Reintegration good practices #2 - Skills and employability enhancement in Burkina Faso

In preparation for the national Independence Day, the Government of Burkina Faso invests massively in public works and civil engineering. Every year, in a different region, many construction projects are launched, including housing construction, road upgrading, etc. These projects offer excellent job opportunities for many Burkinabè returnees who were employed in construction works during their migration journey (mainly in Algeria and Libya).

Based on these opportunities, COFEC (Cercle d’orientation et de formation Emergency Consult), a vocational training consulting firm, applied for a tender issued by IOM to select organizations that could contribute to the implementation of reintegration assistance activities. This proposal, which aimed to train 40 individuals on masonry skills, caught IOM’s attention as vocational training was part of the local development dynamics building on the opportunities created through state investments.

In a bid to maximize the impact of the vocational training and ensure better reintegration, business management and literacy trainings were also provided to beneficiaries who could neither read nor write.

To better set this training within the local context, the community, including prospective migrants, was engaged with the support of the Ministry of Social Action. Thus, local community members participated in the training and were reunited with returnees who were sometimes disconnected from the local realities after many years of migration, stigmatized or isolated. This contributed to the psychosocial reintegration of returnees.

The immediate post-training results indicated that 82% of the trained beneficiaries found employment almost immediately after the end of the training, either in an established company or in their own company jointly created with other beneficiaries.