Companies like Microsoft can help manage migration: Incoming UN migration chief

Amy Pope, the incoming head of the UN migration agency, said on Thursday she has talked to companies like Microsoft to see how they can build partnerships to manage migration.

A record number of people – more than 100 million – are forcibly displaced around the world and the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) seeks to ensure humane and orderly migration and intervenes where needed.

Washington’s candidate Pope, who beat her Portuguese boss Antonio Vitorino in an tense election last month to head the organisation, said there was a need to ease strain on asylum systems in Western countries she described as “completely overwhelmed”.