At the World Social Forum, conversations about migration took on a deeply personal dimension as participants from Nigeria and Senegal shared stories of family members who disappeared or died while attempting to migrate.

For them, migration is not simply a question of borders, policies or statistics. It is also about the families left behind—families forced to live with grief, uncertainty and unanswered questions.

For Nigerian participant Purity, speaking about migration meant revisiting the painful story of her brother Nicholas, who left Nigeria in 2012 and has not questions that have remained with the family been heard from for more than 13 years.

Nicholas left behind a young family and two children. His first child was only three years old, while his second was six months old.

He hoped to travel through Libya and eventually reach Europe in search of better opportunities and a future for himself and his family.

But after he left Nigeria, communication stopped.

There was no phone call. No message. No explanation of what happened to him.

For more than a decade, his family has been left with questions that have no answers.

“Is he alive? Where is he? What happened to him? Does he remember us?” Purity said, describing the questions that have remained with the family throughout the years.

The pain of not knowing

For families of missing migrants, grief does not always come with certainty.

When a loved one dies, families may eventually have the opportunity to mourn, hold a funeral and begin the difficult process of accepting the loss. But when someone disappears, there is no such closure.

Purity said Nicholas’s children have grown up without their father. The child who was three when he left is now an adult, while the child who was onlymemoration, she concluded, must also become an opportunity to question the policies and systems that continue to put migrants’ia Dieye of Senegal, the pain of migration became personal when her younger brother, Mbaye, died while attempting to reach the sometimes appears in her dreams, giving her brief moments in which it feels as though he is still alive before families, the issue is therefore bigger than individual decisions to migrate. They want governments and institutions to examine the conditions that make dangerous journeys appear to young people as their only route towards six months old has grown up without the chance to know their father as they should have.

More than 13 years later, his absence continues to shape the family.

“Sometimes people may think that after 13 years a family should have moved on,” Purity said. “But time does not automatically remove uncertainty.”

She said Nicholas’s story has changed the way she understands migration.

“Behind every missing migrant is a family,” she said. “Behind every migration journey is a human being with people who love them and people who are waiting for them.”

That understanding, she said, is why families of missing migrants must be included in conversations about migration.

They need systems that can help them search for missing relatives, access information and receive emotional and psychosocial support while they live with uncertainty.

Speaking about Nicholas remains painful, but Purity said she continues to tell his story because she does not want him to be forgotten.

“Nicholas is not just a missing migrant,” she said. “He is a brother, a father, a son and a member of our family.”

For 13 years, the family has waited.

For 13 years, they have wondered.

And for 13 years, Nicholas has remained in their hearts.

From remembrance to accountability

For Rita, another Nigerian participant, the Forum provided a different but equally important lesson: remembering migrants who died or disappeared should also involve demanding answers.

Through her work with FREMNET, Rita has participated in activities remembering migrants who left home and never returned.

Families and advocates have held candlelight events and prayers for those who died along migration routes and those whose whereabouts remain unknown.

But at the World Social Forum, Rita encountered people organising specifically around missing migrants, and she said their approach changed her understanding of commemoration.

“What really touched me was that their work is not only about remembering these people,” she said.

“They are also asking questions and demanding justice.”

The discussions pushed her to look beyond remembrance and ask why migrants are forced to take dangerous journeys in the first place.

Why do people have to risk their lives at sea or crossing deserts?

What policies and systems make migration more dangerous?

And what can be changed so that other families do not experience the same pain?

For Rita, that was one of the most important lessons from the Forum.

“Remembering those we lost is important, but we cannot stop there,” she said.

Commemoration, she concluded, must also become an opportunity to question the policies and systems that continue to put migrants’ lives at risk.

A Senegalese family’s journey from hope to grief

For Alia Dieye of Senegal, the pain of migration became personal when her younger brother, Mbaye, died while attempting to reach the Canary Islands.

Mbaye, she recalled, was not simply a young man taking a reckless gamble. He was pursuing what he believed was a chance at a better life.

Football was his passion. He dreamed of opportunities beyond the poverty and economic uncertainty around him.

“He was not leaving on a whim,” Dieye said. “For him, football was everything. He wanted a bigger field, a better future and a way out of poverty.”

But the journey ended in tragedy.

The family spent more than a week desperately waiting for news after the boat carrying Mbaye encountered disaster near the Canary Islands.

Eventually, what reached them was an image of a capsized pirogue.

“All we received as an answer was the chilling image of a pirogue capsizing,” Dieye said, recalling the anxiety and unanswered questions that followed.

