 Now I'm pleased to invite Wushik to present the webinar. Wushik, over to you. Thank you very much, Kunal and for the entire wider team for this invitation. So today I'll, in our team at YRIS has been working on various aspects of COVID response, especially the economic policy side of COVID response and trying to work and support the governments of Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone to do some of this work and I'll try and highlight one theme that has become very clear in our data, which is that migrant families and remittance dependent families are experiencing this crisis a little bit differently, right? And that the policy reactions that we might need for migrant families may be slightly different from non migrant families. So I'm going to draw on multiple data sets that I've worked on with our co-authors over here, Ashish, Corey, Myra and others. I'll draw on multiple data sets to highlight some of these things. So let me start by motivating why is it that we'd like to focus on migrants, especially when we think about low and middle income countries. So the graph that you see in front of you as data from on migration rates from various samples around the world. Some we've collected and some that other researchers have collected. So this covers, you know, Nepal, many samples in Bangladesh, right, but also India and Barbara's country are on re-discussing country, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Peru, et cetera. Right. So something that's very clear in the data is that for specific soft populations in those countries that are studied by any of these researchers, right, the migration rate tends to be meant very, very high. So so migration is an important part of the livelihood strategy for many, many families around the world, especially in Africa and South Asia. Okay. So you see in Nepal, this is a bit of an outlier, but some of our data is from the Western Terai, where two thirds of households send a migrant. But even at the lower end in Peru and Honduras, you still have about a quarter of households or a fifth of households sending migrants. Okay. So I'm making the point that migration is is common. Now I actually want to, I'm curious about the audiences thinking on this poll question that I have on the right. Okay. So what do you think the same fraction is for households in the United States. Right. So the four options are less than 1%, 1 to 5%, 5 to 50% or greater than 15. So I'll give it a minute. So we have a very evenly divided view. So let me let me end it there. So basically, we have about a third of household, a third of respondents suggesting 1 to 5% and about a third suggesting 5 to 15. So it turns out the actual number is 0.2%. So the situation is very different in developing nations compared to industrialized countries. So the point here is that not only is it high in absolute terms, it's also very high in relative terms. Now, some other facts about the migration data is that they're often concentrated among specific regions or subpopulations. So for a few of these samples, like the US is a national average, and then you see, you know, in Nepal, in India, in Uganda, we have the national averages. So what you observe is that the subpopulations studied by the researchers, right, often have migration rates that are higher than the national average is a big gap in Nepal, the medium size gap in India and a smaller gap in Uganda. But also, the reason I'm pointing that out is that that also suggests that perhaps if there's going to be policy responses for migrant families, it's possible for us to identify subpopulations that we need to target. The other point that's that's going to be that's going to play a critical role in our, the policy lessons that we draw today is that, you know, you can migration can be of many different types. So sometimes it's sort of migration that looks full year or more permanent, right, or even it is not permanent that people are gone for lengthy periods of time they're gone for the entire year or for multi year work contracts. Whereas there's other types of migrant migration as well, which is within year seasonal migration, temporary migration or circular migration where people spend part of the year in one part of the country, and a different part of the year and a different part of the country depending on say the agricultural seasons. And so what we observe here is that these four samples for in in Peru Bangladesh India Nepal, right, where we know about seasonal migration, the seasonal component of migration actually accounts for more than half of all of the, of the total migration. So the total is here and this is a seasonal portion of it total is here this is a seasonal portion of it is like three quarters of all migration central India seem to be seasonal in nature as opposed to as opposed to full year. Okay, so that also suggests that not only can we are identified particular subpopulation we might also be able to identify and target particular times of the year when people need greater support, especially if cove it is going to interact with migration and so on. Yeah, and, and so what are what what are these policy lessons. So one is that, you know, we can identify which population we need to identify which populations are at risk, right, so areas with high migration, and also linkages to areas of sort of high exposure to coven. And so one one other way to say it is the country is like Bangladesh Nepal that send a lot of migrants a international migrants elsewhere right, even if cove it had never reached those countries, even if there was not a single case of disease in those countries, those countries would still have been very affected because the migration destinations that those migrants are going to from Nepal and sending remittances back those destinations are being affected by the crisis. And therefore there'll be an indirect remittance effect on those countries as well. And the policy analysis should also focus on, you know, thinking about the time of the year when people are migrating, right, and if people are forced to return early so for example we we observe that migrants from Nepal to cities in India, they were all forced back because of Indians locked down. And like they rushed back home in early April within two weeks. Those are migrants who are supposed to be away right now earning money and sending money back home. So regardless of the food security situation right now it also suggests to us that since those migrants are not doing what they're what they normally would be doing right now working elsewhere and sending money back, then come November when those that money would have really helped those families, we're