Human mobility is driven and impacted by today’s major global transformations, such as growing inequalities, mistrust, exclusion from decision-making and hyper individualism, nationalism and protectionism, increasing number of violent conflicts, changing demographics, climate change and environmental degradation, financial constraints - that require constant reflection on how to better respond to their current realities. 

Although there isn't a perfect formula for designing migration policies, most of them tend to incorporate specific elements. These elements commonly involve utilizing evidence to set a foundation and adoption of a whole-of-government approach to ensure cohesion.

The importance of quality, accessible, disaggregated, reliable and timely data to inform policies, action and public opinion is well recognized and highlighted by national and local authorities, civil society and development partners in the Republic of Moldova, where there is a growing recognition that more needs to be done to harness the potential of using data to inform policy and practice, while protecting migrants against the misuse of data.

IOM Moldova has already conducted 4 Migration Governance Indicators (MGI) assessments on national level (2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021) to comprehensively assess of the existing policies, laws and frameworks on migration, and implemented several DTM surveys after February 2023 to gather and analyze data on mobility, vulnerabilities, and needs of displaced and mobile populations, a gap between migration policies and people’s policy perspectives were noticed. 

Seeking to bridge this gap, IOM analyzed how well local-level migration policies and services cater to migrants’ and displaced people’s needs, directly from their perspective to effectively join DTM's operational humanitarian approach with MGI's policy-focused viewpoint.

The results of this initiative pilot-tested in Cahul and Balti, in a synergized and coordinated way, with significant contribution of both the local and central level national authorities as well as with involvement of the people on the move - displaced population, labour migrants, diaspora organizations representatives -, help identifying interlinkages between humanitarian, development and peace actions in Moldova and advance ideas of collaboration, coherence and complementarity to ensure integration of migrants’ voices, their representativeness in the process and sustainability of the migration governance related interventions. 
 

This work has been featured in a video which participated in the IOM Innovation award 2023.

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/S1nBCDke8WE 

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For more information, please contact: 

Varzari Vitalie, Migration Development Program Officer, IOM Moldova.
vvarzari@iom.int

Cretu Ghenadie, Migration Development Program Coordinator, IOM Moldova.
gcretu@iom.int