 Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone, from the IUM's returner integration platform. With this webinar today, we resume the public dialogues aiming to present specific returner integration practices and tools and to encourage knowledge and experience sharing. So today, in collaboration with the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, NOMAD, we will present an important methodology to conduct longitudinal studies or integration outcomes for returnees. NOMAD is a global hub of knowledge and policy expertise on migration and development supported by a multi-donor trust fund established by the World Bank. Specifically, the methodology we will present today is developed by NOMAD through its return migration and reintegration thematic working group led by the World Bank and IUM. Building on the monitoring and evaluation standardization efforts conducted so far in the area of return and reintegration, the methodology addresses the need to look at reintegration in the longer term, beyond the scope of individual projects. And for all those of you operating in the area of return and sustainable reintegration, it is well known how the reintegration outcomes are critical to inform return and reintegration policies, but the evidence required is not always there to support such efforts. And in this context, the NOMAD methodology sets recommendations and considerations to take when conducting longitudinal studies to measure reintegration outcomes in the long term. So I briefly introduce myself. My name is Francesco and I'm pleased to welcome you today. I work as Knowledge Management Officer at the IUM Protection Division in its return and reintegration unit. So before we start, let me share with you some technical indications about this webinar. If you have any technical problem, please contact us at the email address you find on the screen. Please feel free to ask your questions through the chat that will be collected and addressed during the question and answers after the speaker's presentation. As a last point, this webinar will be recorded and made available in the return and reintegration platform. So we are very pleased to share with you today different and complementary voices to better understand the rational findings and the application of this methodology. We will have Sonya Plaza, Senior Economist and NOMAD World Bank, who will help us to set the frame of this conversation and share a few considerations, including on the NOMAD network and the relevance of the methodology. Following your intervention, Arezzo Malacuti, one of the author of the methodology, will tell us more about this work. Ishita Shruti from IUM Bangladesh will then guide us through the possible application of such important methodology in a specific geographic context Bangladesh, which has also been a country focus for the development of the methodology. Following Ishita's consideration with the help of Roselyne Borland, the head of Return and Reintegration Unit at IUM, we will explore the next steps of this research collaboration under NOMAD. And finally, with the help of our colleague Silva Lange, former colleagues from Return and Reintegration Unit, and now with the DTM, Displacement Tracking Metrics for the Ukraine Response in Poland, we will move to the interactive session where we will ask panellists to address the questions that you will share with us during the webinar. We can now start our conversation and I'm very glad to give the floor to Sonya Plaza, Senior Economist at NOMAD World Bank. As you see from this slide, Sonya is the co-chair of the NOMAD thematic working group on remittances and diaspora resources. She has worked on science and technology, private sector development projects in Latin America and Africa in the Chief Economist's Office. She advised governments, university, and she is the focal point at working level for the World Bank for activities and international partnerships on migration and development. So we are very pleased to have you with us, Sonya. Let's start this brief journey around the methodology. Please, Sonya, the floor is yours. Thank you very much and thank you. Good afternoon. Good morning, colleagues from the greetings from Nairobi. I'm traveling now and I would like to thank you, the extremely productive collaboration that we have with IOM and this thematic working group, return and reintegration. We started this journey with Nicola Gabriani when we decided to try to understand what is really a successful reintegration, how we can measure that on the return and given the importance and the relevance that IOM has in the different programs, we thought that maybe we can use some of the data. But the idea is not to duplicate, not to look at the different initiatives, we look at different initiatives, but how we really can capture the long-term sustainability reintegrations of the returnees. Because as you ever, all of you know, whenever we do some surveys, or even when you try to figure it out where are the returns, they immediately, after six months, we don't know where they're located, if they have gone back to another country, if they have moved to another city. So that's the idea with this methodology, the methodology was to capture more of the data on the long-term survey. You will see that. Now, I wanted to give three examples on how we can measure and why this motivated, especially to know that to be thinking, okay, what is a return, I thought we can measure reintegration, return reintegration. First of all, this topic became even more important after we published the paper. Because when we published the paper, COVID has not yet so much hit. And now we have also some experience that we have done on how COVID has impact return and reintegration. And this is very relevant also for the methodology that we are going to do. So one of the things that we have to consider are tricks, examples. One example, no example, but in the analysis, is there a difference when a person return from a more developed country or from a country in the region? Is there a difference if the way on the type of the return, if it's voluntary or un-voluntary? Or is there a difference between a skilled migrant who return or a low-skilled migrant who returns? And where did you return? So we have several questions. How we can capture this is really we have the data. Everybody says, oh, there's no rate on the return. But now I think that we are in a very specific cases that there are several return programs, especially at this moment, where a lot of the countries are having initiative to return a lot of these migrants and refugees. And I think that we have a great opportunity to capture those data. IOM has an excellent database. And then from that we can leverage those data. Now