going to see this gap and we're going to need to pay special attention to this. So it also I mean thinking about the specific patterns of migration also allows us to think through like exactly when the shocks might hit and you know the situation is already very bad but it might actually get even worse. Alright, so so now just to give you a quick set of results from our samples. We've collected data on multiple samples of households across Bangladesh and Nepal. So I'll leave it to the Q&A in case you have questions about the specific samples. I'll just highlight here that one of these samples is based on a visa lottery so highlight those results early. And what that means is that we also have very good empirical identification we have lottery winners lottery losers so it's not a indolent decision on migration that's governing whether or not you know the effects that we see in migrants and non migrant families are different. It's that we have an explicit like sort of a randomized lottery outcomes so we can study very cleanly what life looks, how life looks different during the COVID period for lottery winners versus lottery losers. Okay, and here's what you see so in 2013 the Bangladesh government ran this lottery for visas to Malaysia the Bangladesh and Malaysian governments at a G2G government to government agreement of sending Bangladeshi workers to work in plantations in Malaysia. And so since 2013 as we've been tracking these household what you observe is that the people who were lucky enough to win the lottery and migrate to Malaysia today and much higher migration rates and those families when you when you track them back home in Bangladesh, they've been doing a lot better. I guess it's not a surprise when you win a lottery. So you get a visa and you access a labor market that's offering much higher wages, then your family does better. So from 2013 to 2019 we observe much higher income. In fact, the income in some years go is about double like 100% higher. And then what we when we go back and talk to these families in April 2020. Of course you see in the lottery losers, the gray bar. There's been a sharp decline in income. That's not news. Everybody knows that after lockdowns all families have experienced sharp lockdowns. So now the question I have for you before I give you the answer. So we're doing a second poll now is is. So what happens to income for these migrant families this red bar right after the COVID-19. Okay, so here we're getting. Okay, let me let me just let it run for another 30 seconds. I think the answer has become clear. So let me end it now. So if you can see the results all sharing. So majority of you almost two thirds of you suggest that it fell by even more and that actually is the right answer. So what you see is while these migrant families were doing better year after year after winning the lottery post COVID. Right. The situation's reverse. Now these migrant families are doing relatively poorly relative to non migrant families. Okay, so there's a decline in income across all families but it's a much sharper decline. And this is something that's not only true in that lottery data, right, but it's true for other data as well. So here in income for Nepal we observe that the situation like the ranking doesn't reverse but the amount of decrease in income for migrant families is larger than the amount of decrease from non migrant families. Right. And this is about food insecurity. You see that food insecurity has risen, but it's risen much more sharply for migrant families. And why is it that migrant families are are suffering more during this crisis so we should really look at specific sources of income what you see both in Bangladesh and in Nepal is that remittances have dropped by a lot right and in the Bangladesh lottery. You see remittances dropping even though even the lottery losers have found some of them have found their way to to migrate elsewhere, maybe not in Malaysia. Right. And you see among both groups, the remittances dropping but the migrant dependent families that drop the share of income that they're losing as much larger. Right. Similarly in Nepal. This is the when we were following the sample around month by month by month since October last year. Right. You, you generally observe remittances in the range of about 4900 rupees on average per month. Right. And this is now after the lockdown got down to 7700 rupees. Right. So people are sending less money back there might the migrants my family members is sending less money back. And why, why is there less remittance income, because one important reason is that the migrants were forced to return. So what you see is this is male migration in Nepal. Right. So across the different seasons. So during the lean period there's high migration rates during the harvest people come back. Right. And this is also a festival period in Nepal and rural Nepal. Right. But then you observe that the migration rate right now is very, very low relative to any other time during the year. Right. So a lot of people have been forced to return. And the second reason is not only have been forced to return, but even the migrants who are away, they're sending less money back. Okay. So, so this is the amount say about 4600 they send back month by month, people who are away in our data for the last several months of the year in 2019. But this is the amount that they're sending back right now. Okay. So both people are forced back and they're sending us back. And so, so then the question is, okay, so we're seeing these drop in income people are coming back. So why isn't home income going up in order to make up for the fact that remittance income is coming down. And we think here, one, something that's becoming more and more clear in the data, as well as lots of anecdotes that we're hearing from Bangladesh Nepal is that migrants are facing unusual amount of stigma right now, because migrants are known to have carried the disease back into Bangladesh into Nepal from other countries where the disease were COVID at it earlier. Right. And therefore, people are more hesitant to work with them or allow them to do anything. Right. So normally, you know, in South Asia migrant families are seen as like they put on a pedestal because they're sending remittances back into the country and earning foreign exchange. But now the situation seems to have been reversed. So, so and somebody is actually true. So what you observe actually in our data that people with COVID symptoms in one of our samples in Bangladesh are 33% more likely to be denied medical treatment. They're 40% of returnees say that they're not supported by friends and relatives. And what I mean by some of it is