Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Overseas education is highly prized in the developing world, but can it serve as a catalyst for local development and returnees’ labour integration? Many educational migrants never return to their home countries, fueling fears of “brain drain”, but for those who do return, it is not clear that social and technological skills gained while schooling can be transferred or successfully deployed into the local market. Returning migrants’ success and contribution to local government may be affected by their access to local knowledge or social networks, or it may be undercut by the character of home countries’ labor markets. This research examines the extent to which: (i) labour market bifurcation and government policies influences the deployment of acquired skills by returnees (ii) return migrants school profiles influence their selection into the labour market. iii) kinship and social networks influence the reintegration of return migrants into Nigeria’s labour market. The research team will partner with Nigeria’s Ministry of Diaspora and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to identify informants, access work histories, administrative data, and to help implement experimental research. The research will involve a field experiment that would vary returnees’ exposure to information and provide them with networks and mentorship in their home country. The idea is that mentoring and integration into peer networks will allow returning educational migrants access to social capital and cultural knowledge they need to be successful. There will be a survey and two experimental researches which include a Blind CV Experiment and then another experiment will deliver informational interventions assigned to a random group which are the kinship and social networks of return migrants such as member of their close families, work-groups and religious groups (treatment group). Interventions will focus on compelling these networks to provide migrants with information that improves their cultural capital and embeddedness driven through a mentorship program. A post-intervention survey will establish plausible factors on returnees’ cultural capital that shapes the reproduction of cultural capital essential for market impact