the second point that I wanted to say and give you an example, how you measure a successful return reintegration. I was in a conference with the universities in Africa. And several of the people who have returned, they returned to get back to the countries to teach in the countries. But do you know what happened? They couldn't reintegrate in the academy. Why? Because the rest of the professors at the university were feeling so jealous. So they didn't want them to give them a course or they didn't want them to teach. So how we can call that successful return reintegration? How we measure that? The second one is sometimes when a migrant returns, the people at home where they return feel jealous of them. Feel jealous of them for two things. Some of them, even when we give some package to the people for return because they return with money, their compatriots get a little bit jealous and say there's distortion in the system because we stay here at home with a lot of challenges and these people return with some money. So how we can do that? And today in the International Day of Women, I would like to put an emphasis if the return is more difficult for women. And I think the return is more difficult for women, especially in societies where the norms are completely different from the norms where the women were returning and they're expecting the women to still be behaving at the way that the traditional communities were behaving before they left. So in short, how we can measure a return migrant when it's successfully reintegrated, we can measure from different angles. And Arepo was going to talk about that and one angle that it's important because we wanted to move from the humanitarian to the development of nexus and approaches is how they can successfully reintegrate economically and socially. Their success of failure is primarily a function of the capacity of the migrants that they manage and the family to manage the resources, acquire abroad for overseas employment, and what happened during the migration phase to support and also the policies that are in their own governments when they're coming back and resettling back home country. So there are several factors that can impact the return migration, but I think the return migration is an important part of the cycle of migration. And it's important to take also when we do the pre-departure classes, the pre-departure training, the importance of reintegration and it includes the reemployment in the local labor markets, the occupational mobility, the accusation of productive assets and real state financial investment. And this could help families and migrants. However, there are several programs. Everybody, every agency has a program to now to help to return the migrants. It will be important that after this methodology to download the regional reintegration in the long term also considers the impact evaluation of these programs. Is it really true that a package to open a business is working? In the long term, do they open a firm that the firm succeeds or survives for two or three years or the firm disappears, the entrepreneurship that they created? Second, is it really, is it really true that the migrant return, migrant can access to finance back home? But it's important to take into consideration several of these returners don't have credit history at home anymore. So perhaps one important policy will be to before they are returning, they save the money and they start opening banks account in the home country so they can have some credit history so they can invest that money or when they return home with all the money, don't spend all the savings. Somebody has to guide them on the financial assistance and on the financial literacy of those ones. And finally, it's not only the economic and how they created, integrated them in the labor markets, but also how they integrated in the society as well. Sometimes the same customs have changed, the country has changed, so is there a program that really compelled them to reintegrate and how will be the easier way? With that, we have a lot of debates on how to capture the different aspects of the economic, of the reintegration. I'm talking about more on the economic and social, because I wanted to focus on that, but Arepo and the providers and the paper will provide you the methodology that it was used and why we chose that. I wanted to thank you, our colleagues Roslyn and Jesse, Pina, because we have been working also on developing our work program on developing now how to apply this methodology to specific countries. So we would like to hear also from the different experience where you are doing, how successful the programs on returnees have been, what are the variables that we can capture that are not being captured, and how long, long until you capture those variables. With that, I wanted to thank you, everybody, and appreciate it. I will listen into the methodology and see what else we can learn from you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Sonia. Thank you so much for setting the frame of this conversation to describe the context, the importance of the methodology, as well as the light on the migration psychology, as well as the link to development, the importance to the long-term analysis of the reintegration process. So it's now time to dive a bit more into the methodology, and for this I'm very glad to give the floor to one of its authors. Arezo Malotti is a lawyer with more than 15 years experience in field-based social research for policy with migrant community. Since 2011, Arezo has been specialized on the migratory movements through the Mediterranean to Europe, and during this time she was director of the Migration Research for Altai Consulting, senior researcher at the IEM GEMDAC, and advisor to European Union. So it's a pleasure to have you with us, Arezo. Please, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Francesco. And thank you to everyone that is here to hear about this methodology, and also to Sonia for introducing and framing the event. So I wanted to, I was, I had the honor of being the team leader on this methodology, on the development of this methodology, and I was the author of the report. And today I'm going to take you through some of the main aspects of the methodology It will be a bit of a quick overview of what was proposed for this methodology. And then, of course, we can go into more detail on specific points in the Q&A, if anybody would like to do so. So, firstly, I just wanted to outline that basically when we were developing this methodology, I worked with Helen Zwick, who is here with us today also, and then comes from a more academic background, and I come from a field-based policy-oriented research background. So together, we were extremely