true is that these stigma that's emerging is coming from the fact that people who have some migration link, or those communities do see higher symptoms. So we observe like this is like some CDC or WH or COVID symptoms like things like dry cough, or dry cough fever, fatigue, etc. And you see that that households which have returning migrants are much more likely to show those symptoms than households and do not. Right. And another data point is that So if you're in a community where in the previous two weeks, there was a migrant who had returned, then in those communities that these symptoms, the double age of symptoms for for COVID that I'm talking about are about three times as likely for us to observe those symptoms and in communities where there was no returning. And so the stigma that we're observing here is partly due to the fact that people are observing like we are in our data that the the presence of migrant attorneys is leading to greater disease prevalence. Right. And so people are rationally in fear, but that also means that this process poses a bigger policy challenge for us. The policy challenge is that migrants are forced back, they're no longer sending rentances back. They could be reintegrated into local economy, but that's not happening easily. There's a lot of friction there as well. So we really need to, policymakers really need to think about enough of these problems. And this correlation between returning presence and COVID symptoms is so strong that if you look at this is at the sub district level in Bangladesh. Right. So what we do is here we're comparing on the x axis we're comparing the sub districts that recently have returning is that came through airports according to the civil aviation authority of Bangladesh. That's the data. Right. And what we observe is that if you have if your sub district has more returnees recently. Right. The number of calls distress calls you're making into a government COVID hotline in those sub districts are much, much higher. Right. So migrant returning presence. This is another piece of research that we did is predictive of where these calls are going to come from. It's also predictive of quarantines and we've seen in the Philippines in addition to Bangladesh we've seen that it's also predictive of actual tested positive cases. Right. So, so migration and positivity rates are actually quite strongly correlated to the extent that you can predict where the cases will emerge based on where people migrants have recently returned. All right, so I'm going to say one final thing about about one final aspect of this. There's a link between migration and income risk and food food insecurity risk, which is, there's a seasonal aspect to this. So they pointed out at the outset that there are certain seasons certain parts of the year where migrants are more likely to be away. Right. And so what you what you're observing here and so I'm showing you here the black line is our month by month by month data collected in a normal year so take 2018 2019. And what I have is on the y axis is the share of households that are facing some food insecurity right they're saying they're having to miss meals cut back on portion sizes etc. So what you observe is that over the course of the year there's certain parts of the year when food insecurity is very high in a normal year. And this is not a surprise this corresponds to the pre harvest lean season so in Bangladesh, the main rice harvest is in December January, you plant in July August. Right. So in between when you're waiting for the crop to grow. That's when food insecurity rises because there's not much work available in the rural areas wages are low during that period etc. Right. So food insecurity is high during that period. Now luckily for us, both in Bangladesh and Nepal. COVID hit at a time when food insecurity is relatively low. Right. And even then, even this period that's supposed to be a good period in a normal year. You're seeing that in migrant families food insecurity has gone up very high. Right. So even in a good period we're seeing this seeing this effect. So I really am worried about what will happen to these households. Right. If this lockdown continues on the disease continues and we're in this period where they will be hit by the double whammy of both regular food insecurity and on top of that, the lockdown effect that we see here. Right. So this is something the policymakers really should be thinking about carefully. That's another point that we want to highlight from from our data. This is true in Bangladesh. And this is also true in Nepal. So, so in, in, in Nepal as well, you know, we have this period in August that's coming and that's going to be seasonal food insecurity period, normal food insecurity. And, and that's a period that we are that we're really much more worried about. Okay, so let me just summarize an end. Remittances of migrant workers are an important source of income, especially in, we know, in South Asia, and in some parts of Africa. Migrant sending households have clearly experienced sharper declines in income than families that are not as dependent on remittances. And then we have the, that we have this couple with a separate public health problem, which is migrant returning presence in the country is associated with greater likelihood of observing COVID-19 symptoms. Right. So the, so the coupling of this problem where the migrant families are earning less income, plus, they're facing some stigma is going to lead to much more difficulty for them to deal with the crisis. Right. And this is not, I mean, I showed you a lot of micro data in order to establish or what is happening at the household level. But this is also going to show up at the macro scale, because many of these countries like Bangladesh and Nepal are quite remittance dependent, like more than a fifth of Nepal's GDP comes from remittances about 10% of Bangladesh GDP comes from remittances. And the World Bank is estimating this based on these predictions that they'll be 22% drop in remittance South Asia. And I have to point out here that some of these drops have not yet been observed. Right. So partly because it was Ramadan, so many people were sending money back more than usual. And another one is that if migrants are being forced to return home, they're actually like liquidating their assets and sending that back home because they're being deported from other countries where that are also worried about like destinations in the Middle East that are also worried about COVID presence in there. And their countries we know in Singapore, for example, the the COVID outbreak was in the migrant dormitories. Right. And so, even if it's not