Migration policies across Africa continue to be designed around assumptions about why people move, how they move, and what would stop them. These assumptions rarely reflect the lived experiences of migrants themselves, and this disconnect has a real consequence for policies that will miss their mark including protections that fail to protect the migrants. This presentation argues that placing migrant voices and experiences at the centre of policy design, implementation, and reform is not a matter of preference but of necessity. When policies are built without meaningfully engaging the people they target, they have a high chance of experience systematic challenges.
Through AMADPOC’s contribution to the DYNAMIG project (2023–2025), we conducted in-depth interviews with over 150 aspiring and actual Kenyan migrants, complemented by digital diaries, social media analysis, and choice experiments. What emerged was a picture of decision-making far more complex than prevailing policy frameworks acknowledge shaped by layered calculations around income, risk, gender dynamics, social norms, and information accessed through informal networks rather than official channels.
The research revealed structural gaps between how policymakers perceive migrant behaviour and how migrants describe their own experiences. Drawing from my work with governments, Regional Economic Communities, and the African Union, I have observed repeatedly how institutional assumptions about why people migrate, what deters them, and what protections they need differ from migrants lived experiences. Addressing this gap is an academic exercise and precondition for effective policy reform.
Evidence alone does not change policy, and my presentation argues for institutional commitments to centring migrant voices and experiences through sustained, structured engagement between researchers, policymakers, and migrant communities. Only when the people most affected by migration policy have a genuine role in sharing it can governance frameworks move from assumption to accountability.
About the Speaker
Linda Adhiambo Oucho is the Executive Director of the African Migration and Development Policy Centre (AMADPOC) in Nairobi and a Part-time Professor at the Migration Policy Centre, the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. With a PhD in Ethnic Relations from University of Warwick focusing on African women’s migration agency, her research spans migration governance, labour migration, regional integration, free movement in Africa, irregular migration and forced displacement. She collaborates with organizations like IOM, IDRC, and GIZ, working closely with African governments and the African Union Commission, international agencies and academic institutions to develop evidence-based migration policy solutions. She has supported the Governments of Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mauritius to develop migration policies informed by evidence. As well as led migration profiling exercises for the Government of Seychelles.
This seminar is co-hosted by the MiFOOD Network, the International Migration Research Centre (IMRC), and the Africa Forum.
 