complementary in being able to develop this methodology. And I just wanted to outline, firstly, that the methodology that we adopted in order to develop this methodology was that we did do quite a bit of research and interviews in order to develop this methodology. And by that, I mean we spoke to a number of experts. We conducted a series of key and formal interviews with different experts, including individuals, let's say, practitioners that are involved in longitudinal studies around return migration or individuals that are working in return and reintegration or methodology experts, researchers and academics that were specialized in developing longitudinal methodologies. And we also spoke to a few IOM officers that were already implementing longitudinal studies to learn from their experiences in the field. Namely, we looked at the studies conducted by IOM Germany, IOM Bangladesh, IOM Iraq and IOM Afghanistan. Here on the first slide of my presentation, we have the key definitions that were adopted for the development of this methodology. So these were the things that were given to us, the parameters that were given to us to operate within as we developed this methodology. So the overall objective of this longitudinal methodology was meant to be to what extent have returnees achieved sustainable reintegration in communities to which they have returned in the long term. And in terms of sustainable reintegration, we adopted the definition that was developed by IOM, namely returnees have reached levels of economic self-sufficiency, social stability within their communities and psychosocial well-being that allow them to cope with re-migration drivers or migration drivers. Having achieved sustainable reintegration, returnees are able to make further migration decisions a matter of choice rather than necessity. And the definition of returning, we also took from IOM's definition, which is that all migrants who could not or did not want to remain in their host country and returned to their country of origin either forcibly or voluntarily, but with assistance through IOM or others. And it does not include refugees or IDPs, the definition of returnees that we adopted for this study. So moving on to look at some of the key parameters of the methodology that was eventually developed. So just to be clear, when we developed the methodology in the actual report, the final report, we do outline a number of options. So in all of the parameters like the scope and objectives, the duration, the sampling, the profiling and other kind of methodological considerations, we do consider a few different options so that different methodologies could be drawn out of this report. And then we actually recommend a particular methodology given the context. So when it comes to the scope and objectives of the study, excuse me, when we were looking at the scope and objectives, a key question that needed to be defined was whether the aim of the study is to measure reintegration, sustainability at the individual level, at the community level or at the structural level. That was one of the key questions to define. And more specifically, will the methodology measure and analyze the factors that contribute to an individual's reintegration or will it measure how a community has transformed as a result of the reintegration of its returnees? Or will it analyze the national mechanisms and systems in place in a country and how they allow a person to reintegrate? Or is it measuring the sustainability of their programming? And what we recommended was to focus on reintegration at the individual level over time into the long term and suggested exploring the other two dimensions, the community level and the structural level from the lens of understanding how they impact sustainable reintegration at the individual level. And in this way, the methodology can adopt the RSS, which is the reintegration sustainability survey that was developed by IOM as its tool and specific indicators and specific profiles of respondents can be defined for the community and structural levels. And by doing it this way, the design is more comprehensive. That everything is built already built into the study because there are other options that we considered where certain elements could be admitted and the focus could be one element and then in analysis there could be a triangulation of existing data, which made it more heavy in the analysis phase. But in this design everything is built in. In terms of the duration of the study, the pertinent questions that we looked at when deciding on the duration of the study were what window of time is required in order to properly assess whether reintegration has been sustainable? At which point do we think the differences between returnees and non-returnee communities begin to disappear? For how many years post-return do we currently have information? And at which point does our knowledge end in terms of the trajectory of a returnee? What is achievable and pragmatic in terms of the resources at our disposal and does much change for a returnee in six months? Or do the changes occur within longer intervals, such as two new periods? And we recommended that the duration of the study extend to 10 years or more because basically our knowledge of what happens in terms of the reintegration of a returnee after two years after return is non-existent. We don't really have a sense of what's happening more than two years after return. And the longitudinal studies that were already being implemented by IOM were still looking at this kind of less than five year timeline. So actually we don't have any information beyond five years, two years, and no existing studies that are trying to look at that. And that's why we recommended to proceed in that way. And of course that longer timeline allows us to also understand the effect of time on reintegration, which is something we haven't been able to really understand yet in a systematic way. Moving on to the next section. There we go. So in terms of sampling techniques, when it came to the sampling techniques that needed to be adopted for the longitudinal study, the first question in terms of sampling was whether to rely on pooled data or panel data. And the panel method we then further divided into fixed panels, rotating panels or repeating panels and made a selection accordingly. And of course the selection was made according to the objectives of the methodology as well as the resources and budget. And we settled on a fixed panel, which is basically where we collect survey data from the same units or the same respondents on multiple occasions. So it means you go back to the same people on each round of enumeration and you speak to the same people. And there are no additions permitted to