Early Evidence on COVID-19, Mobility, and Migration

The first webinar, hosted by Innovations for Poverty Action and the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation & Scale (Y-RISE), will center on COVID-19, mobility, and migration. Contexts in which people are migrating or mobile present unique challenges. Households that rely on the incomes of migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to the pandemic’s economic impacts, as many workers who typically send remittances home are losing income. Meanwhile, many displaced people live in crowded settings where social distancing guidelines may be prohibitively difficult. Return migration in both groups threatens to contribute to the disease’s spread. 

Register for this event here.

Note: The event will begin at 9:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time. 

Additional details:

Mushfiq Mobarak (Yale University) will begin the webinar with an overview on the various ways in which COVID-19 and migration are linked. Mahreen Khan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will speak about a new paper that uses migration data to predict the disease’s spread, and discuss the implications of COVID-19’s links to migration for sector-specific economic policy guidance to Bangladesh’s government. Ashish Shenoy (University of California, Davis) will then discuss the implications of these results for designing and evaluating returnee support and reintegration programs, and interview Shariful Islam (BRAC) about how these considerations are informing BRAC’s migrant reintegration programs. Finally, Kathleen Newland (Migration Policy Institute) will elucidate the implications for global migration policy. Radha Rajkotia (IPA) will host and moderate the event.

The presentations will be followed by a discussion and Q&A.

Presenters

Mushfiq Mobarak, Professor of Economics, Yale University

Mahreen Khan, PhD Student in Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ashish Shenoy, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, Davis

Shariful Islam, Programme Head, Migration, BRAC 

Kathleen Newland, Senior Fellow and Co-Founder, Migration Policy Institute 

Radha Rajkotia, Chief Research and Policy Officer, IPA