bangladesh and Indonesia to gather data about migrant households. The CMS team will take you through the findings of the Ghana survey during the workshop. We are now finalising the Phase II programme which will explore intra-household dynamics through the examination of remittances and youth aspirations; the migration industry with a focus on construction and domestic workers; an examination of how policy gets made (or not) in the area of migration and the forces that shape it; the attitudes of the host communities to immigrants, and a detailed comparison of households from which migration has occurred with otherwise similar households from which it has not, in order to try to pin what would have happened to the migrant and her household if migration had not occurred.

We all know that some people migrate and go on to lead fuller, better lives with more opportunities, more income and more prosperity – some of which is fed back to their families and communities of origin. But alongside these are others who migrate into situations that certainly on a material level are worse than those they left. People who are barely able to keep their heads above water as they eke out a meagre living for themselves in their new homes, let alone having anything to spare for their families left behind.

We are trying to identify the circumstances and factors that result in migration having a poverty reducing effect as opposed to the opposite. Where our findings lead us to conclude that some tweaks or even significant changes in policy can significantly improve poverty outcomes, we say so – to policy makers directly, when we can, but also to the public via people like you. Public understanding of complex issues is an important stimulus to good policy, which in turn makes the lives of the poor better. And that’s where you come in. We need your help in getting decent information and data about migration out there; but to do that you need to know about and understand the issues in general as well our research, our findings and our conclusions – and help us to explain this to others.

The Migrating out of Poverty team at CMS, under the leadership of Professor Awumbila, has had a good relationship with the Ghanaian media, which is why we have such a distinguished set of participants here. We hope that this workshop will make that relationship even stronger. As you are probably aware, this workshop was originally planned to be regional, but unfortunately the spread of the Ebola virus scuppered that idea. However, the new national focus has given us the opportunity to engage more Ghanaian journalists. We hope that you’ll keep in touch with us, and spread the word to the Ghanaian public and to your colleagues in other parts of the region. If you do this in an informed and sensitive manner, you will can work with us to ensure a better understanding of the relationship between internal and regional migration and poverty.

I look forward to hearing about the outcomes of this workshop and to seeing the fruits of CMS’s partnership with you all.

I wish you every success.

Alan

Professor L. Alan Winters, CEO Migrating out of Poverty

September 2014