The benefit of mobility for youth in Europe and Ghana
Many young people have experienced migration, and others stay behind when their parents migrate abroad. Little is known about how migration impacts young people in the Global North and South in the medium term. This is partly because the conception of young people’s mobility patterns has to date focused on a binary definition of ‘migration’: either they move once, or they do not. The MO-TRAYL project set out to bridge this knowledge gap to give teachers, social workers and educational policymakers relevant information. “We hope to incite practitioners to think more creatively,” says project lead Valentina Mazzucato, professor of Globalisation and Development at Maastricht University. MO-TRAYL, which was supported by the European Research Council, conducted its work in three European cities, Antwerp, Hamburg and The Hague, and several cities in Ghana, including Accra, Kumasi and Sunyani. “We chose Ghana as a case to focus on because there are many Ghanaians living in Europe. It was important to us to understand how European contexts differ in the way they address young people’s mobility to a homeland. By keeping the country-of-origin constant, we could home in on this without blurring the picture with cultural differences, had we included more groups,” explains Mazzucato. The project also studied young people who had migrant parents abroad, but who remained in the origin country, Ghana. “This is an important group to study if we want to understand the effects of mobility on young people, because parental migration also triggers a lot of movement (for example, from one school to another; from one household to another; and from one village or city to another) for the children who stay behind,” she adds.
Getting a comprehensive picture of the impact of migration
Mazzucato’s team conducted two types of analysis: ethnographic and survey-based. For the former, she and her team selected the study’s participants in European cities by first living in their neighbourhoods and gaining the trust of community leaders, teachers and the like. They got to know, informally, the requisite number of 15–25-year-olds, living in the target cities, who had mixed mobility patterns. In Ghana the young people were selected from a sample of secondary school students with whom researchers had worked in a previous study. All participants gave their consent to participate, and parental consent was given on behalf of the under 16s. The project also conducted a survey of schoolchildren in the European cities, by randomly selecting a range of schools.
Migration as a resource for young people and society as a whole
The project found that the previously considered ‘passive’ group of children whose parents had migrated, leaving them in the ‘home’ country, are surprisingly mobile. “These young people are often treated as sedentary in the literature. That is, they are assumed to be at home, waiting for their parents to return or for the parents to send for them, to join them abroad. Yet our survey in Ghana showed that these youth move a lot. They switch schools and homes more frequently than their counterparts living with both parents,” Mazzucato explains. Understanding how this mobility affects youth is an important part of the question of how migration impacts families. Western researchers who investigate this question usually only look at how migration impacts the youth who have migrated. “No one asks about how migration impacts the mobility of youth who stay behind.” Through the ethnographic component the project identified some interesting characteristics relating to home visits by Europe-based youngsters. She explains: “One of the things that we found was that older youths who went on visits to their country of origin, especially went out with their friends to cafés, hotels, pools, lounge bars, concert venues, music festivals, shopping malls and night clubs, and so on. “During trips to Ghana, they connect and spend time with family members who are professional, educated and encouraging, and who serve as role models. So young people, through these experiences, gain in self-confidence, adaptability, cultural repertoires and motivation.” Young people’s life goals changed, Mazzucato notes, because of their mobility. “They became more ambitious or worldly, considering their futures beyond their neighbourhoods,” she says.
A change in perspective for educators
The team hopes their findings will feed into a broader understanding of what it actually means to be a young person with a migration background in Europe – and the impact of having a migrant parent while living in Ghana. “By showing the kinds of resources these young people obtain, we want to highlight how such trips are assets for these young people. Currently, in all three European study countries, there are laws or policies in place that penalise school absences due to travels. “We show that young people gain important resources that schools and institutions dealing with youth can capitalise on,” she adds.
Keywords
MO-TRAYL, young people, youth, migration, life choices, education, Ghana