the sample over the life of the sample. So it means that we also need to develop systems to manage the attrition of our sample and to keep in touch with the respondents over time. This is of course a more resource intensive method because of the resources that are needed to keep in touch with the respondents and to manage attrition. But we felt that it was most desirable because it tracks variation over time at the level of the individual sample member. And this is the main thing in this methodology. In other words, it provides information on how the behavior of individual sample members changes over time in response to changes in the context due to background characteristics or other factors. In terms of the sampling strategies, so basically once we determined a sampling technique or a type of sample, a sampling strategy needs to be adopted for the selection of those panel members. And as the total population of returning is not known, we cannot really create a random sample. And so instead we opted for non random sampling strategies and we decided on an area based approach. An area based approach basically involves sampling from a map or an aerial photograph or a similar area frame. It's where you divide the area into equal sized blocks and then from you can draw random samples from there. The samples drawn from an area frame are often referred to as clusters. And so the clusters can then be sub sampled several more times. And so we suggested sampling within the clusters by using a stratified random sampling. So this is basically where the division of the population is based on a maximum of four strata or characteristics. It could be things like age gender education level host country. And then we can, you know, include these characteristics as dimensions of analysis. So then we can look at how some of these dynamics shift according to age or gender or education level and so forth. And the final thing that I wanted to present the final two things I wanted to present the first one is managing attrition. And so as we talked about already earlier with a fixed panel managing attrition is really important and something, you know, most longitudinal studies have quite a high attrition rate. And in our research we did see that for example, there was an attrition rate as high as 45% in some of the existing IOM longitudinal studies. And so it's clearly something that needs to be managed. And there are a number of ways that we can manage attrition and that we recommended in the methodology. Financial contributions that can be paid on enumeration to the respondents and also between later collection rounds can elicit continued cooperation and participation. In-kind contributions could include things such as providing phone credit instead of cash payments or attaching the follow-up of returnees over the long term to the provision of reintegration support, things like this. Non-financial contributions such as sending regular text messages with information that is useful to the returnee and capitalizing on relationships with enumerators. In some of the existing studies we saw that for example in IOM Iraq we saw that when the same enumerators were collecting data across the various rounds relationships became formed between the enumerators and the respondents and this also encouraged the ongoing participation of the respondents. And then in terms of when we look at managing attrition these are some of the incentives that can be provided but we also need systems for tracking and tracing respondents and so some of the recommendations for this methodology are collecting as much information as possible in the beginning. So things like Viber, WhatsApp, details for family members or other people intimately connected to the respondents so that we have a wealth of contact information if needed increasing enumeration in the first year to avoid attrition in the long term so basically the idea is that we do more rounds of enumeration in the first year to build the relationship and then we can drop down to less frequent enumeration in the following years. There's also we recommended considering household based sampling where the survey is conducted with multiple household members and that way it makes it easier to keep in touch with the respondent because you have a number of ways to communicate with that respondent and if they do re-migrate you are in touch with the whole household so it's much easier to keep in touch with them. And also asking regularly for changes in detail sending like a monthly automated text message that asks for any changes in contact details. And now we move to the final slide and here I wanted to talk a little bit about the discussion that existed in the report around the contextualization of the data. So basically here we were looking at ways in which we can bring some contextualization to the data because the methodology is designed so that it can be implemented in a number of different locations with different stakeholders and in different countries but then it would require some modules for contextualization. The first thing we recommended was a calibration group, excuse me, instead of a control group and as a way to contextualize the data. Basically the assumption with the calibration group the calibration group, sorry, would be comprised of non-returny residents in the same location. And the idea here is that these non-returny residents would be demographically matched respondents that reside in the same or similar locations as the returnees and the assumption here is that the returnees are not comparable to their host community but the host community does provide an example of integrated residents. So as the gap between the returnees and the local residents gets smaller it means the returnee is getting closer to integration basically. And so the contextualization comes from comparing the returnees to those local residents and judging their reintegration according to how that gap disappears. The reason why we suggested the calibration group in addition to helping to contextualize the data is that it places the threshold at the community level instead of the individual level. So the RSS is already very focused on the individual level and so the calibration group can create a more objective standard of reintegration to complement that subjective standard that exists already in the RSS because in the RSS it's rooted in the self-perception that the migrant has of their condition. We also suggested potentially doing subjective perception analysis so we can scope how integrated the returnee feels and trace their shifts in perception over time. So basically we could also gauge how the returnee sees the community they have returned to and scope the propensity for re-migration through their