Visiting Research Fellowships offered

The Migrating out of Poverty research programme consortium announces a call for applications from scholars who wish to pursue research on migration and development at the University of Sussex.

Successful applicants will receive Visiting Research Fellow status at the University of Sussex, be based in the Sussex Centre for Migration Research in the School of Global Studies and will work closely with researchers from Migrating out of Poverty.

The University of Sussex is ranked first in the world for development studies.

"Sussex’ world-leading reputation for international development gives us much to celebrate. It's thanks to the concentration of expertise that spans the University and brings us together with our close colleagues and partners, the Institute of Development Studies. Our critical, engaged research on the global issues of our times infuses our teaching in the School of Global Studies, from our undergraduate programmes in International Development to a dynamic portfolio of postgraduate degrees that include long-standing and new cross-campus collaborations with IDS, SPRU, CIE and Brighton and Sussex Medical School. We’re really pleased to be recognised in this way.”  - Head of School, Andrea Cornwall

Our aim is for fellows to participate in and contribute to the broader research objectives of Migrating out of Poverty, addressing research and/or policy issues related to migration, gender, poverty and development in the Global South. Our team is global with researchers based in Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Zimbabwe and the UK. We welcome applicants working in our countries of focus or with similar research themes to ours, described below, but will also consider original themes that provide new angles on migration and development related issues in the Global South.

Our research themes

Income and Remittances

Our research examines the impact of migration on the welfare of households by exploring patterns of remittance sending and their use, livelihood activities and outcomes such as poverty, consumption, asset ownership and living standards. We are building longitudinal rural household surveys for Ghana, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe that allow us to explore changes over time between households with and without migrants, and how these differences vary by important characteristics of the migrants and their families, such as destination and duration of migration, age, gender and skills of the migrant, and initial welfare standards of the household.  Our surveys also provide useful profiles of migrants and their remittance sending behaviour

Gender and Generation

Little is known about how migration, gender and generation intersect at the household level or how economic, social and cultural changes impact on these relations. Our research explores complex and multi-layered household dynamics within the family who remain back home in rural communities in Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal and Zimbabwe. An additional aim is to discern whether there are marked differences between migration to places that are accessible, low-cost and often linked with low financial return (internal/cross-border migration) and migration to places with higher entry barriers, high costs and expectations of high financial returns (international migration). We build evidence for gender-responsive approaches to policy-making and programming.

Migration Industry

The migration of an individual usually involves a range of actors including their own social networks, brokers, border control agencies, training and     certification institutions and even NGOs and religious organisations. These entities, collectively known as the “migration industry”, have grown due to the tightening of restrictions on legal options for migration and their increasingly complex procedures. This has different impacts on the welfare, rights, freedom and economic status of migrants and the research on this theme aims to gain deeper insights into these dynamics in different cultural contexts. An improved understanding of the infrastructure that facilitates migration enables us to make suggestions to reduce exploitation and maximise benefits.

Our digital spaces

migratingoutofpoverty.dfid.gov.uk

migratingoutofpoverty.blogspot.com

@MigrationRPC

www.facebook.com/migratingoutofpoverty

Who can apply?

We welcome applications from early career academics and more established academics employed by another Higher Education Institution, as well as from professionals working for local, national and international government and non-governmental organisations. We particularly encourage applicants from the Global South.

English is the principal working language of Migrating out of Poverty. For both academic and practical purposes, applicants should have fluency in English. 

How long are the fellowships?

Fellowships will usually be for a duration of between 4 and 12 weeks during normal term time, although longer periods may be possible (dependent on the ability to self-fund).

Facilities and practicalities:

The Migrating out of Poverty research consortium will provide office space and access to university services including computing, meeting rooms and the library. We encourage applicants that have funding for their visit via their institutions, but we may be able to reimburse travel and living expenses for those not able to secure funding.

Visiting Research Fellows are subject to UK Home Office immigration regulations. Visitors from outside the European Economic Area must ensure that they obtain an appropriate visa to carry out research in the University prior to arrival in the UK.

Applying:

To begin an application, please first send an abbreviated CV, a 1000-word outline of proposed research (including signalling any specific links to our research themes), duration of intended stay, and desired/expected output(s). Please include details with web links of your current institution and position and the level of financial support you have. If shortlisted, we will ask for two references.

Send an initial application or informal inquiries to migrationrpc@sussex.ac.uk with the subject line: ‘Visiting Research Fellow application’

Migrating out of Poverty, specifically the research theme leaders: Priya Deshingkar, Dorte Thorsen and Julie Litchfield, will review the applications.

