Step up research into migration issues — Veep
The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has urged researchers to step up their activities on migration to provide information for government and other stakeholders to come out with effective policy responses.
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Dr Bawumia said migration and mobility were major human development issues and were increasingly key facets of an increasingly globalised world.
The Vice-President said the country had already launched its first national migration policy to provide the framework to manage migration for sustainable development in 2016, saying migration issues were “high on the global agenda, the African agenda and high on the Ghanaian agenda. I am sure everyone is continuously monitoring the need for effective policies in this area.
United Nations University Conference
Addressing the opening of the United Nations University (UNU) WIDER Development Conference at the University of Ghana yesterday, organised in collaboration with the Africa Research Universities Alliance (ARUA), Dr Bawumia said the theme for the conference spoke to many of the country’s key concerns regarding internal migration, urbanisation, internally displaced persons, irregular migration and migrant smuggling.
Other areas of concern, he said, were labour migration, return, re-admission, and reintegration of emigrants, border management, refugees and asylum-seekers, among others.
More to be learnt
The Vice-President expressed optimism that by the diverse nature of participants in the conference, experiences drawn from many different countries and regions - from Asia to Latin America – as well as to Europe and North America, and especially Africa, would be shared for mutual benefits.
On the capacity of ARUA to impact the body of knowledge on the subject, Dr Bawumia said although ARUA was only two years old, it brought together 15 of Africa’s leading universities with a mandate to develop local research excellence through collaboration, to find solutions to the development challenges of Africa.
Impact of migration
The Secretary General of ARUA, Professor Ernest Aryeetey, said the impact of migration and mobility for policymaking had not well been understood by most countries in the world.
Several decades ago in Africa, he said, rural-urban migration became topical in the numbers of people who migrated from rural areas in search of better life in the urban areas.
However, since two decades ago, Prof. Aryeetey said, more and more attention was being paid to international migration within the context of globalisation.
He said the full-scale investigation of what the phenomenon was ought to be carried out and properly analysed and that the outcome of the conference was set to inform policy in different parts of the world.
The Ambassador of Finland to Ghana, Ms Pirjo Suomela-Chowdhury, said it was time to break away from political rhetorics and fully engage with the issues that underpinned migration which had far-reaching ripple effects on national development.
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