subjective perception of the community rather than an objective reality. Now, perception analysis is usually conducted qualitatively but a series of questions could be developed to build a quantitative analysis thereby making the data collection analysis and comparison of the results between different rounds easier and that a qualitative follow-up could be conducted to understand the nuances. So for example every time there is a round of enumeration for the longitudinal study then a small sample of qualitative interviews could also be conducted that would further explore and add nuance to the perception, the quantitative perception analysis. So I will leave it there. Those were the main parameters of the study report and methodology that we developed, Ellen and I and looking forward to any questions that you may have and I will also point out that as I mentioned earlier in the actual report there are a number of different options that were also set out for the design of longitudinal studies around sustainable reintegration. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Rezo for the comprehensive description of the methodology for guiding us through the scope objectives but also to share very concrete indications about the sampling techniques the duration of the study the recommendation shared on managing attrition data contextualization and indeed I would like to here I like the practicality and usefulness of such methodology for researchers operating in this area of work and I'm sure that this will trigger many questions that we see are coming in through the chat. So I think now we can please feel free to continue sharing the questions we will we will address them during the upcoming question and answer session but now building on the practicality that we just mentioned we move to another aspect not fully explored yet so the methodology which is the possible future application of this methodology in specific reintegration context. Ishita will tell us more about this she is the head of migration policy and sustainable development unit in Ayun Bangladesh and I'm very pleased to give the floor to you Ishita over. Thank you Francisco and thank you Sonia and Rezo for very comprehensive setting of the tone and I'm so glad that we have this methodology published which we tried to do something in Asia but of course the methodology have gone much more beyond what we have done so I would start with like I know I have five minutes I would start little bit with sharing the experience we had with the longitude survey of course it was not 10 years it was 2 years due to resource resources available to us and then I would I would say that how we can apply this methodology in different context especially in Bangladesh context with huge reintegration case load so in Bangladesh under year and year funded project we did a return longitude survey it may not be it may not it looked at returning profile but also reintegration like how they progressed in 2 years time as already mentioned like most of the IOM studying the return or reintegration survey we were doing was limited to 2 years it's also because we have to limited to project duration and as I said it was mainly for returning profiles so we looked at socio demographic background their needs, vulnerabilities and how they are faring in in like you know next 2 years how they would fare in next 2 years when it comes to reintegration we have to keep in mind that this particular activity or the research activity I am talking about we only looked at assisted voluntary return and reintegration case load I know many of you will know about it like we that's IOM's longest program when we support stranded returnees but we also looked at voluntary humanitarian return because there are lots of Bangladesh stranded in Libya so they come through VHR what we call it VHR so we only focused on these 2 groups we also had another big reintegration project but we thought that it will also give us some idea that if we are focusing reintegration only on economic reintegration how what are the learnings from there and maybe pitch for more sustainable reintegration approach for even AVRR returns I already see some similarities from what we did and in the methodology mentioned in the main report so for example we went into when it comes to sampling we went into fixed panel method more or less so we went to the same group again and again we focused on returnees from Greece and Libya mainly and we had some conditions I am not going into the detail I will post or one of my colleague will post the report here you can access that online and so we went to same returnees again and again and I will talk about the issue of attrition so we started with 635 and we did 3 rounds so the plan was to do 4 rounds but due to COVID we couldn't complete the 4th round so we did 3 rounds so the overall attrition was 17% but between round 1 to round 2 it was 9% between round 2 to round 3 it was 8.6% like that and because we had to align with other programs in Bangladesh and by other UN agencies so we were not paying in kind assistance or cash assistance to the returnees so we the only method we used or only option we used to avoid attrition is the personal connection the personal network which innumerator established with the respondent or the returnees and as Arizzo mentioned we kept like the same innumerator would interview same returnee in every round in between we also did a short phone based survey this quick 10 question survey just to keep them informed and then the innumerators would also keep calling them and keeping them interested in their study I think when it comes to attrition it is also you can see it's I mean 17% is not very high because they were also beneficiary of reintegration assistance from IOM I mean I'm sure when we go to normal returnee area based approach we may have to apply some other approaches mentioned in the methodology and some of the limitations I would like to highlight mainly a couple of them one is the two years so that we have already put that so it's not giving us a long-term perspective of reintegration also the RLS was mainly focused on returnee profiling and what are the learnings we are getting from there sample size was small because we couldn't due to resource constraint we couldn't spread it area was also limited so what we did is two country returnees 635 and the limited districts so we couldn't even go to all 64 districts in Bangladesh because it was face-to-face interview the three rounds of face-to-face interview and again because it focused on Greece and Libya so we couldn't claim that okay this is a very representative kind of sample for all even within AVRR all AVRR written Libya is still the highest case load when it comes to AVRR returnees