Student returnees and their reflection on contribution to Nepal: use of knowledge and skills

Abstract

While usefully underscoring return migrants’ ability to create and spread knowledge, present developmental perspective risks portraying return migrants as one homogenous group and tends to debate on outcomes while ignoring the process of knowledge use and returnees’ experience. To date, there is little documentation of returnees’ ‘emic’ perspective on what knowledge and skills they gain from the migration cycle, their idea about ‘contribution’, how they use their knowledge and skills upon return, and their experience of use of knowledge and skills after return. Moreover, literatures on Nepal have only focused on socio-economic aspects of labour migration. This study of student returnees and their experience of knowledge use provides a new perspective on the return development nexus. Based on case studies of Nepali student returnees and students studying in UK, Denmark and Sweden the paper shows a general typology of knowledge that is gained in the migration process and presents the idea of contribution from the perspective of the returnees. For them the preceding questions are on whether returnees should be expected to contribute more than others and if so, should they return physically. Lastly, the paper describes the context of returnee students’ and experience of knowledge use in Nepal.

Keywords:

• migration
• student returnees
• knowledge
• motivation
• contribution

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out within the framework of Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South. The authors would like to thank and acknowledge the support of the Swiss Development Agency and the Swiss National Scientific Foundation for their support. Besides this the researchers would like to thank Dr. Susan Thieme, University of Zurich Human Geography group for her insights and very helpful comments on the paper.