Joe Lowry for IOM/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
In 2015 the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), a gathering that brings together hundreds of relevant civil society organisations and many government representatives, opened with a picture of Alan Kurdi. You know the one: the picture of a three-year-old that floated briefly above a relentless news cycle, incandescent with both innocence and horror. The Syrian toddler in his neat red shirt and blue shorts, wearing shoes so small they would both fit in a single man’s palm, lying lifeless on a Turkish shore. Yet that year’s GFMD, held in Istanbul, featured a theme so carefully bland that it stood in jagged and obvious contrast to the photo: “Achieving migration and development goals: movement together on global solutions and local action”. Amidst all this, delegates crowded into conference rooms to share frustrated stories of migration’s effects on the most vulnerable in Ghana, in the Philippines, in Syria, and from these disparate inputs we cobbled together a final report that said both a lot and very little.