in Bangladesh but we couldn't claim that because we just focused like the returnees from two countries and and because it's we only focused on AVRR and VHR so this is very like very IRN assisted returnees we couldn't we couldn't claim that this actually represents the other returnees who come from other assisted or you know like other forcefully sent or in other cases where they don't receive any integration support so these are some of the limitations and like linking that to the future application I think the whole whole package is very relevant for Bangladesh I would only talk about Bangladesh as I said when it comes to return and reintegration Bangladesh is not I mean not right now but the way it was happening in say Afghanistan before or Iraq or the way it happens in Ethiopia I have some understanding where where hundreds of people come every day in Bangladesh we don't see that so it is a very sporadic kind of return during covid yes but post covid we don't have that so there were a couple of flights from Libya and some flights from Europe but we don't have like you know like bunch of returnies coming every day like that so I feel like I mean I can go into a little bit of specific as well like that India based approach is really something which is very relevant for Bangladesh when it comes to you know sampling option because we as of now we don't have a sampling frame we don't have the data on returnies because this one the RLS which I was mentioning we had a sampling frame because it was all from our AVLR data but if you go into the like you know SS we don't have a sampling as of now we are working on having some returning database in Bangladesh so that way it is really important in terms of technicalities of this and also a calibration approach is something which we can look at in Bangladesh because we don't have like in in a village or in a community we have different households where there are non-returnies as well in terms of you know the positive impact because we are proposing like you know it's a long term one it is really going to give us the the two sustainable impact of returning reintegration process in two years we can still say that the impact of reintegration process would remain probably but if you take it to the 10 year period then you will really see that what are the other additional factors or additional you know resources which came into the practice and but only problem I see in that is the commitment from development partners or donors to fund something that long term 10 years and also if we have to spread it like every two years I'm not sure how attrition could be managed because if we keep giving in-kind assistance or cash assistance for example the cost of the research is really going to go high so I would stop here if you have some specific question I will come back to it but I'm hoping that I've been able to answer. Thank you so much for guiding us through this scenario the application of the methodology in the in the Bangladesh context also built on the vast experience developed by the team in Dhaka and across the country on supporting the sustainable integration of returnees and I would also like to highlight the point that you made regarding the long term as well as that as a go and an end with the commitment of the development partners so following the previous consideration now we are with the help of Rosalie in Borland we will now briefly explore what the Nomad Working Group on Returnary Integration will be working on which are the next steps of such crucial knowledge partnership Ros is the head of the Returnary Integration Unit at IUMHQ she has 18 years of international development experience and during her career she has specialized on issues related to human rights and migrants specifically trafficking in person health and of course return migration and reintegration please Ros the floor is yours. Thank you so much Francesco and thank you to everyone for this really interesting presentation of this very important document that has gone through so much work I'm really pleased to see we have so many people still with us in this very technical discussion at this point in the webinar so my intervention will be fairly brief I really want to just highlight a bit where this fits in the ongoing work that we are doing as part of the working group within Nomad that as you heard from Sonya is led by the World Bank and IUM so the next step coming of course from IUM as an intergovernmental organization working on the ground migration is to apply and to use this work as soon as possible and for us that always means something practical that we can test on the ground and some perhaps some sort of toolkit that practitioners can use so the idea is that we will be working on a toolkit for this longitudinal research where we actually apply it and it helps us create a toolkit for the use of practitioners I think this will be something I can see from the many many questions coming in of interest to all of the important partners working on returning integration so that will be coming soon but in addition you can see on the slide we have two sort of main areas of research happening within the return integration working group under Nomad one is focused on this space of work for researching integration and one is focused on climate change the rest of that theme number one includes a bit of work to get to the voice of the migrants themselves in all that diversity and I would sidestep to say happy International Women's Day to everyone so we will be also doing some work about a returning centered perspective what do the people themselves feel is success and that is a question that has been looked at for example with the reintegration of victims of trafficking over the years but not so much about returnees in general so we will be looking for example at subjective versus objective indicators and doing a bit of a review to see what the literature tells us about this and then based on that we will doing a case study on reintegration that is using indeed our existing data from our reintegration sustainability survey so you will see we will be doing a cross national study on returnees perspectives and again this is a bit to get existing quantitative data and some qualitative data to look at what returnees themselves feel our measures of success what the targets should be for reintegration and then once we have completed those actions we will be looking at sharing that information as part of our knowledge raising efforts that will probably be some sort of workshop or webinar that will be coming so stay tuned for that and then just let everyone know we have another stream of work on climate change and reintegration I don't want to take time to get into today because I think there