showing up the macro data yet our micro data suggests that there is a lot for us to worry about. Let me and there and stop sharing my screen. And I'm looking forward to Barbara's comments. Thank you for being with us, Barbara. So, Barbara, over to you. Thank you. You're on mute. Thank you. Thank you. Great presentation. Thank you so much by commending the multidisciplinary nature of the work that Mushfik and team are undertaking. And the reason for this is that the COVID-19 pandemic has actually brought to the fore the gaps in social policy. And I think that this work enables us to see that with data, and with analysis of target groups, it makes it much easier to then have every the underlying impact of the pandemic. So I think that this work enables us to see that with data and with analysis of target groups, it makes it much easier to then have evidence based on policy making. Starting off with migration, as Mushfik says, in most of our countries, it's an important livelihood strategy. And coping mechanism. You have a lot of migrants, but also non migrant households that will be affected, depending on what region. Whereas in Bangladesh and Nepal, you've been able to very specifically focus on agricultural communities and migrant households. One could argue that in some of our countries, Uganda, for example, you will find that you do have non migrant households, but at least one or two members of that household have migrated internationally and send remittances home. Nigeria is one of those countries where remittances are important for economic survival. And therefore it will be interesting for further research by those that are interested in looking at similar issues to look at how a non migrant households being impacted when the person that's bringing in or looking after the family can no longer send back as much money because in the destination country, they're probably not working full time as they were. They're also facing challenges or when someone is forced to return home and cannot find employment because they cannot be reintegrated into the labor market. That's one of those pointers that one needs to bear in mind. I found it very interesting, the Bangladesh visa lottery analysis. Again, that is a very specific group. One wonders, a lot of these visa lottery households or individuals are basically sending remittances back to support families that may not necessarily be part of the migrant community. And so what is, how is that playing out? What is the impact given this pandemic? This is a migration in agricultural communities. This is something that is being observed in a lot of agricultural communities across the world. The lean season, as opposed to the peak seasons, and as you rightly say, the impact is bound to be much higher during the lower productivity periods. It would be nice to hear from you what sort of policies, does this therefore make it much easier for government to focus on providing support at a particular time. So the sequencing of government measures is made much easier once they have these kind of results. When it comes to the high COVID incidence at migration destinations, and also the fact that the returning presence is associated with high incidence of COVID. I'd like to give an example from Nigeria. Nigeria has a rather peculiar example of what has happened during this COVID-19 pandemic. We have what we call the Al-Majiri. The Al-Majiri are young children that are normally sent away from home to study the Quran under the guidance of an Imam or a Malam. And so what you have particularly in northern Nigeria is these Al-Majiri that had originally migrated for Quranic education but due to extreme poverty are now on the street begging. So the COVID-19 pandemic started about the same time that the state governors of northern Nigeria had decided to send these children back to their states of origin. You could call this a forced migration. While this happened, COVID-19 infections were on the rise. So one of the states, Kaduna state, found that a lot of the returnees were infected. They very quickly had to isolate the returnees, test, isolate, and then think of how best to reintegrate these children into the community. So the governor of the state and his team decided that once this infected group of children had recovered, they would very quickly see how best to settle them within the community and ensure that they had access to health and education facilities rather than them going back onto the streets. I give this as an example of how when you have a very specific group, you can also target this group with very specific measures. And this is something that I find interesting in the study on migrants in Bangladesh and Nepal. Coming to remittances. There is definitely a loss in remittance income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. What we've observed in many African countries is that governments have had no choice but to evacuate their citizens from countries like China, UAE, South Africa. Many of these are migrants that have been stranded. I would assume that a good number of them are low-level workers and therefore have found that they have no option but to come back home. Upon returning, many of them go into self-isolation. Some of them in countries like Uganda, not far from the international airport, there are a couple of hotels where they are taken to for at least 14 days. What is worrisome is how do we reintegrate them into economies that have already faced high loss of jobs, into economies where they may require to be retrained, so it would be good to hear from you what are the sort of strategies would you advise on skills retraining and reintegration into the labor market. Finally, I'd like to comment on food insecurity. The issue of food insecurity is important and particularly sensitive because if governments are not able to address this, then we will have social unrest. I think in Nigeria, in Lagos, we did see some areas where some of the youth were getting very agitated because there was a lockdown, they're not able to get their daily wages, they're food insecure, then what do you do. And to be good to hear from us, what therefore happens or what strategies have the government taken in Nepal and Bangladesh in terms of food insecurity. We have had governments that have gone out and distributed foods. This is not sustainable. In many of our countries, we do not have established social welfare and social protection systems. If we have a second wave of COVID-19, what then will we do. Interestingly enough, in countries like Uganda, where food security is much more evenly distributed across the country, you find that food prices have actually fallen. So there's been