Dakar — 'The idea that migration needs to be reduced at all costs is completely misguided.'
Last year, I set out to investigate the on-the-ground impact of the tens of millions of euros the EU has spent trying to address the root causes of migration in Senegal.
The funding for these efforts came from the EU Trust Fund for Africa - a five-billion-euro pot of money launched in 2015. That year, over one million refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe - the vast majority of them Syrians escaping their country's metastasising civil war.
The basic idea of the EUTF was that by using development assistance to address poverty, poor governance, and insecurity - what the EU termed 'the root causes of migration' - the bloc could help reduce the number of people making the irregular journey to Europe.
In Senegal, the EU has spent nearly 164 million euros on these efforts since 2015. Fifty-five percent of that money has gone toward employment-related programmes, including efforts to reduce migration by creating job opportunities in Senegal's agricultural sector. My aim was to explore the outcome of these projects.
I set out to visit farms that had received EU funding and to talk to local and international development actors, beneficiaries, and experts. But I quickly discovered that getting access and information was surprisingly difficult. At each step of the way, I encountered obfuscation, opacity, and at times, downright hostility. Why was it so difficult to report on projects that were ostensibly doing good?
Despite the barriers, I pushed forward, slowly uncovering a mixed and at times troubling picture of the on-the-ground impact of EUTF projects in Senegal. As a central part of the reporting, I managed to organise a trip to visit farms that had received EUTF funding in Senegal's agricultural belt, known as the peanut basin - or so I thought.
The visit was coordinated by Senegal's National Agency for Agricultural Insertion and Development (ANIDA), one of the EUTF's implementing partners. I had been explicit about what I was reporting on and what I wanted to see. But at the end of my investigation, when I reached out to the EUTF for comment, I received the following reply:
"To clarify in the first place, the farm visited by the journalist was not financed via the [EUTF] project".
I stared at my computer in disbelief as I felt the sinking feeling of months of reporting evaporating into thin air. But as I thought about it more, it dawned on me: The frustrating - and at times farcical - experience of trying to track the EUTF's on-the-ground impact spoke volumes about the overall effectiveness of using development funding to tackle the root causes of migration: In the end, it was a fool's mission.
Tackling migration through farming
My interest in the EUTF was sparked in June 2023 when I met a farmer, Ousmane Sambou, in the southern region of Senegal.
Sambou recounted the harrowing journey he took in 2016 through Mali, Niger, and Libya to attempt to reach Europe. After being beaten and robbed in Mali, imprisoned and extorted in Niger, and then robbed at gunpoint when he finally made it to the Libya-Niger border, he opted to turn around and go back to Senegal via a voluntary repatriation programme run by the UN's migration agency, IOM.
Back home, depressed and lost, he got connected with a farming training programme through a EUTF project. He called it "life-changing" and vowed to never migrate again.
His story struck me. Was it really possible to tackle the drivers of migration through farming? I wanted to find out if the approach was scalable and financially viable for the EU, and whether it met the needs of the local communities it aimed to serve.
Back in Senegal's capital, Dakar, I chose two EUTF projects focusing on agriculture to look into. One was managed by ANIDA in partnership with the Italian and Spanish Development Cooperation Agencies and had received 20 million euros from the EUTF. The other was run by the Belgian Development Agency, Enabel, and had a budget of 18 million euros from the EUTF.
I thought getting in touch with Enabel would be an easy place to start, but my attempts were met with silence. When I turned up unannounced at the agency's office in Dakar, the project lead declined to be interviewed. The EUTF, it turned out, was politically sensitive.
Stonewalled by Enabel, I tried my luck with ANIDA, which proved more receptive. Babacar Ndiaye - ANIDA's director of studies, facilities, and infrastructure - promised to show me around some of the 114 farms he said the agency had built with the 20 million euros from the EUTF to stimulate youth employment and - by extension - provide an alternative to migration.
The approach of trying to tackle migration through agricultural development wasn't entirely new, Ndiaye explained. ANIDA was created in 2006 as part of an early iteration of these efforts funded by Spain - a common destination for Senegalese migrants.
"ANIDA was created in the context of stopping illegal migration to Spain," said Ndiaye. "With 10 million euros from the Spanish, ANIDA was born."
