The Digital Leisure Divide and the Forcibly Displaced

UNHCR has been pursuing an agenda of enhanced connectivity and digital inclusion for forcibly displaced people. In 2020, following an array of standalone efforts in pursuing these agendas – for example, through the 2016 Connectivity for Refugees Strategy – the organization began a journey to consolidate initiatives around digital transformation into a new organization-wide strategy. One priority outcome area is around digital inclusion that seeks to ensure forcibly displaced and stateless people “have equitable access to digital technology and channels and can use them to pursue opportunities for lifelong learning, inclusion in the digital economy, leisure, and solutions.” For a number of years, many digital inclusion interventions have been tied to specific developmental goals – enhanced education, use of digital financial services, greater access to information, among others. There is emerging evidence that challenges the notion that those targeted with such interventions prioritize connectivity for these purposes. Rather, the agenda highlights leisure as a key driver for adoption of digital technologies, and a critical use case for such technologies that bring indirect benefits beyond the ‘virtuous’ aims of humanitarian aid and development programmes globally. In this report, UNHCR and Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) scholars document the evidence on digital leisure in the forced displacement context, highlighting issues unique to that context. This report constitutes a continuation of the desk review,1 and provides evidence from fieldwork carried out in two refugee shelters in the city of Boa Vista, Brazil – Rondon III and September 13 – at the end of 2021. The report focuses on the main uses and potential benefits of digital leisure in refugee contexts. It brings together evidence from Venezuelan forcibly displaced people with an emphasis on Brazil due to that country’s relevance in the human mobility context within the Latin American region. The report aims to inform actors in the government, private, non-profit, and aid agency sectors who are interested in digital inclusion and rights-based solutions for forcibly displaced people. It provides insights about issues of access, privacy, and trust experienced by forcibly displaced persons while using devices and navigating connectivity in their everyday lives. It also explores the opportunities for community-building and local citizenship through content creation and connection with family, friends, and society at large. We reveal how digital leisure fosters unique opportunities for self-realization and shapes specific worldviews through their information practices in digital spaces. The possible livelihoods enabled by digital leisure and the aspirational digital lives of participating Venezuelan refugees and migrants are also explored

Digital Leisure and Aspirational Work among Venezuelan Refugee and Migrant Women in Brazil

This chapter builds on a UNHCR Innovation Service project in partnership with Erasmus University Rotterdam, supported by the Government of Luxembourg, where we examined the opportunities afforded by digital leisure for Venezuelan refugees and migrants in northern Brazil. The project aimed to assess the ways in which refugees and migrants use digital media for entertainment and the possibilities of these uses for improved livelihoods. In this chapter, we focus on three women who participated in the project and their perspectives on content creation using digital media. The field work took place in late 2021 in two shelters in northwestern Brazil and involved in-depth interviews with fifteen participants, and a workshop on how to be a digital influencer. The analysis of these three cases presents different ways in which refugee and migrant women use digital media and their aspirations for a better life through content creation

Rescue of a chimeric rinderpest virus with the nucleocapsid protein derived from peste-des-petits-ruminants virus: use as a marker vaccine

The nucleocapsid (N) protein of all morbilliviruses has a highly conserved central region that is thought to interact with and encapsidate the viral RNA. The C-terminal third of the N protein is highly variable among morbilliviruses and is thought to be located on the outer surface and to be available to interact with other viral proteins such as the phosphoprotein, the polymerase protein and the matrix protein. Using reverse genetics, a chimeric rinderpest virus (RPV)/peste-des-petits-ruminants virus (PPRV) was rescued in which the RPV N gene open reading frame had been replaced with that of PPRV (RPV–PPRN). The chimeric virus maintained efficient replication in cell culture. Cattle vaccinated with this chimeric vaccine showed no adverse reaction and were protected from subsequent challenge with wild-type RPV, indicating it to be a safe and efficacious vaccine. The carboxyl-terminal variable region of the rinderpest N protein was cloned and expressed in Escherichia coli. The expressed protein was used to develop an indirect ELISA that could clearly differentiate between RPV- and PPRV-infected animals. The possibility of using this virus as a marker vaccine in association with a new diagnostic ELISA in the rinderpest eradication programme is discussed