Designation: Professor and Postgraduate Coordinator
Email: mdinbabo@uwc.ac.za
Professor Mulugeta F. Dinbabo is a Professor of Development Studies at the Institute for Social Development, University of the Western Cape (UWC), and an NRF-rated C2 Established Researcher. He holds a PhD in Development Studies from UWC, as well as Master’s degrees in Development Management from Ruhr University, Germany, and Development Studies from UWC.
His academic work is situated at the intersection of development studies, migration and human mobility, and postgraduate teaching and supervision. Over the course of his academic career, Professor Dinbabo has supervised and graduated more than 55 Masters and doctoral students in Development Studies and has published extensively in peer-reviewed national and international journals.
Professor Dinbabo is the founder and Chief Editor of the African Human Mobility Review (AHMR), a Department of Higher Education and Training-accredited interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal. The journal advances scholarship on the socio-economic, political, legislative and developmental dimensions of migration and human mobility across Africa.
Through his research, postgraduate supervision and editorial leadership, Professor Dinbabo has made a sustained contribution to scholarship and capacity development in development and migration studies, with a particular focus on African development challenges and human mobility.
2021-2028: South-South Migration and Migrant Food Insecurity in the Global South (MiFood Project): Co-Investigator (Co-I)
MiFood is an international research initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The project brings together a multidisciplinary network of partner institutions, co-investigators and collaborators from seven Canadian universities and research teams across the Global South, including partners in China, Jamaica, Kenya, Mexico, Namibia, Mozambique, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Qatar, South Africa and Singapore.
The project investigates the relationship between migration and food security, with particular attention to international and internal South–South migration. Its objectives are to develop a global research and knowledge-mobilisation agenda on migration and food security; compare the food-security vulnerabilities of migrant women, men and children across cities, migration corridors and migrant-sending communities; examine how changing food systems contribute to migration, precarious employment and food insecurity; and strengthen the visibility of the migration–food security nexus within global, national and local development agendas.
MiFood’s distinctive contribution lies in its comparative, interdisciplinary and Global South-focused approach. It seeks to generate new evidence on how migration can contribute positively to food security while also identifying the structural vulnerabilities affecting rapidly growing migrant populations and their dependants.
2025-2027: Remitting for Resilience (R2) Project: In collaboration with Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University. Co-Investigator (Co-I),
The Project research focuses on a number of contrasting migration and remittance corridors. Migration corridors are a useful framing device “to understand the movement of people, goods, money, knowledge and skills between two places with sociocultural, economic, political and historical dynamics that transcend national borders” (MIDEQ, 2023). All migration corridors have certain common features, most notably the flow of remittances in cash and kind from migrant destinations to origins. In some remittance corridors, there is also a reverse flow of food remittances from origins to destinations. However, there is also considerable variation between corridors in terms of inter alia the motivations and ability of migrants to remit; the volumes, types and frequencies of bi-directional remittance flows; who receives and controls remittance income and decides on the uses to which they are put; the regulatory environment governing cross-border financial transactions; the differences between corridors that straddle international borders and those that do not; the relative balance between formal and informal remittances; the types, costs and speed of different remittance channels; and the extent to which senders and recipients have access to digital and mobile money options. For this study, the first of its kind, we have selected a group of international and internal remittance corridors with one major common feature: that is, the migrant-sending and remittance-receiving end of the corridor is located geographically in rural communities in marginal environments.
2022-2025: Assessing and Mitigating the Food Insecurity Impacts of COVID-19 on Marginalized Refugees from Countries in Crisis (R350 000.00): In collaboration with Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University, Co-Investigator (Co-I)
Strategies to mitigate the public health impacts of COVID-19 have led to a secondary pandemic of global food insecurity. Our project will ‘scale up’ our First Round CIHR Grant on the negative impacts of COVID-19 on household food security in Wuhan and Nanjing, China to three additional cities: Quito (Ecuador), Cape Town (South Africa) and Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W) (Canada). The project has a particular focus on the food insecurity experience of marginalized immigrant and refugee populations during the pandemic and how to build greater resilience post-pandemic. We will undertake a comparative study of the food security and related health impacts of COVID-19 on immigrants and refugees who have settled in these three cities and who come from countries experiencing political and economic crises or natural disasters: in Quito, migrants from Venezuela and Haiti; in Cape Town, migrants from the DRC, Somalia and Zimbabwe; and in K-W, refugees from Afghanistan and Syria. In all three study sites, we have research partners and infrastructure in place as well as ongoing projects on gender violence against migrants (Quito), refugee livelihoods (Cape Town) and the social determinants of refugee health (K-W).
Prof Mulugeta F. Dinbabo was part of the 2025 Africa Visa Openness Index report which was officially launched at the Ninth Pan-African Forum on Migration in Cape Town, South Africa.