Very rarely one gets the opportunity to represent migrant workers and refugee communities in a room of twelve nonprofits from Cameroon to Argentina to Malaysia to discuss Equity in Evaluation Landscape towards a landmark report by Praxis and Global Change Center commissioned by the Ford Foundation. We were in Johannesburg a few months ago. Looking forward to the public report next month.

Thank you very much Adrian Pereira Sir Ann Beatrice Madam and the North South Initiative Team for the opportunity to bring muted voices to the funder community.

In Solidarity!

PS: I am a third-generation migrant who is perennially on the move from the Gulf to SE Asia unlike academics who theorize migration on the pathos of helpless workers and refugees.

One of the ways I think of the ways one writes about migration from the extraction oriented lens of academic theorising is the non appreciation of lived experiences of workers to publish in journals such as Geoforum. One scholar called Desker road or the migrant worker space on Lembu Road in Singapore as Bordered Security Scapes, where Bangladeshi migrants gather on a Sunday to gather, break Iftar and meet friends.

For me a second generation migrant and non scholar, the Lembu Road space is one of joy and celebration and of celebrating humanity. Every migrant knows that they are under the loving gaze of the cctv camera.

Privileged lens does impact how one writes about bachelor bodies in bordered security scapes (Loong 2018) (Ye 2014).

ESG and it’s meta framework, the good old sustainability has its biggest strengths in transparency and trust which is tied to being responsible in stakeholder capitalism. Businesses exist to deliver value to customers and returns to investors. Sustainability professionals often forget why businesses exist.

Only when we do a multiple number of gigs within the ecosystem we are aware of our zone of excellence. In the future of work, the nature of skills to deliver shall evolve as per the on demand characteristics.

We will map the traits of automation too. The hybrid future is here.

We always had historic automation, it was called serfdom, slavery, and migrant and gig work now a days.

The hardest job in any business, particularly in a start-up, is revenue generation, which is the real product market fit. Bringing the money to the table is the most challenging and those who can build profitable businesses are stars and will paradoxically never be out of a job.

The PhD coursework phase at NUS was immensely enriching; however, I needed a pause to recalibrate my scholarly agenda and to find the writer in me back again. After 9 months of a writing break of sorts, i realized that writing is a whole of the body experience where the vision, research agenda and the will to strive need to align.

I write as a professional services entrepreneur each day, and finding the joy in the words that one writes is something which I had lost. The break has helped. I look forward to writing a PhD again, this time in something I love and have the wherewithal to do excellent work.

In the last nine months, I have traveled the entire city of Bombay, and have visited Delhi, Pune, and Johannesburg and engage with issues of migration in the Indian Ocean deeply. As i was having Baida Roti at Bade Miya at Fort the other day in search of an Arab Bombay, I am eating the popular mutton Murtabak in SE Asia, a Hadrami import to the region.

The waters do connect us via the plate, even if contemporary politics just in a temporary amnesia. The effective networks of food connect us beyond what the national defines us to be. However, I am no theorist, as a supervisor once quipped.

Too many sustainability professionals are stuck in the regulatory fine print rather than using entrepreneurship as a lens to drive resilience. Sustainability unless it is a core business proposition such as climate tech fund, will be a mere side show.

ESG in the midst of the ruckus in US politics has emerged into the latest turf war for the ideological real estate. In these times it is important to head back to basics and remember sustainability is about quality of living with an eye towards corporate integrity and accountability.

Meanings and nomenclature are sites of contestation yet we reside on one planet with finite resources and that reality does not change.