are a lot of really interesting questions but we will be working on gathering and clarifying the conceptual framework around reintegration and climate change as well as looking at some specifics on climate change and reintegration in urban settings and also gender and adaptive solutions to climate change so those are just some highlights from the ongoing work in Nomad and I would also like to thank the World Bank for their continued collaboration with us in this space of work and I think I will stop because I'd really like to have the discussion continue thank you so much Francesco and everyone thank you so much Rose for your consideration for sharing with us the information regarding the next steps of this collaboration as well as to allow the value and importance of such important partnership as well as the next research coming soon so we have reached the last session of this webinar we can now move to the question and answer I leave the floor to Silvan Lange from my UM country office in Poland who will moderate this interactive session please continue to share your questions in the chat over to you Silvan thank you for the introduction Francesco and as you could see in the chat we've already received quite a few questions and as it says on the slide you can continue asking questions through the chat and what I will do now is to assign the questions or some of the questions that we've received individually to the panelists and of course we will not be able to address every single one of your questions but they will be answered in the community of practice of the return and reintegration platform in the coming days and I think you can also find a link to the platform in the chat if you don't know it yet being mindful of the time we have only a couple of minutes left I will start right away with the first question and this one is for the two researchers so if an organization manages to convince the donor to use the methodology for a study of 10 years or more with a fixed sample what would be your three key tips to kickstart the study and what are the most important things to keep in mind beyond the attrition related issues that you already mentioned and this one is for Ariso or Elin thank you very much Silvan and thank you for the question to the participant so it's a very good question and of course there are a lot of considerations but if I was to narrow in on what I feel are the three important things to really make sure in the beginning and prioritize I think that I would a few things the first one is that I feel that the to manage attrition which is such a big factor in this and especially if we are doing a 10 year timeline then I think that we really need to invest in the enumerators and I think that the experience that we've seen where if we do retain the same enumerators and they build relationships with the respondents and that really helps with the methodology and managing attrition it means we need to invest in the retention of our enumerators in the training of our enumerators so I would really recommend that a lot of thought and resources are put into how we identify the enumerators how we train them and how we retain them and that's part of a bigger conversation in terms of who is doing the study actually is it IOM or is it outsourced is it IOM staff or are you partnering with someone and that would be my second point that's a big I think important consideration I would recommend that IOM partner with a research centre or a consulting firm or some kind of research organisation and IOM staff can conduct the field work but the overall management be given to a specialised research institution because it does need specialised research skills but also because there is a lot to manage and if we expect IOM country officers to take this on in addition to everything else that they are doing then it's going to be I think a little bit demanding and the third point I would like I would suggest is that different typologies of returnees be built into the sample because at the moment we are just looking at returnees and basically excluding refugees and IDPs from that so non-refugee and non-IDP returnees and I think that the existing research has shown that there's no real standard trajectory for the reintegration of a returnee but specific profiles do go through identifiable stages and so I think typologies that we could include could be things like normal return, distressed return return for re-migration and this creates another dimension for our analysis and our knowledge base sorry if that took a long time thank you thank you there was a great response and very comprehensive as well and maybe I would just follow up on one of the points that you mentioned and this is also in line with one of the questions that was posed by a participant and this is related to the mitigation measures for the attrition rate you mentioned that there needs to be for example investment in the enumerators but also a good relationship between enumerators and the respondents the survey respondents so one of the questions was that whether you think that the deepening relationships with enumerators affected the nature and quality of responded responses to survey questions over time and how did you manage this if you identified this as an issue during the research thank you just a reminder we haven't implemented this methodology so it was the design of a methodology so we don't have any experience in its implementation yet but the building of this methodology was based on experience of other longitudinal studies and it's a good question no the answer I think is that in the studies where we saw that relationship where we saw that retaining enumerators and the relationship that developed between the enumerators and the respondents was positive and encouraged participation I don't feel that there was that kind of influence I think that it was more what we saw was that developing that relationship encouraged the respondents to stay in touch because as you know in a fixed panel we can't lose respondents if we lose them we can't replace them so our sample size diminishes and so in addition to them participating we want them to stay in touch with us and tell us when they move when they change their phone number things like this and that's what we found is that because a relationship had developed then they could stay in touch because every year it was the same or every six months it was the same person coming back to interview them they knew who this person was they were in touch and they would be able to notify they would easily notify them with changes in details whereas if it's a new person every year then they don't know who to contact when their details change thank you okay thank you so much then I have another