As Sussex research programme ends, findings continue to influence policy on migration and poverty

After nearly a decade, the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme (MOOP) is drawing to a close, having conducted research in more than ten countries in an effort to uncover how and why migration plays such a significant role in poverty reduction in some contexts, but not in others. Funded by the UK's Department for International Development, MOOP has built up a robust body of evidence on the relationship between migration and poverty, with research feeding directly into regional policy in the global South, and cited in international reports on development. Coordinated out of the University of Sussex, the consortium has conducted research in five regions in the global South (South Asia; Southeast Asia; East, West, and Southern Africa) , incorporating 11 countries: Ghana, Senegal, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Singapore, and Indonesia. Now, as the programme comes to a close, an end of programme report has been produced, detailing the significant impact it has had over the years. Professor Priya Deshingkar , Principal Investigator of MOOP, University of Sussex, said: "Migrating out of Poverty was a multi country, multi-disciplinary and mixed methods programme of research, capacity building and policy uptake across Asia and Africa. It provided a unique opportunity to undertake comparative research on the kinds of migrations that matter to the poor and how the experiences of migration differ by gender, age, ethnicity and religion. "Although migration does not necessarily lead to poverty reduction, it can be an important step in the social transformation of the lives of migrants and the families they leave behind, which explains continuing migration into many seemingly dead-end situations.