Grief without an expiration date

More than two years after Mbaye’s death, Dieye said the loss continues to affect her everyday life.

At times, she instinctively reaches for her phone, imagining she might call her brother. A notification or a memory can briefly revive the impossible hope that he might still be alive.

“The memories remain intact in our minds,” she said. “People ask us to forget, but that is impossible.”

Mbaye was not only her brother, she said.

“Mbaye was my little brother, my confidant, my other half.”

She said he sometimes appears in her dreams, giving her brief moments in which it feels as though he is still alive before she wakes to the reality of his absence.

Rather than carry the grief alone, Dieye found strength among other families who had experienced similar losses.

Through networks including the Collective of Victims of Migration in Senegal (COVES) and the CommémorAction movement, she met mothers, fathers, sisters and other relatives mourning loved ones lost along migration routes.

Those gatherings created spaces where families could talk about their experiences, remember their relatives and challenge the tendency to reduce migrant deaths to numbers.

“Being able to talk about my brother and his passion for football with other mothers and sisters who share the same pain helps us transform our enormous grief into collective strength,” she said.

In Senegal, families have organised commemorations, including candlelight gatherings in Dakar, to ensure that those who died or disappeared are remembered by name and story.

‘Every missing person has a family’

The issue was also discussed during a commemoration panel at the World Social Forum focused on missing family members.

Participants spoke about the trauma of families searching for loved ones who disappeared during migration and called for truth, accountability and justice.

“Every missing person has a family, a story and a voice that must not be forgotten,” participants said.

They remembered missing migrants, stood with their families and demanded truth, justice and accountability.

The gathering then observed a minute of silence for missing migrants.

For families like Purity’s and Dieye’s, such moments of remembrance are significant because they affirm that their loved ones have not been forgotten.

But the participants also want commemoration to lead to action.

A crisis that crosses borders

Dieye’s advocacy eventually took her beyond Senegal to Cameroon, where she met families who had experienced similar losses.

The encounters helped her understand that her family’s tragedy was part of a much wider crisis affecting communities across Africa.

Families spoke about poverty, isolation, broken family structures and the pressures that push young people towards dangerous migration routes.

Some parents blamed themselves for being unable to provide better opportunities for their children.

But Dieye and other activists challenged that sense of guilt.

“The parents are not responsible,” she said. “The real problems are closed borders, inequality and the lack of prospects for our young people.”

For the families, the issue is therefore bigger than individual decisions to migrate. They want governments and institutions to examine the conditions that make dangerous journeys appear to young people as their only route towards a dignified future.

‘The ocean must not have the last word’

At the heart of the campaign is a demand that the dead and missing be remembered as people—not statistics.

Dieye argues that poverty, inequality, social pressure and restrictive migration policies have combined to create circumstances in which young Africans are willing to risk their lives on dangerous land and sea routes.

For her, remembering the dead must therefore go hand in hand with confronting the conditions that contributed to their deaths.

At a final commemoration involving families from different countries, national borders appeared to fade as participants united around a shared experience of loss.

Today, Dieye said, her brother’s memory has become part of a broader struggle for justice.

“My brother no longer lives only in our regrets,” she said. “He continues to live through our struggles.”

Alongside families who have lost sons, daughters, brothers and other loved ones, she says she will continue to march, speak and commemorate.

“We will continue to walk, gather and remember,” she said, “so that their memories can light our path and so that the ocean will never have the last word.”

At the World Social Forum in Cotonou, Nigerian return migrants questioned the promise of reintegration, arguing that returning people home without addressing trauma, poverty, stigma and the reasons they left is not the same as helping them rebuild their lives.

For many migration programmes, the story appears simple: a migrant leaves, encounters difficulties, returns home and receives support to start again.

But for Nigerian return migrants who gathered at the World Social Forum in Cotonou in 2026, the reality is far more complicated.

Behind the language of assisted voluntary return and reintegration are stories of detention, coercion, trauma, stigma, inadequate training, failed businesses and a painful question that echoed through the panel discussion:

Reintegration into what?

The participants did not speak as statistics or beneficiaries of migration programmes. They spoke as people who had lived through the migration system and returned to confront many of the same social and economic conditions that had pushed them to leave.

Their central argument was stark: physical return is not reintegration.

And where programmes present packages, training or financial assistance as evidence of successful reintegration while deeper problems remain unresolved, they described the process as a “reintegration façade.”

“I Was Sent on My Way”

For Udo, the failure began almost immediately after returning to Nigeria.

