Diabetes Care: Development of a Mobile Technology Support System for Community Health Workers

A significant aspect of global poverty is displacement. Annually, over one million persons facing severe economic hardship, often accompanied (and/or caused) by political instability or repression, migrate from global regions mired in poverty to cities and nations where economic opportunity is perceived to be greater. Some of these migrations are internal, rural to urban, or across regional divisions within country. Others, drawing more media attention, are international. In both instances, the burden of migration often falls on youth, teens and young adults facing a choice-set of less-than-ideal options.We propose a three-year interdisciplinary study of global youth poverty focused on three sites— Tunisia, Morocco, and South Africa—with potential extension to a receiving site in Spain. Our goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the comparative roles that economic development, democratization, the social context of the donor society (or region), and the social context of the recipient region play in the decision of migrants, especially youth, to stay or leave their nations/ regions of origin. In pursuing this goal, we also hope to further develop and deepen partnerships with youth-serving organizations in our sites of interest. Those partnerships will provide greater access to informants while, themselves, serving as an object of inquiry on models of human development in donor and recipient contexts. To what degree are these civil society institutions successful in ameliorating the poverty and other harms associated with youth displacement and migration on the one hand, and the cultural, political and economic challenges that result, on the other? Taken together, the two goals should provide us with a theoretical blueprint for models of youth empowerment and civic engagement in both donor and recipient settings that may reduce the rate of intra- and international migration and the accompanying hardship and poverty.