Strengthening Maipú’s Governance Capacity to Promote Social Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees

Summary

Maipú Municipality commits to strengthen its local capacity to govern migration and forced displacement in a way that promotes social inclusion and peaceful coexistence between migrant and refugee families and other members of the community.  

Maipú Municipality will build its capacity by participating in the MigraCiudades Argentina project, developed and implemented by the UN Migration Agency (IOM) in coordination with the National Direction of Migration.. This includes assessing existing local governance structures, providing training for government officials, and designing action plans and monitoring systems to facilitate the successful socio-economic inclusion of migrants and refugees.

In this context, Maipú  is institutionalizing a local Immigration Office. This Office consolidates all relevant information for migrants and refugees in one place, including access to rights, services and job opportunities, this way institutionalizing all reception, integration and protection services in a ‘one-stop shop’.  The Office will also identify key areas for collaborations with other departments within the municipal government, hereby promoting cross-cutting interventions that encourage social inclusion and coexistence between migrant families and other members of the community. The centre is also actively engaged in the design and implementation of migratory policies and seeks to foster partnerships with organizations experienced in migratory matters.

Impact

This action aims to improve local migration governance and design public policies to ensure orderly, safe and dignified migration in the department.

To this end, it was decided to create a support space that brings together in one place the provision of basic information about the department, access to rights and services as well as to the labor market, useful telephone numbers, etc. It aims to allow the institutionalization of reception, integration and protection services. The objective is to help migrants to carry out their initial procedures, to obtain employment, school vacancies, access to services, etc. in a coordinated, faster and simpler way than if they had to request each of these services to specific departments each time.

On the other hand, training has been provided to civil servants around mental health and psychosocial support as well as the strengthening of the intercultural strategy. These actions are intended to respond to the needs of migrants by means of a properly trained team, focused on carrying out actions aimed at integrating migrants, improving institutional capacities and resources and forging strategic alliances. In addition, the work is motivated transversally and jointly with the different areas of government, seeking to promote interventions and spaces for interaction that foster social inclusion and peaceful coexistence between families of the migrant population and the host community in our department.

The impact will be measured through the creation of a registry of people attended, identifying nationality, gender, age, subject of consultation, results and other aspects of interest. Another indicator will be a record of the number of courses offered and the total number of municipal personnel accessing training promoted by the Immigration Office. The successful implementation of strategic alliances, agreements and joint actions with organizations specialized in migration issues will also be evaluated.