He said he came back in a severely distressed mental state after being held in what he described as a notorious detention centre. What he needed, he said, was medical attention, psychological support and time to recover.

Instead, he was lodged for one night.

The following morning, he was sent on his way.

Two months later, he was recalled for business training and given a small amount of money to start a business he had no prior knowledge of. He was also paired with people he did not know as business partners.

For Udo, the arrangement was almost destined to fail.

The experience, he said, destroyed much of the confidence he had left in the reintegration process.

His story exposes one of the central weaknesses raised at the Forum: support cannot be meaningful if it is disconnected from the person’s actual condition, skills, interests and circumstances.

A returnee who has just emerged from detention and trauma may need counselling before entrepreneurship. Someone without business experience may require sustained training and mentorship rather than a small start-up grant. And someone whose original reasons for migrating remain unchanged may find little reason to believe that returning home has solved anything.

“The push factor of my migration was still evident and untreated,” Ude’s testimony suggested.

That, for him, was the fundamental contradiction.

He had been returned.

But he had not been rebuilt.

When “Voluntary” Does Not Feel Voluntary

For several participants, the problem begins even before reintegration—with the word “voluntary.”

Rhoda questioned whether a return can genuinely be called voluntary when a migrant is detained and returning home appears to be the only available route out.

“If someone is in detention and the only option available to them to leave that situation is to return to their country, can we really say that the return is voluntary?” she asked.

Awe offered an even more personal account.

He described his return from Libya as anything but voluntary, saying he was confronted with conditions in which remaining appeared to mean risking his life.

He recalled being presented with two choices: return to Nigeria or remain in Libya amid violence and insecurity.

“I had to return back instead of staying in Libya to die,” his testimony stated.

For the participants, such experiences challenge the neat language often used to describe return programmes.

A decision made under detention, fear, violence, insecurity or the absence of realistic alternatives may technically be recorded as a return, but the participants argued that the circumstances surrounding that decision matter.

Consent cannot be understood separately from the conditions under which it is given.

The Business Package Is Not the Person

Another major criticism centred on the economic component of reintegration.

The participants questioned a model in which returnees are frequently directed towards small businesses and short vocational courses, as though entrepreneurship were a universal solution to the complex consequences of migration.

Rhoda put the question simply:

Why should entrepreneurship be the answer for everybody?

Some returnees want employment. Others want to return to school. Some want to learn technology, pursue a profession or develop a completely different career.

The problem, she argued, is what happens when programmes are designed for returnees without being designed with them.

Olu made the same point from a broader perspective.

For him, reintegration must empower migrants rather than become a mechanism for discouraging migration.

People with lived experience, he argued, must be involved in shaping migration and reintegration policies.

“Nothing about migrants without the voice of migrants,” was the principle underpinning his intervention.

Ido was particularly critical of the vocational training component of reintegration programmes.

He argued that training lasting only a few days or a few months cannot necessarily produce competent artisans or professionals capable of sustaining themselves in competitive markets.

He cited examples of returnees being trained as tailors, barbers, hairstylists and solar-energy installers within very short periods.

The question is not whether these skills are useful.

It is whether the intervention provides enough time, equipment, mentorship, market access and follow-up for those skills to become sustainable livelihoods.

A sewing machine, barbering kit or business grant may make for an attractive programme statistic.

But a returnee’s survival cannot be measured by the number of items contained in a reintegration package.

The Trauma That Does Not Appear in the Package

Perhaps the most persistent concern raised at Cotonou was the psychological dimension of return.

Immaculate argued that reintegration must recognize the whole person.

A migrant may return carrying trauma from detention, violence, exploitation, disappointment and dangerous journeys. Those experiences do not disappear at the border.

Yet economic support can sometimes dominate reintegration programmes while psychosocial care receives less attention.

The result can be a person who has technically received “reintegration assistance” but remains emotionally and socially unable to rebuild.

Immaculate posed a series of questions that go beyond whether a package has been delivered:

Is the business sustainable?

Does the returnee have access to counselling?

Is the family supportive?

Are there employment opportunities?

Has the community accepted the person?

And what happens when the initial assistance runs out?

These questions point to a different definition of reintegration—one based not on delivery of assistance, but on whether a person’s life is actually improving.

From Survivor to “Success Story”

Ife and Ewa raised another uncomfortable dimension: the way return migrants’ stories can be used by institutions and campaigns.

Ife described a situation in which migrants are invited to recount experiences of trauma, only for those stories to become tools for discouraging others from migrating.

