Can European foreign aid motivate people to stay in Africa?

Danish and European development assistance has to a large extent been focused on preventing irregular migration to Europe the last 10 years. However, one may raise the question as to whether aid can achieve that purpose. Moreover, the official discourse characterising the ambition has been to address the ‘root causes’ of irregular migration which, it appears, are a very broad category of diverse issues.

In this article, DIIS researchers Lars Engberg-Pedersen, Ida Marie Savio Vammen and Hans Lucht take a closer look at what we know about the relationship between development assistance and irregular migration. The article discusses the ‘root causes’ discourse as well as recent research on the drivers of migration before it turns to different attempts to link aid and irregular migration in the literature.

Overall, it is very difficult to document a relationship between development aid and irregular migration as both phenomena cover substantially different activities and situations. However, it can be concluded that to reduce irregular migration to Europe development aid has to address very context-specific drivers as potential migrants consider many different issues when they decide about their future.