As migrant receiving countries increasingly focus on ‘return and reintegration’ as a cornerstone of their migration management practices, much more evidence is needed to understand how sustainable such practices are, as well as the impact they have on migrants. This includes a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by migrants during return journeys, their needs and challenges after return, their longer-term rights and prospects, as well as their consideration of remigration and future plans. Exploring these return dynamics is crucial to understand the impact of current return practices and to design more effective, rights-based, and sustainable return and reintegration programmes and policies into the future.

Between February and May 2023, the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC) conducted 616 survey interviews with migrants who returned to Senegal about their experience of return, their needs and reintegration challenges, as well as their re-migration intentions. This paper comes out of the “Strengthening the evidence base on return dynamics” project, funded by the Return and Reintegration Facility (RRF), and is based on a pilot study of returns to Senegal.