a decline in food prices. And thus far, there hasn't been a lot of agitation by households with regard to food insecurity. It's rather been more about wanting to be sensitized, accessibility to masks. I know we all keep recommending that everyone should wear a mask. These masks cost money. And if you're earning daily wages, you're probably not going to be able to spare 50 cents or a dollar to buy a mask. So how about having free distribution of masks combined with distribution of support in kind, cash transfers, cash handouts. These are all measures that we will need to look at in the policy space. And I'd like to hear from you how Bangladesh and Nepal governments dealt with these policy issues. I think I'll end right there. Thank you, Barbara. That is a really excellent set of comments. If I'm wondering that Mushfiq, you might want to respond to them maybe for four or five minutes because there's a very interesting comparison between Africa and South Asia. So do you want to respond? Yes, please. So first of all, congratulations to Kunal and to the wider team for actually putting this particular pair of speakers together. I come from a research background, but Barbara's excellent comments make clear that she has really strong policy background as well. And this is exactly the type of conversation that we need in order to think creatively and innovatively about policies that we need in order to address this very novel crisis that's in our hands right now. And Barbara, I mean, raised so many interesting issues that I think we could have a one hour conversation about all of these in addition to the research and maybe Barbara, you and I can figure out a forum to do this. But let me try really short and therefore necessarily incomplete answers to your questions. So one quick clarification is that, oh, Barbara, you know, was mentioning like migrant members and non-migrant, I mean, members of the families that remain behind. That's actually also the typical situation in South Asia, just like in Africa, right? So there's a migrant who's away and then the family is remaining behind. So really a lot of our data that you should read it as, okay, what's happening to the households that are remaining, the household members that are remaining behind, and then the migrant is now forced back to join them. And then, okay, so let me, yeah, let me just focus on the more important, what I think are the more important things for the audience to hear about. The question is about policies. Okay, okay, so now how do we deal? I mean, we raised a lot of problems in our data, and now the question is, how do we think about designing policy to address them, right? So one simple point I want to try to make early in the talk is that because the migration is more heavily focused during certain times of the year, right? And, and certain types of families. So it's somewhat predictable exactly where we need to focus our policy attention. So part of our goal here is to just say, look, in your country, you'll be able to, you know, from previous patterns, exactly where the migrants come from, where they go to, and what parts of the year they're likely to be away when they are away versus when are they sending money back home, right? And we know this from previous years of data, right? So now the point is that those patterns are suddenly changing because of the COVID crisis. And we need to design policies that are appropriate, given the timing of the migration, given the specific regions of origin and the regions of destination. And now then thinking about, okay, a lot of international migrants and now forced back, they've been deported back from the Middle East and from like East Asia for the, in the case of South Asian migrants, right? But in general, what I'm talking about is, again, in Nigeria, there's also, you know, workers who work in the Middle East will have some of the similar patterns in Africa as well. Now the, now the question is, okay, so these migrants are forced back, so what do you do with them? I think of two potential directions to go, right, plus a third one that might not be so obvious. The two potential directions to go is that, oh, we need to either reintegrate them into the local economy, figure out, like, what is it that they can do, and how do we enable them to move productively to the local economy? What type of policies should we be devising in order to help them reintegrate? The reintegration is one. And the other possibility is, of course, repatriation, because the very reason that the migrants live in this, in this destination is because there is demand for their labor there, right? So the fact that the Kuwaitis or the Qataris or Emiratis or Saudis who are hiring these migrants are Malaysians or Singaporeans, right? Those needs are still going to be there, right? So then the question becomes, how do we create the conditions such that they can repatriate to where they, the destination where they came from, and go back to productively contributing to those societies and sending some of their money back home or other family members to as a maintenance income, okay? So that might, so each of these strategies will require different types of policy analysis. So I think what I've been trying to propose to the Bangladesh government, and I think this is useful for maybe other governments to think about as well, is that let's think, you know, we should do some policy analysis to think about, okay, what is it that UAE or Qatar or Saudi Arabia or Malaysia or Singapore or Korea thinking about, right? Under what conditions will they allow migrants back, right? Is it that we need to quarantine them for a while? Is it that we need to do testing? Do we need to do isolation, right? What will make them feel comfortable, right? And then, so that's part of it, like, let's understand what they need and then create the conditions and provide the support, facilitate that repatriation process. It might also require a lot of diplomatic channel work, not just research work, right? Where the foreign ministries have to get involved, the embassies have to get involved in order to understand these bilateral decisions on Nepal, Qatar, or Bangladesh, Malaysia, right? How do we recreate the condition for migration? And then on the reintegration side, that part that's not obvious, but BRAC, a very, you know, large and impressive NGO that operates in Bangladesh and in many other countries now. So they have a migration sort of reintegration program that they already had, but they really need to sort of rethink and scale that up right now given the large number of deportees coming back. And there, what we've learned from them is that it turns out mental health