 Your Excellency, the Ambassador of Finland, Mrs. Pyrrho Soumeila Shoudry, other members of the diplomatic corps, Professor Fintab, Director of UNU-Wider, distinguished ladies and gentlemen. Let me begin my remarks by welcoming all of you to the ISA conference facility at the University of Ghana for the opening of the wider development conference, organized as a partnership between UNU-Wider and the African Research University Alliance on migration and mobility. I would like to welcome especially his Excellency, the Vice President of the Republic. I am certain that coming to ISA today has reminded him of the good old days when he had the blissful life of a researcher. Your Excellency, we thank you most sincerely for accepting our invitation. I would also like to welcome the Finnish Ambassador to the conference and the wider team from Helsinki to a warm and sunny Accra. I know Accra and Helsinki are very different places. In Helsinki you feel cold, in Accra you feel too warm. You have to choose which one you prefer. Today's conference is addressing one of the most topical issues in our world today. The full ramifications of recent migration and mobility trends are yet to be properly understood for policy purposes in most parts of the world. Several decades ago, Circassian Africa and elsewhere focused on rural urban migration. In the last two decades, more and more attention has been paid to international migration within the context of globalization. The full scale of more recent migration, the factors behind it and the effects on participating countries are yet to be properly measured and analyzed. This makes it important and desirable to put together as much material as possible from new researchers in order to inform policy in different parts of the world and hence this conference. Arua is particularly pleased that it was invited by UNIWIRE to team up with it in putting up this conference. This is because migration and mobility is one of the 13 priority thematic areas that Arua Vice-Chancellors have expressed a desire to focus on. The African Research University Alliance is an expression of the desire of a number of African universities to support policy making in their countries. With more and more cutting-edge research, it is acknowledged that the development challenges confronting Africa will not be contained without a solid knowledge base. Such a knowledge base can only come from rigorous and relevant research. Arua therefore seeks to strengthen the 16 member universities to become globally competitive in the conducts and dissemination of research. Arua is in the process of setting up 13 centres of excellence in a number of African countries for the task of perceiving its agenda. These include centres of climate change, food security, materials development and nanotechnology, water conservation, renewable energy, non-communicable diseases, migration and mobility, poverty and inequality, unemployment and skills development, good governance, post-conference societies, urbanisation and sustainable cities. The centres will pursue research excellence and health graduate training, improved research management and research advocacy. Arua's work is done through partnerships among the best research intensive universities in the region and with the best universities in other parts of the world. It is for this reason that partnership with UNUWIDER to organise this conference and for future activities becomes important. UNUWIDER has been a formidable research centre for many years and is today one of the foremost development think tanks in the world. Its research has often provided material for solid academic discourses that have sometimes led to policy adjustments in developing countries and in the orientation of international development partners. WIRER's research of migration and mobility brings together some of the best non-economists working on the subjects with other non-economists. Our choice of keynote speaker for this morning, Professor Ingrid Palmer from WIDTS University, is a good reflection of the strong interest that WIRER economists have in working with non-economists. It is an approach that has helped to grow WIRER research extensively and make it more and more relevant to developing countries. It is our expectation that this conference will provide a solid platform for understanding migration and mobility which will be fed into policy debates in various countries. It will also provide an opportunity for networking among the researchers assembled here. In ending my welcome remarks, let me thank all of you for accepting our invitation to submit papers. For this conference and to attend the conference, we are delighted that you could make it to Ghana. We wish you the most productive conference and the most enjoyable stay in Ghana. Thank you very much.