Each year, the Advancing Development Goals International Contest for Graduate Students invites teams of master students to devise innovative and practical proposals for effecting change. This year, the challenge was to assess how return migration can contribute to social or economic development.

Teams from around the world submitted 45 project entries, of which 12 were selected as semi-finalist. The external Jury Panel of policy makers and academics has now chosen the three finalists:

• Assisting the Reintegration of Philippine Return Migrants through Mobile Technology
  Three students from the University of the Philippines have created an integrated return migrant mobile assistant, a user-friendly and multi-lingual app which offers return migrants a range of services.
• The Ethics of Remitting: Building a Normative Framework for the Inclusion of Remittances in Policy Discussions on Migration and Development
  A team from Columbia University proposes a strengthened normative framework for migrant remittances, combining a more favourable tax regime with measures which ease and reduce the cost of transferring remittances.
• Vital Networks: Extending the Agency of Return Migrant Health Workers
  A team from the London School of Economics and Political Science has devised a global telemedicine network which enables migrant health workers to return home, yet still work within the health system of their host country.

Details of all three projects and teams can be found here.

The finalists will present and defend their projects at a special public event at the Graduate Institute on 12 October. This will culminate with the award ceremony where William Lacy Swing, Director General of the International Organization for Migration, will award 10,000 CHF to the winning project, 5,000 CHF to the second prize and 2,500 CHF to the third.