The returnee’s suffering becomes a campaign message.

The migrant’s pain becomes evidence.

The survivor becomes a warning.

But what happens to the person behind the story?

Ife challenged the tendency to portray migrants primarily as helpless victims, arguing that their skills, knowledge, resilience and capacity to create change are frequently overlooked.

The labels can be damaging.

Returnees may be described as victims, greedy, ungrateful, entitled, unruly or insatiable, while their abilities and aspirations disappear behind the label.

The participants called for a shift from the victim narrative towards one that recognizes return migrants as people with agency.

That does not mean denying the trauma they experienced.

It means refusing to allow trauma to become their entire identity.

“They Covered Their Noses”

Ewa’s testimony brought the issue of stigma into sharp focus.

She recalled returning to Nigeria in 2017 and encountering people who presented themselves as humanitarians but responded to survivors with discrimination.

She remembered people covering their noses because they believed survivors smelled.

It was a small gesture, but for her it represented something much larger: the humiliation that can accompany return.

Instead of being welcomed with dignity, survivors can return to judgment.

Some are told they were greedy.

Others are told they should never have travelled.

Some are made to feel that the abuse, exploitation or violence they experienced was ultimately their own fault.

For survivors, such attitudes can compound trauma rather than heal it.

Ewa also recounted experiences in which organizations allegedly took returnees to rehabilitation centres without adequate consent, restricted communication with families and placed people in skills programmes they had not chosen.

She said she had to fight for her own release before she could return to her family.

Her account raises a fundamental principle for reintegration programmes:

Support should never become another form of control.

A System Designed Without the People It Claims to Help?

Ara described reintegration as a mechanism that can be used to control migrants and consolidate power rather than provide the support promised.

Ido went further, arguing that the concept of reintegration can allow European migration policies to distance themselves from the consequences of those policies while responsibility is shifted onto African governments.

His criticism reflects a broader concern expressed during the Forum about externalization—the shifting of migration-control responsibilities beyond Europe’s borders.

For the participants, this creates a troubling sequence.

Movement is restricted.

People become stranded or detained.

They return under difficult circumstances.

They receive limited assistance.

Their stories are then used to discourage other migrants from making similar journeys.

And all of this can be presented as a successful reintegration intervention.

Ife captured the contradiction bluntly:

After restricting people’s freedom of movement and returning them under difficult circumstances, institutions then use their experiences to advance migration-control agendas—and call that reintegration.

Reintegration Must Begin With Listening

The Nigerian participants at the World Social Forum were not simply rejecting support.

They were demanding a different kind of support.

One that begins with listening.

One that recognizes that returnees are not identical.

One that does not assume that everyone wants to become an entrepreneur.

One that provides psychosocial support alongside economic assistance.

One that offers meaningful training rather than short courses designed primarily to tick programme boxes.

One that includes long-term follow-up.

One that respects consent and freedom of choice.

And, above all, one that allows returnees to participate in designing the interventions that are supposed to rebuild their lives.

The participants’ argument is ultimately about accountability.

A reintegration programme should not be judged simply by how many people returned, how many received packages, how many attended training or how many businesses were launched.

The more difficult questions are:

Did the person recover?

Did the business survive?

Did they find meaningful work?

Did their mental health improve?

Did their family and community accept them?

Did they regain control over their lives?

And are the conditions that drove them to migrate still there?

If the answer to these questions is no, then a return may have taken place—but reintegration remains incomplete.

The Question Cotonou Leaves Behind

The debate at the World Social Forum did not end with a rejection of reintegration.

Instead, it demanded that the word itself be taken more seriously.

For Ude, reintegration failed because a traumatized person was given inadequate support and expected to build an unfamiliar business.

For Rhoda, the word “voluntary” deserves scrutiny when people make decisions under detention or extreme pressure.

For Awe, return was a choice made against the backdrop of danger.

For Ido, short vocational training and inadequate economic interventions cannot deliver the independence programmes promise.

For Immaculate, reintegration must extend beyond a package to encompass mental health, family, community, employment and sustainability.

For Olu, migrants with lived experience must have a seat at the table.

For Ife, returnees must not be reduced to stories of suffering that serve other people’s agendas.

For Ewa, dignity must be at the centre of the return experience.

And for Ara, the power dynamics behind reintegration must be confronted.

Together, their testimonies point towards one uncomfortable conclusion:

A person cannot be reintegrated simply because they have been returned.

Reintegration is not a suitcase handed over at the airport.

It is not a cash grant.

It is not a three-month skills course.