question in the chat that was specifically for IOM for Rose in this case so there's been quite a bit of data that has been collected through the reintegration sustainability survey and the question was whether there are plans to revise the tool at some point in the near future and if yes what are the plans about that when will that be the case thank you thank you very much for the question and indeed we've been using this survey now in some parts of the world for some years so there is a process that we've begun in IOM to do a revision we're in early stages of that process but indeed that is something that we have recognized and so part of what we're doing is gathering information from our practitioners on the ground who've been using it in terms of the kinds of changes that are needed and we're doing some low hanging fruit changes immediately but we're looking to do a more systematic analysis to adapt the tool soon so yes indeed recognize the need for that Sylvan I saw another question related to the survey if you don't mind maybe I'll go ahead and take that one as well please go ahead yes so I saw there was also another question about the reintegration sustainability survey data and whether it's available for scientific academic use this is something that at the moment it's not out there in a portal or available in a database that you can access you may know that our counter traffic model which we for the last counter trafficking data so we have been having some discussions internally about the return data we have to see if it is of interest and sufficient for that kind of a model we don't have any decisions there yet so I don't think that's coming soon so for the moment it would be in the context of a specific program or project where we'd have a very specific agreement with a partner that we work with and I would just echo what was said by other colleagues we would always work closely with academic partners and academic experts because I think the mix of practitioners on the ground together with our partners who know research methodologies well is always the best way to go for IOM as an government organization so back to you Sylvan thank you thank you so much for your response Rose and since we only have a few minutes left I will ask one last question and again all the other questions will be collected and then addressed in the community of practice of the platform so this one is also for the researchers but also for Ishita as a practitioner and it is how can the results of a longitudinal study on the reintegration sustainability of returnees be used to improve programming so this is more on how the results can concretely be used to develop or improve programs and projects on reintegration maybe Arisa and Elin if you want to start and Ishita if you want to add something afterwards that would be great Elin would you like to go ahead or I can start I understand Sylvan the question is how can this kind of research impact programming be used for better programming basically yes exactly yes so I think basically I mean this is it's kind of a key question in the sense that it touches upon the whole reason why we did design this methodology and basically we don't know what the trajectory of a returnees reintegration is into the long term and all of the information that we currently have is pretty much up to two years post-return and what we have understood more anecdotally and from experience like being working with return and reintegration is that actually the trajectory is very long and it goes through a number of phases and this is also what the development of the RSS highlighted as well so it means that really we don't understand the nature of reintegration and hence this is why we developed this methodology is because if we do really want to work towards sustainable reintegration and understand the key aspects of what it requires for a sustainable reintegration of a returnee or even just understand what that journey looks like in terms of reintegration, re-migration etc we need to research on a longer timeline and many of the factors that we've already been studying on a shorter timeline if we look at them on a longer timeline they have a different characteristic so basically I would say in answer to the question such a methodology will allow us to build programs that actually work more effectively towards sustainable reintegration because we will understand that process better I give back to you Syltan, thank you thank you so much for this response and Ishita do you have anything to add to that maybe from specifically from the Bangladesh context yeah yeah I mean again a disclaimer that the RL study was not long term like 10 years it was 2 years and 3 rounds but what we have found that the learning from there the evidence we generated on a longitudinal basis even though it was short term it contributed to reintegration policy of Bangladesh which is underway right now so in terms of policy we see direct kind of you know relationship linkages from research and evidence to policy level policy development and again I completely concur with what Arizo said in terms of long term you know impact of reintegration and then how do we do the revised programming so that can only happen if when we have a long term assessment of reintegration so yeah over okay thank you so much for your responses and of course also to the audience for their questions and I will give the floor back now to Francesco to close the webinar thank you everyone thank you for remaining with us the conversation we will continue to address the question that remain unaddressed unfortunately but there will be available in the returner integration platform coming into practice the link to register will be is available here in the chat I would like to remind you that the recording of this webinar will be shortly available on the returner integration platform and we have reached the end of our conversation today we really hope that the description of this methodology will provide your interest as also reflected by the questions coming through the chat please do not hesitate to contact us for more information on the tool I would like also finally to anticipate that we are working as also anticipated by the rows on the delivery of other webinars in the coming month and weeks hosted by the platform and that the platform itself will grow and progressively expand its semantic focus to other protection related areas once again thanks to all the speakers that join us today thanks also to colleagues in Cairo, Nairobi, Vienna, Bangkok and Dhaka who made this presentation possible and helped on the organization and moderation please continue to follow our activities online thank you everyone again and I wish you a nice rest of the day goodbye