When the EUTF entered the picture almost a decade later, it poured more money in and doubled down on the same approach.
Social death
Ndiaye connected me with Mactar Thiam, an ANIDA project coordinator in the peanut basin - Senegal's agricultural heartland that stretches through the centre of the country from west to east.
The region's name is a legacy of colonialism. When the slave trade was outlawed in Senegal in the 19th century, European merchants and French colonial officials looked to peanuts and peanut oil as a way to make up for lost revenue. Vast tracts of land were converted from cultivating traditional subsistence crops to peanut farming.
Paradoxically, Thiam explained, the consequences of this European intervention in Senegalese agriculture - land degradation and an over-dependence on a single crop whose value is linked to volatile global markets - still contribute to increased migration to Europe today.
When I went to visit, Thiam was sitting in his air-conditioned office in the town of Kaolack, about 160 kilometres southwest of Dakar, behind reems of stacked paper. "Here in rural Senegal, people migrate because there aren't good yields from farming," he explained.
The majority of migration in Senegal is from rural areas to cities. Only a fraction of people who leave their homes in search of better opportunities ever venture beyond the country's borders.
Regardless of whether it is internal or international, migration is intrinsically linked to social status, according to Hamidou Dia, an IOM researcher in Senegal. An estimated 16% of Senegal's youth population is unemployed. And not having a job, or having little income, can lead to "social death", Dia said.
Left with few other options, and incentivised by the social status successful migrants are given and the economic benefits they provide to their families, many young people attempt to migrate internationally.
Increasingly, the main route they have been taking is by sea to the Spanish Canary Islands, which requires a treacherous journey of some 1,500 kilometres up the West African coast. The route is so dangerous that it is known as Barsa wala Barsakh in Wolof, Senegal's main language, which means: Barcelona or die trying.
A Spanish NGO estimates that more than 5,000 people died attempting the crossing from Senegal and other West African countries in the first five months of this year.
An unexpected turn
After speaking in his office, Thiam took me to meet Aliou Sene, 35, at his farm about 10 kilometres away.
Sene had returned to Senegal two years ago after spending 10 years in Barcelona, and his farm - or so I was led to believe - had received funding from the EUTF-funded project and was supposed to be a success story.
As we stood in an expanse of scotch bonnet pepper bushes, punctuated by thick-trunked baobab trees, Sene opted to speak in Spanish so the French-speaking Thiam couldn't understand what he was saying.
Instead of being a success story, he told me, the project was in shambles. He'd been waiting for ANIDA to send him money to start a chicken farm, but the money had yet to arrive.
"Every day, they promise me this money," Sene said. "It's been a year and a half, and nothing's coming."
As we said goodbye, Sene told me that his story wasn't an exception. Other farms in the area that were supposed to receive funding from ANIDA were in a similar state of disarray.
Curious to verify his claims, that night, the translator I was travelling with and I went to visit another farm near the village where we were staying that had received funding from ANIDA, according to a large placard in the village.
We found a group of men sitting underneath a cashew tree drinking cafe touba, a herby, sweet coffee. When we asked them about the farm, one of the men called Thiam, who grew angry and cancelled our plans to visit more supposedly EUTF-funded farms the following day.
When we returned to his office to explain that we were merely doing our job as journalists, he was still outraged and insulted that we had attempted to visit the farm without him and refused to provide any further help.
Later, the EUTF informed me that the farms Thiam showed me, including Sene's, had not received their funding. I still don't know whether the error was intentional. Thiam has not responded to multiple attempts to reach out and clarify what happened.
Finally, a success story
Having hit a sudden dead-end with ANIDA, I found myself scrambling to salvage my reporting trip to the peanut basin. I remembered that one of the Enabel projects was located in a town called Toubakouta, 50 kilometres from where we were. My translator and I decided to go try our luck.
Toubakouta is in the Saloum Delta, an area known for its dense mangroves. An official at the town hall directed us to the nearby village of Diermol, where Enabel had implemented an EUTF-funded project.
When we arrived, we met Ismaela Camara, a community leader involved in the project who was more than willing to talk. "It's the best project we've ever seen," Camara said. "The village of Diermol will never forget PARERBA" - the acronym of the Enabel project.