For further information, please read the School of Global Studies web page on Visiting Research Fellows: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/global/research/academicvisitors/visitingresearchfellows

Once selected for a fellowship by Migrating out of Poverty, the candidate will receive further instructions similar to the procedures in the link above, however please send all application related communication or queries to migrationrpc@sussex.ac.uk

Deadline for applications:

31 July 2018  

(for anyone wishing to visit in the Fall 2018 term)

or

31 October 2018

(for anyone wishing to visit in the Spring 2019 term)

Dreaming in Dhaka: a postscript on the Global Forum on Migration and Development 2016

This adapted version of a blog by Kellynn Wee was first published on the Migrating out of Poverty (Singapore) site and is re-posted here to mark the start of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) 2017.

Building on an op-end I wrote with Kuda Vanyoro and conversations with sharp, wonderful colleagues, these are my immediate impressions of the GFMD 2016. (My experiences stem from attending two sessions on labour recruitment and global supply chains, another on migrant diasporas and entrepreneurship, and a final session on developing a gender-sensitive approach to the Global Compact.)

We still tend to talk about migrants as workers first, people second. 

This is a thread that runs powerfully through discussions pre-empting the Global Compact on Migration, and was particularly evident on Common Space Day. We talked about labour markets, push and pull factors, entrepreneurship, skills development and matching, recruitment fee regulations, and how migrants brighten local economies as a justification for their entrance into nation-states, employers, ethical recruitment–all of which are crucial topics–but we talked less about migrants’ changing family dynamics, socio-cultural incorporation and inclusion, intimate relationships, and reproductive rights.

Women aren’t just domestic workers.

This tends to be our default mode when we talk about women in migration. Firstly, this reverts to point #1: we see women migrants, first and foremost, as migrant workers. The second problem is that we have fallen into a familiar narrative of adopting domestic workers as the default ‘worker’, which in no way diminishes the urgency of the issues that surround domestic work, but crowds the spaces that we have to discuss women in labour migration. What about, for example, women who engage in embodied and intimate labour, such as migrant sex workers? This is a trickier and more divisive terrain to navigate, but important nonetheless. The third and most pressing problem is that a gender-sensitive approach cannot and should not be restricted to women as workers. Marriage migrants are a significant migration flow: in Singapore, one in five marriages are between a citizen and a foreign spouse. A foreign wife’s legal status is dependent on her husband and a rising number deals with shocking levels of abuse. Or what about ‘study mamas‘, women who accompany children who migrate to study abroad? We also did not discuss transgender women and queer women, and the specific vulnerabilities that they must grapple with. Will these women make an appearance in the upcoming Global Compact, or our future discussions about migration and women.

The host country plays a powerful role in setting the agenda. 

The candidness of H.E. Shahidul Haque, the Bangladesh Foreign Secretary and this year’s GFMD Chair, was a breath of fresh air. Playing both provocateur and realist, he was forthcoming, reflexive about the mandate of states, and eager to urge civil society to take a leading role in issues of migration in the years ahead. “How about a free, fair, and responsive approach, rather than safe, regular and orderly?” H.E. said at today’s Common Space speech. “The strength of every movement is the people, not the state. Have you ever seen a state lead a transformation?” he said at the GFMD Civil Society Days opening speech.  (It helps that he’s very quotable.) In comparison to last year, I thought this year’s Common Space had a relaxed openness to it, with civil society representatives and government delegates truly interacting, responding, and mixing, not just in the interstices of the conference, but within the formal spaces of the conferences as well.

Moderation and session structures are critical to the quality of the discussions.

Well-moderated discussions had several common elements: good timekeeping, critical in reining overenthusiastic speakers in; reminding delegates to ask pointed, concise questions; an ability to make thematic connections between disparate comments and questions; and, most importantly, the facilitation of interaction, rather than panellists’ monologues. In a room full of experts who have spent years working closely with migrants, it is, I think, less important for panellists to share statistics about rates of migrant abuse–an issue we can safely assume to all be intimately familiar with–and more important for a lively Q&A which will allow panellists and the floor to dynamically shape their responses in relation to each other, and to better explore topics of discussion.

Stories are crucial. 
And in many ways, this year, they shone. Poet Vanessa Kisuule’s performances were a gift: necessary, honest, funny, piercing; they felt organic, not shoehorned or tacked on, and I appreciated her active participation and reflection in the days following her poetry. The photo exhibition at the foyer–titled ‘The Best Years of My Life‘ and put together by Shahidul Alam–tracked the lives of Bangladeshi migrants to Malaysia, and glowed with open empathy. Nonetheless, however, I echo the comment we made in our reflection on last year’s GFMD. 

What is the role of research(ers) at the GFMD?
There are times where I itched, and tried, to temper abstract principles in empirical stories, data, and information. I think I talked often, for example, about how recruitment fee flows are gendered in Asia: women migrate through debt; men migrate through upfront fees. These have hugely different implications and will need different solutions. The perennial question of how to connect a global process to local contexts remains something that we will need to explore.

