In recent years, stakeholders have pursued data innovations to enhance the ways in which decisions are made on migration. Delving into efforts to establish data collaboratives, Andrew Young, The GovLab’s Knowledge Director, contributed a blog post to OECD’s Development Matters, a platform dedicated to fostering conversations around opportunities and challenges around development. Narrating the current state of cross-sector data collaboration in the context of monitoring and analyzing migration, Andrew emphasizes the role of non-traditional data sources in cultivating “demographically-disaggregated information and insight into ‘data Invisibles’” whose experiences are often excluded from official statistics and reports. 

The piece describes the Big Data for Migration Alliance (BD4M) as a pioneering organization dedicated to facilitating responsible data innovation and collaboration to enable evidence-based policymaking on migration and human mobility. The BD4M’s work on co-designing and prototyping methods to reimagine what responsible, effective, and ethical (re)use of data looks like characterizes the novel approaches to data innovation for migration and new forms of partnerships that govern the ecosystem. The International Network on Digital Self Determination (IDSD), a recently established consortium that aims to study and design ways to engage in trustworthy data spaces through human-centric approaches, has also become the vehicle to spearhead this effort. BD4M alike, IDSD is engaging in the practice of collaborative studios to assemble domain experts and migrants to develop strategies for new data innovations that prioritize intended beneficiaries’ perspectives and experiences. 

The blog post then underlines three priorities that emerged from our research and experiments with the studio methodology. 

1. The global migration ecosystem needs new governance frameworks and guiding principles for the use of non-traditional data sources such as the private sector data 
2. Stakeholders and leaders should explore the mechanism in which migrants are encouraged to participate and are included in the policymaking process for the use of data and technology for migration 
3. The field needs new business models that create incentives for private sector parties to be a part of the ecosystem in a more sustainable manner, for example by selling or licensing aggregated datasets to public interest institutions.

Read the full piece on Development Matters here. 

Cover image by Airam Dato-on/Unsplash is licensed under CC0.

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