The Ted Talk Questionnaire: Yasin Kakande on Using TED to Expose the Abuse of Migrant Workers

2017-08-06

The Ted Talk Questionnaire: Yasin Kakande on Using TED to Expose the Abuse of Migrant Workers

How did you first find out you were selected?

I learned from an email that I had been selected. It popped up on my phone and from the headline it needed my reaction accepting the offer. I was going to a library but I could not wait to get there and use a computer to send my response, instead I pulled my car on the side of the road and using my phone I accepted the offer. I had been expecting they would take me as throughout the interviews, I had managed to sell my case to the TED team about being a witness of gruesome migrant worker abuses in the Middle East and how my efforts to put these abuses into a book had led to my losing a job and deported from my base in Dubai. Despite all odds being against me, I was determined to continue trying to put the case of poor migrant workers to the Middle East in light and I was considering TED as my next attempt. I thought I had good chances but still the news that I had been chosen was a big surprise and a “dream come true”.

Please read here my TED Talk Questionnaire

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About Me

A native of Uganda, Yasin Kakande holds a university degree in mass communications and is currently pursuing an MFA (Creative Writing) from Emerson College in Boston. He worked in the United Arab Emirates reporting for local newspapers for fifteen years. Named a Global TED Fellow, Kakande is the author of many international news articles and two previous books, The Ambitious Struggle: An African Journalist’s Journey to Hope and Identity in a Land of Migrants and Slave States: The practice of Kafala in the Gulf Arab Countries. He has lectured widely on the topic of African migration and the politics of nationality at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Lake Forest College in Illinois, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. His op ed pieces appear regularly in major media outlets such as The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The London Economic.

Yasin Kakande