It is not a photograph of a returnee receiving equipment.

And it is certainly not a success story written before the returnee has had the chance to rebuild.

True reintegration must mean restoring agency, dignity, opportunity, belonging and hope.

Until those things become central to the process, the question raised in Cotonou will remain difficult to escape:

Reintegration into what?

For many of the Nigerians who attended the just-concluded World Social Forum (WSF) in Cotonou, Benin, the experience was more than an international gathering of activists, civil society organisations, researchers and migration advocates.

It was a moment of questioning.

It was an opportunity to listen to voices from different parts of the world and, perhaps most importantly, to question some of the assumptions they had previously held about migration, migrants and the policies designed to control human mobility.

Across conversations on deportation, border externalisation, criminalisation, trafficking, climate change, reintegration and migrants’ rights, participants encountered a broader understanding of migration — one that placed human dignity and lived experience at the centre.

For some, it was an affirmation of what they already believed. For others, it was an uncomfortable but necessary shift in perspective.

From statistics to people

One of the strongest lessons emerging from the participants’ experiences was that migrants must be understood as human beings rather than statistics, policy subjects or security concerns.

Purity Franca Onikoliase, an advocate working on the rights and well-being of migrants and returnees, described the Forum as a “meaningful and transformative experience.”

She said the discussions helped her understand that migration is not simply about movement from one country to another.

It is also about human rights, dignity, protection, family, livelihoods and social justice.

The Forum, she noted, brought together migrants, returnees, survivors, civil society organisations, advocates and other stakeholders, allowing participants to encounter experiences that are often missing from official statistics and policy documents.

That same principle resonated with Alia Joke Oreoluwa, who returned from Cotonou with a stronger conviction that migrants should not merely be discussed by others.

“Migrants must be involved in designing policies, programmes and solutions that affect their lives,” she said, stressing that solutions should be informed by the real experiences and needs of affected people.

For her, the message was simple: nothing about migrants should happen without migrants.

Rethinking the meaning of “irregular migration”

For some participants, perhaps the most significant impact of the Forum was the challenge it posed to conventional narratives around irregular migration.

Rita Abu came to the Forum with an understanding shaped largely by her work with returning migrants. Her focus had often been on sensitising people about the dangers of irregular migration — trafficking, exploitation, death in the desert or at sea and other risks encountered along migration routes.

She encouraged people to use safer and regular pathways whenever they were available.

But Cotonou prompted a different question.

Why are people taking dangerous routes in the first place?

The question shifted the focus from the migrant’s decision to the conditions surrounding that decision.

Abu said she began to recognise that migration itself is not necessarily the problem. People have always moved in search of work, education, family reunification, safety and better opportunities.

What requires deeper examination, she realised, are the policies and border-control systems that can make migration increasingly difficult and, in some circumstances, more dangerous.

The experience left her with a question that continues to occupy her:

Why has safe migration become so difficult that people are willing to risk their lives to move?

Looking beyond Europe’s definition

Ejike Ezeonyido similarly described the Forum as an opportunity to move beyond what he had previously understood as the dominant European interpretation of migration.

The experience broadened his knowledge of migration and migrants’ rights, exposing him to experts and activists from different parts of the world.

He also encountered a range of migration working groups examining issues including externalisation, criminalisation, deportation, death and disappearance, and climate change and migration.

Perhaps most revealingly, he came to a personal realisation: he had, unknowingly, been promoting what he described as “migration MADE IN EUROPE.”

The Forum, he said, equipped him to participate in migration conversations from different contexts and perspectives.

That shift — from accepting dominant narratives to interrogating them — was echoed by Chylian Ify Azuh.

Azuh said the Forum provided “critical knowledge, transnational connections and solidarity,” while deepening her understanding of the power dynamics surrounding migration.

She encountered perspectives that went beyond familiar discussions of safe and irregular migration, trafficking, return and reintegration.

Conversations around freedom of movement, border externalisation and the criminalisation of migration challenged her previous understanding.

More importantly, she began asking difficult questions about how migration narratives are constructed.

Who and what is responsible for migrants’ vulnerabilities?

Who defines the problem and the solution?

And what are the consequences of those solutions?

For Azuh, the Forum was therefore not simply an educational experience. It became a moment of reflection on her own role in shaping migration narratives and a challenge to become more deliberate about confronting misinformation and what she described as corruption within the migration sector.

When borders move beyond borders

The issue of externalisation emerged repeatedly in participants’ reflections.

