Re-balancing the reintegration process and the potential of mentoring for returnees: evidence from Senegal, Guinea and Morocco

This article answers a key research question on the geopolitics of reintegration assistance, based on research in Senegal, Guinea and Morocco in 2020. Our research began by asking: Can a social-work-inspired case-management approach, provided by local mentors, improve reintegration outcomes for migrants returning to their countries of origin? We examined the role and effect of local mentors, employed as part of a pilot reintegration support project, by analysing quantitative data from reintegration sustainability surveys collected by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), triangulated with additional quantitative and qualitative data. We found that mentoring has a small but significant and positive impact on reintegration, which suggests that a further expansion of approaches at the cross-section of social work and reintegration may result in improved reintegration outcomes. Although longitudinal research, monitoring and analysis of trends across additional contexts is needed, one of the greatest promises of the pilot mentoring approach presented in this article, if improved and enhanced in the long term, could be to change the geopolitical power imbalances in reintegration planning. Enhancing the mentoring approach would mean giving more weight to local contexts and national actors and letting mentors and mentees, together, decide on what and when assistance needs to be ‘triggered’ to support them. It would take reintegration approaches a step away from the migration-management agenda of regional powers such as the European Union and a step closer to the goals of empowerment and self-determination of migrants and sending countries in the Global South.