The Handa Policy Lab is a planned research initiative. It aims to study how overseas workers navigate their rights across migration corridors — and how technology could make that navigation safer, clearer, and fairer. This is where we're headed; none of it is published work yet.
Handa is being built alongside workers, caseworkers, and legal-aid volunteers. The Policy Lab is designed to become the place where the patterns behind that work — what actually helps a worker act on their rights — would be studied openly and responsibly.
It has not begun operating. When it does, it aims to draw only on information shared willingly and with consent, and it would never depend on identifying individual workers.
Each of these is a direction, not a finding. The Lab has not produced any conclusions.
How protections that exist on paper could actually reach the worker who needs them — in the language they read, at the moment they need it.
What it would take to measure the distance between a law and its filing — and where that distance falls hardest.
How digital tools could support access to justice without exposing workers to new risks. The Lab aims to weigh both edges.
How lived experience from the corridor could inform better policy — framed as questions to pursue, not answers to sell.
Anything the Lab would share is legal and policy information, not legal advice. Guidance for individual workers stays lawyer-reviewed inside Handa itself.
The Lab is designed to study only what people choose to share. It would not analyze private worker data, and it would not identify individuals.
Like Handa, the Lab aims to stay independent of destination-country governments, so the only interest in the room would be the worker's.
When the Lab begins, it aims to convene the people already closest to the work. These are intentions, not existing partnerships.
Researchers and universities who would help hold the work to a rigorous standard.
Pro-bono lawyers and clinics whose frontline experience would keep the questions grounded in reality.
Public institutions the Lab would hope to inform, in an advisory spirit — once there is work worth sharing.
The Policy Lab is still an idea taking form. If you research migration, practice law across the corridor, or fund work like this, we would like to think it through with you.