Irregular Journey is a Puzzle with Missing Pieces: Disseminating Safe Migration Message through Crossword Puzzles

Many of the female population in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka has a tendency to engage with crossword puzzles appearing in the regional newspapers. Usually, they are highly skillful in filling such puzzles by gathering knowledge from newspaper articles. Using this trend as one of the opportunities to disseminate the safe and regular migration message, the SMC team of IOM Jaffna sub office organized a pilot series of crossword puzzles against thematic newspaper articles in a local regional newspaper from 2 – 15 October 2019 as a part of the Jaffna mass information outreach campaign. Five articles were designed based on C4D principles and published in the themes of, "A safe foreign journey", "Health and legal repercussions of irregular foreign journeys", "Government stakeholders related to safe migration", "How to identify a genuine foreign employment agent", "Global Assistance for Irregular Migrants project implemented by IOM and means of return and rebuilding of livelihood is possible through this project at present".  

The entire crossword puzzle generated correctly filled 119 puzzles along with 35 correct SMS based answers in favour of the objective question posed to IOM survey. Many individuals called the IOM hotline to know more details about the information mentioned in the above articles as well. The answers showed a positive impact in knowledge, attitude and behaviour of individuals towards safe and regular migration.   

This pilot study further reflected more number of crossword puzzles from males and more SMS from females providing more lessons to learn for the next rounds of similar activities. Randomly selected winners were granted with gifts and incentives for responses at the end of the competition by filling with joy on their knowledge attainment.