support is quite critical for migrants to come back, right? So there's not only hard skills that we need to be thinking about, but also soft skills and soft, like, by soft, I mean other important, but not issues like sitting in a classroom and retraining, right, that we also need to think about carefully. All right, so then final two points that Barbara made that I'll only briefly touch on. Okay, so one is about mask distribution. Okay, here I want to, so we're also at YRI we're doing multiple types of research and not only on migration. So for example, we are trying to prepare for a large scale, mass based randomized control trial in Bangladesh. And what we've learned there is, you know, initially, like when we started collecting data in April, right? So mask use, of course, in a baseline was low, and then we saw sharp increases and people reporting to us at their own mass, right? The numbers went up to like 80, 90% both in Bangladesh and Nepal. Okay, so then at that point, you know, we did have an agreement to like distribute mass at that time with a donor. And then we kind of said, oh, you know, actually, don't worry about this, keep your money because we, it turns out the problem appears to have been solved. Right. But then as we continue tracking, turns out, mask ownership rates are actually a lot higher than actual mass usage rates. It seems like only a third of households or third of people are actually consistently wearing their masks and masks are not so useful if they're not wearing them. So therefore, in a barbarous point of mass distribution, it turns out what's clear now in our data is that it's not only mass distribution that's required, but you also have to pair that with some kind of like institutional interventions where you have to think about monitoring and enforcement of mass wearing norms, especially in places like mosques and markets where people are getting together at high density, right? So we need a kind of a broader intervention strategy. And then Barbara, lastly, also pointed out cash and doubts, right? And here the problem, a fundamental problem that we are facing in Nigeria and Bangladesh and many other countries in total, that it's not easy for us to suddenly identify who is the poor, especially who's a new poor who are suffering more during this crisis, right? Identify them and target money to them, right? That's a pretty complicated task. Like if you think about Bangladesh, Nigeria, countries with populations upwards of 160 million people, right? Identifying the poor quickly is not so easy. And so here this is how actually Barbara and I first connected by our very common good friend Hakim Belosage who's in Nigeria. And then we need to support governments in order to develop new types of infrastructure and like targeting infrastructure that allows us to very quickly target support. So let me stop there because if I start talking about targeting, that'll take another hour, because that's a pretty complicated problem. Thanks, Moshfiq. I had a couple of questions before also, so if others can send in the questions in the Q&A feature, that'd be great. I had two questions on both on the type of migration, migrants themselves. Domestic versus international migrants. The stigma associated with international migrants probably would be higher, right? And domestic migrants. So did you observe that? Did you see that domestic migrants coming back from Dhaka, back to their villages, stigma associated with them? And therefore their integration of the labour markets in the local village, in the local communities is less of a problem than somebody coming back from Malaysia. So that's the first question. Second is that there must be a difference between temporary migrants going to Malaysia, for example, and temporary residence permits versus permanent migrants. There's a lot of Bangladesh are also, as you know, in the UK on a long-term basis in terms of remittance flows. So do we have any data that remittance flows from the long-term migrants is still as stable as before versus the ones who obviously went to countries where there were long-term policies and temporary residence permits would obviously be coming back to Bangladesh and therefore there we can see a significant income decline. Is there any evidence to suggest that the nature of migration, duration migration, and where do migrants go internationally or domestic, makes a difference here? Okay, so those are excellent questions, but really difficult to answer with the data that we currently have. One thing I'll mention kind of indirectly, I'll take the questions in reverse order that, you know, it is clear in the data in like one, the one scatter plot I showed you, right? Well, we learned from that data because here, there we have, like, we're using data on migration permits handed out in Bangladesh to any migrants going anywhere around the world, right? So something that's very clear is that the shock is larger when you're thinking about other countries where the number of cases, early cases were larger. So for example, there's a lot, many Bangladeshes actually also go to Italy, that's a popular destination, right? And the very districts that are, or sub districts that are connected to Italy, because, you know, as you know, Kunal, that, you know, some destinations are more popular because migration is kind of a network good, right? Some destinations are more popular in certain districts, other destinations, the UK is more popular in different districts, right? And what you observe is that, like, what's happening back home in the country is quite strict, quite nicely tied to, or predictably tied to the destination and how they're experiencing the crisis. Okay. And so the way for us to move forward with that analysis is that we do need to pay attention to sort of these bilateral connections, not only at the country to country level, but at like the sub district to specific location level. Okay. So yeah, your point about destination from our data is absolutely valid, right? And then the second question about stigma, is it more among domestic or international? Actually, I have to honestly say I don't know, right? You could be right that maybe international migrants would say it's more stigma. I think that people are updating pretty quickly. So my guess is, but take this with a grain of salt because this is not based on data, okay? My guess is that initially, like back in April, most of the stigma was associated with like migrants returning from Singapore, Italy. So there's international migrants, right? But now increasingly because the disease has moved from being internationally transmitted to being locally transmitted. So once you think about local