Camara led us to his single-storey house and farm compound, striding through a tall crop of maize. As we sat on plastic chairs in the shade of a mango tree while wandering chickens clucked in the background, he told us about the project.
Camara explained that Enabel had built a well that provides year-round access to water and had helped to set up a local cooperative to share resources, divide farming tasks, facilitate the exchange of best practices, and support experimentation.
For Camara, who in 2019 tried to migrate to Europe via Mauritania, the project was life-changing. He now earns a sustainable living from farming and has gained social status as president of the cooperative. "Now, I don't have time to think about migration, only my crops," he said.
A more complex picture
When I returned to Dakar, I reached out to Enabel again. This time, they agreed to an interview and provided me with the PARERBA project's evaluation reports.
In 37 towns in the peanut basin, the project installed access to water with solar-powered wells and pumps, capable of irrigating 342 hectares of land. Enabel economist Seynabou Kane explained that lack of water was a critical issue facing farmers and driving migration from the peanut basin.
The project created 321 jobs, an EUTF representative told me in response to questions, and benefited over 6,000 people.
But Camara's experience was individual, even according to the project evaluation. The document acknowledged that increased income from successful development projects can actually help facilitate migration. The person benefiting from the project might not migrate themselves, but they can use the money they are earning to finance another family member's migration journey.
The relationship between development and migration is complex - far more so than the EU's rhetoric of addressing root causes lets on.
People migrate for all kinds of reasons, according to Kane. "We travel for many reasons, not only economic, but also to discover new places and meet new people," he said.
The Enabel project evaluation conceded: "Without a much deeper understanding of migration dynamics, it is difficult to clearly state the impacts on migration".
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The EU's own Court of Auditors, the bloc's financial watchdog, recently confirmed this in a special report on the EUTF, stating: "There is still insufficient data to establish whether projects have helped to address the root causes of instability, irregular migration, and displacements."
Development and self-interest
The more I dug into the relationship between development and migration and the impact of the EUTF, the more Enabel's initial hesitancy to speak to me made sense. Beyond its ambiguous - perhaps indiscernible - impact on migration, the EUTF is mired in controversy.
The EU says the root causes approach "fosters stability, peace, and better migration management". But critics say some of the 45% of the EUTF's budget not spent on job creation has gone towards training and equipping security forces that have been accused of committing human rights abuses against refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. They also say that the EU's external migration agenda helps to undermine democracy.
The European Court of Auditors' special report also highlighted that human rights risks were not comprehensively addressed by the EUTF.
Many experts and humanitarian organisations argue that the root causes approach harmfully links already limited - and increasingly dwindling - development funding to the effort to stop migration. In doing so, it detracts from what is supposed to be the main goal of that funding: fighting poverty.
"The idea that migration needs to be reduced at all costs is completely misguided," said Stephanie Pope, EU migration policy advisor at Oxfam International.
Migration has always existed and has significant development benefits, Pope explained. The amount of money sent home by migrants through remittances each year likely outstrips the amount of money spent on global development aid by a factor of at least three.
The approach embodied by the EUTF, however, has now been institutionalised in the EU's approach to foreign aid, according to Pope.
The EUTF will cease operating at the end of 2025, but its mission has been integrated into the EU's new Neighbourhood, Development, and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI) - the bloc's main international fund for external cooperation.
Increasingly, to gain access to development funds from the NDICI or individual member states, countries have to agree to intensify their border security and cooperate with EU efforts to deport people who are undocumented. The word the EU uses for this is "conditionality", but Pope suggests a better word would be coercion.
When I reached out to the EU to ask for their response to these allegations, I received a burner plate response: "Migration is a global phenomenon that must be addressed in cooperation with countries of origin, transit, and destination alike," it said. "The EU can offer more cooperation to countries interested and willing to improve their capacities to better manage migration and forced displacement."
Back in the peanut basin, before our relationship soured, Thiam succinctly summed up the situation in a candid moment. "The European Union only invests for itself, not for Africa," he said.
With reporting support from Ibrahima Sall. Edited by Eric Reidy.
