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      Social Media, Mobile Phones and Migration in Africa: A Review of the Evidence

      1 , 2 , 1
      Progress in Development Studies
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          The role of new technologies, including mobile phones and social media, in migration moved to the fore during the European migrant crisis in 2015. Images of Syrians fleeing civil war, along with Iraqis and Afghans, guided by their mobile phones became common in the international media. While much has been made about the importance of mobile phones for migrants, including by humanitarian organizations, what evidence do we have about the role such technologies have in migration, particularly for migrants in, and from, Africa? This article uses a semi-systematic approach to evaluate the strength of the evidence around the use (or not) of mobile phones and social media in the migratory pathways of Africans, primarily to Europe. This includes detailed systematic database searches, submissions from experts such as academics and practitioners as well as the use of snowball citation searches. We argue that given the intensity of the claims affirming the role of new technologies in migration, the evidence remains surprisingly anecdotal and weak. In short, the use of mobile phones, and social media, on migratory pathways cannot be generalized and further investigation is urgently required to better determine whether, and how, such technologies are shaping and transforming migration in the ways so frequently argued.

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          Liberation Technology

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            State-of-the-evidence reviews: advantages and challenges of including grey literature.

            Increasingly, health policy decision-makers and professionals are turning to research-based evidence to support decisions about policy and practice. Systematic reviews are useful for gathering, summarizing, and synthesizing published and unpublished research about clearly defined interventions. State-of-the-evidence reviews are broader than traditional systematic reviews and may include not only published and unpublished research, but also published and unpublished non-research literature. Decisions about whether to include this "grey literature" in a review are challenging and lead to many questions about whether the advantages outweigh the challenges. The primary purpose of this article is to describe what constitutes grey literature, and methods to locate it and assess its quality. The secondary purpose is to discuss the core issues to consider when making decisions to include grey literature in a state-of-the-evidence review. A recent state-of-the-evidence review is used as an exemplar to present advantages and challenges related to including grey literature in a review. Despite the challenges, in the exemplar, inclusion of grey literature was useful to validate the results of a research-based literature search. Decisions about whether to include grey literature in a state-of-the-evidence review are complex. A checklist to assist in decision-making was created as a tool to assist the researcher in determining whether it is advantageous to include grey literature in a review.
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              How social media transform migrant networks and facilitate migration

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Progress in Development Studies
                Progress in Development Studies
                SAGE Publications
                1464-9934
                1477-027X
                January 2022
                October 04 2021
                January 2022
                : 22
                : 1
                : 56-71
                Affiliations
                [1 ]University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
                [2 ]University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
                Article
                10.1177/14649934211043615
                3ff2e8d3-c6c0-4e22-83e4-6d0dcf4527f2
                © 2022

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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