I am both optimistic and wary (and weary. Goodbye forever to 6 am wake-up times! I say fervently). It has been an exciting few days, with many ups and downs, coloured with lots of frustrations and Twitter rants and furiously whispered conversations with people at tea tables and in the audience, but also with moments of delight and joy, and a conviction that some conversations are, at last, moving forward and taking flight. Warm, warm congratulations to the Bangladesh team for pulling off a fantastically organised conference on a tremendous scale. Until we meet again.

Brokers in the migration industry in Ghana: The positive side untold

By Emmanuel Quarshie

Despite their significant role in the migration industry, little has been said about the role of brokers. When people do focus on brokers they tend to highlight the unscrupulous behaviours of some recruitment agents. However a wide array of recruitment agencies in Ghana play roles in the management of risks among migrants and are valued as a result. A working paper by the Migrating Out of PovertyResearch Programme Consortium examined the agency role in the migration brokerage for domestic workers in Ghana.

People on the move

The relative importance of the North-South migration in Ghana has gained ground within key policy dialogue in recent times. The surge in the growth rate of Ghana’s informal sector within urban settlements has remained one of the key pull factors compelling young people to migrate from the Northern part of the country to the southern cities. Over the past few decades, the country has experienced admirable economic growth coupled with improvement in infrastructure and larger engagement in the service sector. This, in turn, has tremendously increased women’s participation in the labour force rendering them less able to participate in household production. As a result there has been a renaissance in the already existing industry which trains people (mostly migrants) to take up these abandoned domestic activities.

What do brokers do?

Brokers are key players in the migration process spanning the pre-migration, migration and post-migration periods. Trust and cultural brokerage are central to this, linking the sending and destination communities and managing the migration process. As part of their role brokers reassure the migrant’s family that their ward is in trusted hands with a high level of certainty of acquiring a good job. It is also the duty of the broker to guarantee the employer that all possible damages, time wastage or misconduct will be resolved appropriately. They also serve as guarantors for migrant workers to ensure some level of credibility and trust in their prospective employers. This can be in the form of written or unwritten agreements with a signed memorandum of understanding. As noted by one of the agencies:

“Our girls cannot mistreat our clients’ kids and they also cannot do the same to our girls. Whatever he/she damages, you, the client, should let us know and, if you want her to pay, she will work for it and pay but you cannot mistreat the person because she is your home help. She is not your slave, she is there for you and you are also there for her, so you work together.”

Alex, a broker, said:

“Yes, I am the guarantor for almost all of them and it is very risky; for most of them, it is because I know either their brother or their sister so I am able to guarantee them. With most of the girls I send to work for expatriates, the least thing that happens, I am the first person to be called, so it is very risky and I always pray that nothing bad happens. I always ensure that I talk to them about staying out of trouble, I always tell them I did not take a penny from anyone when they arrived. Instead, I fed them and paid for their transport so they should stay out of trouble. By the grace of God, nothing bad has happened.”

They also work to overcome negative and prejudiced attitudes among prospective employers.  A recruitment agency acknowledged:

“People mostly don’t trust the Ewes [the third-largest ethnic group in Ghana, mainly from the Volta region] partly because of the fear of juju (voodoo). You would be amazed at how many enlightened people will tell you that. Yes, the Ashanti girls are loud and lazy, yeah a lot of people don’t like them… People prefer Fantes, Akuapems, yeah. Central and Western regions. Oh, Akuapems are polite, do you know what I mean?”

Additionally, brokers serve as mediators for bargaining over wages, working conditions, and workers’ rights. Even though brokers can be guilty of influencing workers to accept jobs where the conditions and wages are poor, they importantly serve as an interlocuter for women in vulnerable positions with little education when they need to negotiate the terms of their employment. As stated by Margarette, from Hammani:

“You send somebody to a place and maybe the agreement was that he/she was supposed to stay at work until Friday and go away on weekends but maybe the employer will say ‘I want you to stay Saturday and Sunday’. Then we draw their attention to the fact that, in order for the person to stay on Saturday and Sunday, the employer needs to pay extra to the person. If the person doesn’t agree, the employer can’t force him or her.”

The way forward

Despite the above-mentioned roles of brokers within the migration industry, they have been generally perceived to be illegitimate and unscrupulous in their approaches to mediating between the prospective workers and employers. This is due to the presence of some non-traceable, unregistered and illegal individuals who manoeuvre their ways into the system to exploit the industry to their own advantage at the detriment of their legit cohorts. However, brokers are important elements in migrants’ strategies to exercise agency, which they would probably otherwise struggle with, given the highly unequal power relationships they face at home and also at their work destination with employers. It is therefore imperative to see the need for a more nuanced and more differentiated understanding of the role and the practices of brokers and intermediaries as they navigate the multi-faceted space in the recruitment process for migrant domestic workers. This is especially important as efforts to regulate the domestic work sector in Ghana intensify.