Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in northern Benin, the paper examines changing relations between education, migration, and rural livelihoods. Analyzing parental investments and youth return migration, it argues that education has lost its promise of employment and became one option among others.

Paper long abstract

In rapidly transforming rural life-worlds of West Africa, education, aspiration, and migration have historically been closely intertwined. Educational success long depended on young people leaving their villages to pursue schooling elsewhere, often accompanied by hopes of urban integration and access to formal labor markets. This relationship has shifted paradoxically since the turn of the millennium. While the expansion of “education for all” policies led to near-universal school enrollment, the generation that grew up under the Millennium Development Goals now faces increasingly limited opportunities for social mobility.

Based on ethnographic research in northern Benin, this paper examines a striking reversal: the majority of young people who migrated to attend secondary schools now return to their home villages. Contrary to parental aspirations that education would enable an exit from agriculture, rural livelihoods have come to appear more viable than precarious and restricted urban employment. These return mobilities profoundly reshape expectations surrounding education, migration, and the rural future itself. “After education” describes the new configurations in which neither schooling careers nor technical training alone seems to suffice to find one´s living.

The paper explores the moral, economic, and emotional investments parents make in their children’s educational trajectories, as well as the tensions generated by their children’s return to rural life. It argues that education has lost much of its former promise of labor security and has become one option among several strategies for making a living, thereby reconfiguring the meaning of aspiration and success in contemporary rural West Africa.