Hi! I'm a researcher doing work around modern slavery and human trafficking. Sometimes i do work on other crime and security issues too.
MIICT, (ICT Enabled Public Services for Migration), is conceived with the goal of designing, developing and deploying tools that address the challenge of migrant integration through the co-creation of improved ICT- enabled services with migrants/refugees, public sector services, NGOs (Non-Governmental-Organisations) and other interest groups. MIICT addresses the need to improve and customise the interfaces used to access key public services so that they better address the requirements of migrants and refugees. In service of this goal, MIICT proposes the development of “IMMERSE” (Integration of Migrants MatchER SErvice), a database system that captures the specific socio-cultural, economic and legal contexts of migrants that is shared with public authorities. In order to promote inclusion and reduce the potential for discrimination and bias, the system acts as a firewall, meaning only information pertinent to the specific task of the public authority is visible, removing elements such as gender, ethnicity and age in circumstances where they have no relevance.
Previous research has established that issues of integration, dissemination, employment (and unemployment), incapacity support and education rank highly among migrants of varying demographics; including different age groups, genders, education levels and immigration status. Factors such as autonomy, perception, culture and history, as well as institutional constraints shape the dynamics and experiences of migrants [2], and highlight the complexity of the migration process. This complexity is also said to indicate diversity in the migration and integration process as a result of the almost infinite combination of factors that may impact upon migrants’ experiences; influenced by the relationships between the economic, social, political and cultural factors that exist across a given juncture.
Therefore, using a co-design approach, MIICT will design, develop and deploy bespoke solutions, building on the existing capacity and tools of its constituent R&D partners that address; a) the management of migrant integration, b) the customisation of services to match migrants’ needs, and c) the need for sustained and improved inclusion of migrants by improving the access they have to labour markets via IMMERSE, an inclusive mechanism through which their specifics contexts can be understood and used to match them to jobs and development opportunities. MIICT is wholly grounded on the principles of co- design, through the participation of multi-disciplinary stakeholders in the design, development and deployment process to ensure the identification of needs and requirements from both the perspectives of migrants, public sector services and NGOs, the collaboration of cross-disciplinary expertise from academia, industry and the private-sector in the development of digital-services, and the realisation of improved service delivery via an extremely thorough and rigorous piloting and evaluation process.