transmission, that's when more of the stigma is now rationally associated with movements within the country. Okay. I have one question here from the audience, which is a kind of a tricky question, comes to back to what I think Barbara was also talking about, and she responded to some extent. So let's think about the future. So this migrants coming from who went to Malaysia came back, when they go back to Malaysia or to other countries where they were working before. How can we make sure that they get better working conditions? The one thing we learned from this whole episode is how bad the working conditions were. You mentioned Singapore as an example there. So is there a way you think that one can try to actually bring about change in the long term when they return to the countries where they're working in before, or is that not something that's possible? So yes, I mean that's an excellent question because it also cuts across. I mean that's not COVID specific at all. That's a general problem that the world must try to address, right? Let me tell you about small efforts that are being made to address it and we can think about whether or not these are sensible ideas. So this G2G program that I mentioned between Bangladesh and Malaysia, the government-to-government program, the very emergence of the program was in reaction to the abuse and that migrants often face or the migrants are taken advantage of by unscrupulous sort of middlemen, right? So the idea is that there are these private sector entities that act as middlemen between the destination employers and the migrants who are coming from places like Bangladesh, Nepal and India. And they often extract a lot of the rent that these families have to pay them a lot upfront and ongoing. And on top of that, they put them with employers who can also take advantage of the migrants. And the whole point of the G2G agreement was, oh, let's weed out these middlemen and let's do a direct government-to-government agreement and that way they'll have some stronger legal protection, right? Now these arguments, I mean, these programs itself is actually, I would say, met with at best mixed success. So like the Bangladesh-Malaysia program was supposed to take tens of thousands of migrants, ultimately it only took less than 10,000, right? And it hasn't, I mean, that particular program has not been sort of replicated and scaled up. However, there's, I mean, the concept now came in and there's now other G2G programs, right? So I think we need to all think just like we're talking about this COVID crisis is an excellent question. We also need to keep thinking creatively about how to provide some migrant rights. And that is fundamentally a multidisciplinary question, right? It not only requires research, it requires like legal, like legal research ability, legal efforts. And of course it requires the participation of governments and diplomats and policymakers. I think I've got a couple of questions from KC Hari. So KC Hari is asking that what are the gender dimensions of this, what you're seeing in Bangladesh and Nepal? So is there a way to look at the gender dimensions of this issue? And secondly, obviously migrant income is very important for non-migrants too, in the spillover effects and so on. So in a sense, what we know about the fact that we are seeing this big decrease in migrant incomes on the incomes of non-migrants, is there a way to look at that? Yeah, excellent question. So the first one on the gender dimensions. So I'll actually mention here that, you know, the seasonal migrants we talk about in Bangladesh and Nepal, which is actually the most common form of migration, like temporary seasonal migration, is overwhelmingly male. So it's males who, like in Bangladesh, I know the numbers because we've tracked this year after year after year, we're talking about 99 to 100% of these types of migrants who are the poorest of the poor migrating, like agricultural laborers. Of course in Bangladesh, there is a separate population, which is not the subject of what we're seeing here, which is garment workers. So sometimes you have in Bangladesh, there's a big ready-made garment industry. We have young women who live home and live in dormitories in the garment factories and work, you know, live close to the factories and work at the factories and send money back home. So of course, you know, there are both types of migrants and both types of family would be affected. So just to give you the ready-made garment story, as soon as COVID hit, even before COVID arrived in Bangladesh, because it arrived in Europe and North America early, which are our main export destination for garments, like immediately all these orders got canceled. And it was even worse than that, whereas many of the buyers were refusing to actually pay for the orders that they had already made, because the contract were sort of, you know, not paying advance contracts. And so that led to many, many young women being out of work. And other research that I had done in partnership with Rachel Heath at the University of Washington. So we found that these garment sector jobs are extremely important for women's lives in a variety of ways. So for example, not only once you get access to these jobs, but not only is that you earn income, but it turns out that in those villages, when parents see that women can now work in factories, if they have a little bit of skill, the parents become much more likely to put their daughters in school, even relative to her own brother. Right. And those families, you know, fast forward 10, 15 years, those women become less likely to be married off at the age of 16 or having their first child at the age of 18. Right. So if you observe, so we've documented this very carefully in the data for, you know, collected much earlier and over many years. And, and so if you see, you know, these types of jobs now disappearing because of, you know, international supply chains breaking down. That's going to have some adverse effects on young women. So that's from different reasons, but all the data that I suggested today suggests that men are actually bearing the brunt of the, the migration crisis where suddenly when, you know, like low income men are forced back to the home countries. Right. They're suddenly, you know, forced back from India to Nepal and that's become a really complicated situation for those migrants. There's a question, which I think is probably more relevant for the Indian experience, but the question is about the fact that what we saw in the case of India, I would say, maybe less so in validation Nepal is a very big lockdown policy when migrants almost evicted from the cities after after some