This article is co-authored by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Sierra Leone and Craving 4 Development (C4D) as part of a shared learning process informed by operational delivery, systems experimentation, and field-based evidence. As we align with the 2026 global theme, “The Power of Youth in Co-Creating Education,” this reflection brings together institutional mandate, policy engagement, and grassroots implementation experience to contribute to broader conversations on the future of market-driven skills building, reintegration, and youth-centered development models.
As the global community celebrates the International Day of Education under the theme, “The Power of Youth in Co-Creating Education”, this reflection comes at a critical moment. Through its return and reintegration programming, IOM has recognized that business development training alone is insufficient to produce sustainable outcomes. What has emerged instead is a clear lesson: co-creation within market-driven skills building ecosystems is foundational.
The experience of migrant returnees in Sierra Leone demonstrates that young people are not passive beneficiaries of training, but active agents capable of shaping learning pathways that reflect real labour markets, lived realities, and cultural contexts. When youth are engaged as co-designers rather than recipients, education becomes more adaptive, more relevant, and more likely to translate into dignified livelihoods, enterprise creation, and long-term economic participation.
Across Africa and beyond, migration is often framed through lenses of movement, return, or risk. Yet on the ground, migration is most often a livelihood response, a rational reaction to constrained economic opportunity, skills mismatches, and limited pathways to dignified work. Lack of access to education, particularly lack of access to technical and vocational skills, sits at the heart of this reality.
From Return to Reintegration: What Education Must Address
Between 2024 and 2025, Craving 4 Development (C4D), in partnership with IOM, supported the reintegration journey of 800 migrant returnees in Sierra Leone, including 300 in 2024and 500 in 2025. This experience represents the largest single implementation of enterprise-focused reintegration training in the country over this period.
What emerged consistently was a critical insight:
Returnees often come back carrying:
● Interrupted education pathways
● Skills that are informal, unrecognized, or mismatched to local markets
● Psychosocial stress linked to loss, stigma, and economic precarity
● A need not only for income, but for dignity, identity, and belonging
Education, in this context, cannot be reduced to classroom instruction or short courses. It must respond to real market demand, support psychosocial recovery, and connect skills to livelihood pathways that can endure.
At a deeper level, the collaboration between IOM and Craving 4 Development illustrates the value created when institutional scale meets ecosystem intelligence. IOM brings the mandate, reach, and policy interface required to operate at national, regional & global scale, while C4D contributes deep ecosystem grounding, enterprise logic, and trusted relationships within communities and markets. Together, this partnership enables a dynamic feedback loop between policy, practice, and evidence,where global frameworks are tested against lived realities, operational insights inform program adaptation, and community-level outcomes feed back into institutional learning. This convergence establishes Market-driven skills building and reintegration beyond program delivery toward a model of continuous, system-level learning.
Market-driven skills building: Education as Economic Infrastructure
Market-driven skills building plays a critical role in reintegration precisely because it operates at the intersection of skills, productivity, and employability. However, the two institutions’ joint experience highlights that Market-driven skills building is most effective when embedded within a broader livelihood system, rather than delivered as a stand-alone solution.
In practice, this means:
● Linking skills development to enterprise structuring, not necessarily employment
● Anchoring training in local value chains with clear market access
● Pairing technical skills with financial literacy, mindset shifts, and business ethics
● Recognizing informal skills and supporting pathways to formalization
By anchoring skills development in trauma awareness and enterprise thinking, interventions can shift reintegration training from a technical exercise to a systems response. Skills that are based on economic relevance, through entrepreneurship, community-based initiatives, or sector-specific value chains, reinforce the idea that sustainable reintegration depends on markets that have space for the skills being developed and that market analysis prior to the development of skills building programs is essential.
Education, Psychosocial Recovery, and Dignity
A critical but often understated dimension of reintegration is the psychosocial journey of returnees. Education, when designed appropriately, can serve as a stabilizing force, restoring confidence, rebuilding agency, and creating a sense of forward momentum.
Increasingly, evidence and practice converge around a simple insight: training alone is insufficient. Sustainable reintegration requires approaches that engage the whole person, addressing psychosocial wellbeing, identity, and social connection alongside technical competencies. When education is embedded within ecosystems of care, peer learning, and dignity-affirming spaces, it becomes a catalyst not just for employment, but for renewed agency.
This approach recognizes that skills building alone is insufficient if individuals remain trapped in cycles of fear, stigma, or hopelessness. Technical education becomes transformative when it restores a person’s belief in their capacity to contribute meaningfully to society. Such models recognize that economic participation is not a mere function of skills, but of confidence, belonging, and the ability to imagine a future beyond displacement.
Learning from Scale: Evidence from 800 Returnees
Working at scale has provided critical evidence that can inform policy and practice:
● Skills gaps are rarely technical alone, they are structural and systemic
● Market-driven skills building must be adaptable to informal and semi-formal economies
● The outcomes of skills building improve when linked to markets, capital, and mentorship
● Continuous engagement with returnees enables better data, learning, and impact
These insights reinforce the importance of education systems that are responsive, inclusive, and connected to economic reality, particularly in migration-affected contexts.
During the scope of the collaboration, what surprised us most was not the absence of skills among returnees, but how often those skills had existed before migration. Many individuals had been engaged in trades, services, or informal economic activities prior to leaving their countries, and expressed a strong desire to reconnect with what they once knew, carpentry, tailoring, agribusiness, and small trading. A recurring dilemma emerged: returnees were willing to engage in work, but uncertain how to translate past experience into viable livelihoods within changed local markets. One pattern became impossible to ignore: when skills development enabled people to reclaim and update pre-existing capabilities, and when this was coupled with basic business development, market orientation, and confidence rebuilding, trajectories shifted. Skills alone restored competence; skills paired with enterprise thinking restored direction. In several cases, this combination marked the difference between prolonged dependency and renewed economic agency.
Great examples illustrate this shift. Young returnees trained under the programme showcase the relevance and timeliness of this approach.
Tailoring Enterprise Formalization
One returnee with prior informal tailoring experience transitioned from post-return instability to business formalization through enterprise orientation and supplier linkages, stabilizing his income and creating long lasting job opportunities for his community members within months.
Structured Food Micro-Enterprise
A female food vendor improved income stability and nearly doubled daily earnings after adopting standardized pricing, hygiene practices, record-keeping, and WhatsApp-based pre-order systems, transforming informal trading into a structured micro-enterprise that responds to the needs of the markets.
Mobile Repair Business Expansion
A phone repair technician formalized operations, established a permanent service point, diversified into accessory sales, and adopted savings practices, resulting in improved income consistency and business scalability.
Looking Ahead: Education as a Pillar of Migration Governance
As global discussions on migration increasingly emphasize sustainability, resilience, and inclusion, education, especially skills-based education, must be understood as economic infrastructure.
Partnerships such as that between IOM and Craving 4 Development underscore a growing recognition that education must be embedded within broader economic and social systems. Education models that link skills to livelihoods, markets, and community resilience can help reduce precarity and support safer, more sustainable migration outcomes.
On the International Day of Education, these insights remind us that education’s true value lies not only in learning outcomes, but in its power to expand opportunity, restore dignity, and contribute to inclusive growth.