Yaramola Blessing arrived at the Forum with a perception that the struggle over migration was largely a confrontation between Europe and Africa — or between white people and Black people.

Cotonou changed that understanding.

She encountered people from different countries, communities and backgrounds who were also organising around migrant rights and justice.

That discovery gave her a sense that the struggle was not isolated to Africa or to individual activists. It was part of a wider global movement.

The discussions also helped her make sense of questions she had carried for years about migration policies, border controls and the European Union’s approach to migration.

Sessions on borders, frontiers and externalisation provided a framework for understanding how migration-control systems operate beyond Europe’s geographical borders and how their effects are felt in African countries.

She also developed a deeper understanding of xenophobia, recognising that hostility towards migrants is not driven solely by individual prejudice but can also be influenced by politics, policy, misinformation and fear.

The result was a stronger sense of purpose.

Blessing said she returned with better knowledge, language and confidence to advocate for migration justice, reintegration and survivors’ rights.

Deportation, return and the question of dignity

The Forum also forced participants to confront the experiences of people who have already made the journey and returned — voluntarily or through deportation.

For Udekwe Kennedy Obinna, one of the most eye-opening aspects of the Forum was learning more about deportation structures in Europe and the role of agencies such as Frontex.

He said the discussions exposed gaps that require greater engagement from civil society organisations and government actors in affected countries.

Such engagement, he argued, is necessary to identify loopholes, support local organisations and increase visibility for the experiences of victims, potential migrants and survivors.

But perhaps the most important lesson for him was the need to challenge the portrayal of deportees and returnees as criminals.

Returnees, he stressed, should not be automatically viewed through the lens of failure, illegality or criminality.

Their dignity and confidence must be restored.

That requires psychosocial support, stronger reintegration programmes and a broader recognition that returning migrants are people whose lives, aspirations and experiences continue beyond the end of a migration journey.

Knowledge, networks and renewed inspiration

Beyond the policy debates and critical conversations, the Forum also created something equally important: relationships.

Aah Esther said she returned with three major gains — knowledge, new networks and inspiration.

Listening to movements from different parts of the world broadened her understanding of how people are fighting for justice and supporting reintegration.

The Forum also introduced her to organisations with which partnerships could potentially be developed.

But the most personal takeaway was the reminder that the work of migration advocates matters.

“Beyond the stereotype of storytelling lies our expertise,” she reflected.

That sense of solidarity was shared by other participants who described meeting activists and organisations that had spent years challenging policies they considered harmful to migrants.

For many, seeing that this work was being undertaken across countries transformed what could otherwise have been an overwhelming struggle into a shared one.

Migration requires regional solutions

Tobi Ayediran brought the conversation back to a fundamental reality: migration does not stop at national borders.

His major lesson from the Forum was that migration cannot be addressed by one country alone.

It is a regional issue requiring cooperation across borders, particularly in West Africa.

Migration is intertwined with unemployment, poverty, insecurity, climate change, trafficking, exploitation and the search for better opportunities. Consequently, responses must go beyond border enforcement and address the circumstances that shape people’s decisions to move.

Ayediran also emphasised the need for safe migration pathways, protection of migrants’ rights, prevention of trafficking and sustainable reintegration for returnees.

At the centre of all these interventions, he said, should be the person.

Behind every migration statistic is a human being with a story, dignity and aspirations.

From Cotonou to action

The most significant outcome of the World Social Forum may ultimately not be what participants learned in Cotonou, but what they do with that knowledge after returning home.

Their reflections reveal a common movement from simply discussing migration to questioning how migration is discussed.

They returned with new language for examining externalisation and border controls. They encountered international networks of solidarity. They were challenged to rethink assumptions about irregular migration, deportation and return. And they were reminded that migrants themselves must have a voice in the policies that shape their lives.

For some, the Forum confirmed existing convictions. For others, it disrupted long-held assumptions.

But across their experiences was a shared realisation: migration is too complex to be reduced to borders, statistics or warnings about dangerous journeys.

It is about people.

People who move in search of opportunity, safety, family and dignity.

People who face risks along the way.

People who are returned and must rebuild their lives.

And people whose voices must be heard when governments and organisations design the policies that determine how, where and under what conditions they can move.

The conversations in Cotonou may have ended, but the questions they generated remain.

If migration is a human reality, can migration policies be truly effective without putting people at their centre?

And if the challenges migrants face cross borders, can the solutions remain confined within them?

For the participants who gathered in Cotonou, the answer appears increasingly clear: migration does not stop at borders, so neither should solidarity, responsibility or the search for justice.