time and first they were initially stuck there then they then they're pretty much evicted. So that trust between the state and the migrant in this pandemic has eroded a lot. I'm not sure that's the case in validation Nepal but could you speak about this particular question that is an important question also how migrants are treated as citizens in their own countries. Yeah. So something that's become clear in India is that, you know, a lot of state level policies and the mattering. Right. So when we talk about how migrants are treated within countries, you know, the first example that comes to everybody's mind is China, right, which is virtually the only country in the world that has explicit like formal restrictions, or like an internal visa system, like if to the call the hookah system. So if you don't have a hookah for Beijing or Shanghai. Then even if you work there as a migrant labor or one true or any of the highway cities, right, then many of your rights are are not protected. And so for example, your children don't have a might not have a right to get an education there you might not have good housing right. And so you're forced to leave your family back at home. Right. So that's so the explicit limitation of rights in China is well known. Now in India, some of these same in effect on the same policies exist. Right. So just as an example like PDS system the public food distribution system. Right. Now if the PDS card is something that you cannot easily port from one location to another. And that's going to have an effect on people's decisions right so it's like, so for example if I can't get food, you know, subsidized food distribution at the destination because my PDS card doesn't work there. Right. Then I'm going to suddenly be forced back. Right. So there's there's ways in which in effect in India there are restrictions in being put on internal migrants. And as you pointed out the other, you know, I think this was really and there's not no other way to say it other than a big screw up and without thinking carefully about the fact so when in the impose a lockdown from the public health perspective maybe that was a sensible thing to do. Right. But it is also important for the government to think about, you know, what are economies made of where people are versus where they live where they work versus where they live. Right. And if I suddenly put a very, you know, stringent restriction on public transit, right, or any kind of inter district or interstate travel, then that's going to have disproportionate effects on these on these poor migrants. Right. And I think just the mechanics and specific implementation of the policy just was not taught through carefully in the same way that when the US suddenly imposed, you know, overnight of flight restrictions between the EU and the United States. They didn't think carefully about, okay, how is it that all the Americans are now broad, we're stranded abroad, and they get home. And so what ended up happening was suddenly you had everybody quingesting at airport. And if anything that led to sort of super spreader events. So implementation is critical. So it's not just about policy design, we need to actually think about the steps of implementation. Yeah, I have one final question for you and I know we've been writing about it quite a bit. How practical is it to have long term policies or the kind you see in the western countries in countries like in South Asia, or perhaps also in Africa. Yeah, so, so you know the life of the question that trade off is much more difficult. Right. I think, you know, here I'll just give you like the key insights that come out of out of the modeling, like even the epidemiological modeling, the same modeling that produces answers like we should be locking down in the US or Europe. Okay. So what you learn from that work is, I mean, if you just apply the same epidemiological models on low middle income country data separate from high income country data. What you learn is one that the age structure of the population is very different in lower income countries, right. There's not as many elderly partly because birth rates are higher as the population skews younger. Right. So that means that this the risk, the disease risk and the risk of fatality is going to be very different. Right. It's, it's thankfully lower in poor countries, just because we have younger populations. And second, you know, if we are going to impose lockdown policies with the goal of flattening curves. Right. Like you're trying to flatten the curve below the health care capacity now that if the health care capacity line is extremely low. Right. Then, then, you know, flattening and delaying infections doesn't actually save a lot more lives. So that's another way in which rich and poor countries might be different. Right. And finally, you know, compare, you know, those are how the benefits are different. So you got to compare it against the cost. And for the cost side, the main issue is that in a rich country like you and I living in US or Finland, right, we can sit at home get our work done as we are right now, and we're still getting a paycheck. Now for a like a day wage laborer who's, who's weekly earnings actually feed a particular family and if they don't have earnings that week, like the family may not have food as we saw food insecurity is going up people are having to cut back on meals. If it's it's much harder proposition to tell them to just like lockdown indefinitely and stay at home indefinitely. So, you know, it's it's so basically what that means is that in poor countries, it's not really a live versus livelihoods debate. It's really a lives loss versus lives loss debate, right, because malnutrition hunger, etc. are also public health problems. Right. So, so I don't think the answers are like a one size fits all policy is sensible to apply across the world. Countries really do need to think about exactly what is at high risk and what factors pose the highest risk in those countries. Thank you so much. Thank you, Barbara. We come to the end of this of this particular webinar. And I should say to the audience that we have also mush fakes recent writings on our website on the specific page around on this on this webinar. So please do take a look at those articles and blogs. And thank you so much for participating. Thanks mush fake thanks Barbara and thanks to Ashish, Myra, and Corey who have been basically responding to questions coming in the q amp a themselves. Thank you for your participation. And hopefully, I'll see many of you in the next webinar that's the same day same time next week. I'll be a bargain for the team covered 19 different countries. Thanks very much.