Migration consortium discusses ways of ensuring inclusive growth

The Consortium network of academic and research institutions, known as Migration for Inclusive African Growth (MIAG), has held a workshop in Accra to find ways of managing migration to achieve an all-encompassing growth.

The Consortium has membership in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria and Kenya, and aims to conduct a comparative study to understand migration's contribution to inclusive growth.

It is being supervised by the Open University, United Kingdom, with funds from the Economic and Social Research Council.

The Centre for Migration Studies, University of Ghana, is representing Ghana on the Consortium.

Professor Joseph K. Teye, the Director of CMS, said migration was an integral part of life, hence the need to manage it effectively to achieve all-encompassing growth.

"It is also to understand…which sectors are benefiting and which are not and what can be done to scale up growth to these sectors," he added.

He said Ghana's focus is on immigrants and how they were contributing to growth, hence a research would be conducted in the Greater Accra, Ashanti and Western regions, targeting them to collect the necessary data to support policy.

Ghana receives about 4.9 billion annually as foreign remittances, which was higher than international foreign investments, Prof. Teye said, adding that the time had come for the Government to ensure that banks developed remittance led products to promote investment in that sector.

He said another area to look at was reducing international remittance transfer cost to encourage people to send in more.

An International Development Professor, Giles Mohan, of the Open University, said MIAG aimed to develop a robust conceptual framing of how migration and inclusive growth could be linked with the view of informing research, policy and practice.

It is also working to ascertain the economic contributions contemporary migrant communities could make to achieving inclusive growth in Africa and to evaluate innovative examples of policy and practice to enhance it.

The MIAG was instituted between 2017 and 2018 with the purpose of understanding the link between migration and inclusive growth, using evidence cafés to take stock of existing data and research connecting migrants and diaspora to sector development.