Travel and personal growth: the value of visits to the country of origin for transnational migrant youth

ABSTRACT

Migrant-background youth travel often to their or their parents’ country of origin, yet little is known about how such trips affect their personal growth. These trips have either been ignored or analysed through concepts of belonging or identity. By contrast, studies on international education and travel and tourism, which commonly focus on youth without migration background, highlight positive personal impacts of experiences abroad. This paper applies a personal growth lens to analyse how visits to the origin country impact Ghanaian-background youth living in Belgium. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Belgium and Ghana with 25 young people, we show how such trips stimulate self-confidence and aspirations. Self-confidence is strengthened through favourable treatment and access to luxurious spaces that make youth feel special. Young people develop educational and career aspirations after comparing opportunity structures they face in Belgium with their experiences in Ghana and engaging with Ghanaian role models.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational youth mobility
• personal growth
• self-confidence
• aspirations
• Ghana
• Belgium

Introduction

A growing number of young people in the Global North have a migrant background, and many engage in travel to the country of their birth or the country their parents came from. But how do such trips to the country of origin affect young people’s personal growth? These trips are commonly seen by schools as problematic for the educational progression of young people with a migration background. They are considered to interrupt educational continuity, complicate language acquisition or negatively affect emotional well-being (van Geel 2019). However, little is known about the actual effects of travel to the country of origin. This is because the mobility of migrant youth has been under-researched. Scholars in migration studies tend to focus on integration into the country of residence and to ignore ties to the origin country (Erdal et al. 2016). The categories of ‘first-generation’ and ‘second-generation’ suggest that it is the one-off international move that matters, either young people’s or their parents’ (Mazzucato 2015). Such conceptualisations conceal the highly diverse mobility trajectories that young people with migration background have (Cheung Judge, Blazek, and Esson 2020; Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar 2018; van Geel and Mazzucato 2018) and the personal growth experiences these might facilitate (but see Hoechner 2020; van Geel and Mazzucato 2021).

By contrast, research on international education and on travel and tourism analyses trips abroad through what we call a ‘personal growth lens’. Researchers find that periods spent abroad help young people become better in a personally meaningful way, commonly defined as personal growth (Vittersø 2014). Authors using a personal growth lens typically focus on aspects of individual development, such as self-confidence, independence, adaptability, and the transformation of aspirations (Alexander, Bakir, and Wickens 2010; Tran and Vu 2018). These characteristics, in turn, lead to increased motivation and better academic achievement (Nash 2002; Huang 2011). But despite the potential of travel to facilitate personal growth, research has almost exclusively focused on youth without migration background.

These separate yet related bodies of literature, the former based in migration studies and the latter in tourism and international student mobility, reflect a dichotomy in the way that the mobility of youth with and without migration background is analysed. This paper questions this dichotomy. It applies a personal growth lens to investigate the trips that Belgium-based young people of Ghanaian background make to Ghana. Although a personal growth lens is used in studies that foreground the individual, we explore the resources that young people gain during trips by paying special attention to the specific context in Ghana where personal growth happens. Such resources gained in Ghana can be useful for young people’s lives and education in Belgium. We present data from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 25 young people who were born in various countries to Ghanaian parents and are currently residing in Belgium, using a multi-sited methodology which involved following their daily lives in Belgium as well as accompanying a sub-set on trips to Ghana. While literature on the mobility of migrant youth often speaks of ‘return visits’ to a ‘homeland’, ‘home country’ or ‘home’, we refer instead to ‘visits’, ‘trips’ or ‘travel’ to the ‘country of origin’, be it theirs or their parents’. We do so because migrant youth do not necessarily consider their visits a return, especially those visiting for the first time, nor is the country of origin always perceived as a home.

Below we review research in migration studies on visits to the country of origin, identifying a lack of concern with the personal growth consequences of travel for migrant youth, and then turn to literature on the mobility of young people without migration background to elaborate on the personal growth lens. We describe our methods and sample, before analysing data on two opportunities for personal growth that visits to the origin country provide: self-confidence and stimulation for future aspirations. The conclusion addresses implications for research and practice in relation to youth mobility.

Personal growth through travel: different analytical approaches to youth mobility

Almost half of migrant youth in European secondary schools visit the country of origin at least annually (Schimmer and Van Tubergen 2014). Yet these visits remain under-researched because research on immigrant youth is mainly conducted in the country of residence and predominantly interested in issues of integration. As such, it is characterised by ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), often neglecting transnational ties and mobility (Erdal et al. 2016; van Geel and Mazzucato 2018). In education, discourses on migrant youth are usually marked by ‘deficit thinking’ whereby students are conceptualised as lacking the normative cultural knowledge and skills to succeed (Clycq, Nouwen, and Vandenbroucke 2014). Notions of underachievement and failure, reinforced by teachers’ stereotypes and expectations, further negatively impact migrant youth’s education and career aspirations (Nouwen and Clycq 2019). Travel, in this context, is seen as coming at the expense of academic success (Lightman 2018) rather than as contributing to young people’s personal and educational growth. As van Geel (2019) shows, educational professionals frame travel and transnational mobility as emotionally and academically disruptive.

Literature exploring the transnational mobility of migrant youth is recent. Second-generation young people maintain connections to the country of origin as they grow up through regular phone calls, emails and visits (Levitt 2009; Reynolds and Zontini 2016; Somerville 2008). Return trips can be a parental strategy to revive or maintain family relationships and to instal cultural pride (Clycq 2015; Gardner and Mand 2012; van Geel and Mazzucato 2021; Zontini and Reynolds 2018). Most of the literature investigating travel to origin focuses on how trips shape young people’s sense of belonging to and identification with a particular nation or ethnic group, emphasising the difficulties that arise because of young people’s mobility. Scholars find that returning to the country of origin can result in disillusionment or a sense of lost roots (King, Christou, and Ahrens 2011; Wessendorf 2007), and often focus on where migrant youth feel they belong (Vathi and King 2011). Yet focusing only on ambiguities in young people’s sense of belonging and identity leaves unexplored the personal impacts of country-of-origin trips.

A small but growing number of studies focus on the opportunities young people enjoy or the personal benefits they gain from trips to the country of origin. Van Geel and Mazzucato (2021) show how such trips can increase educational resilience through (re)connecting to motivational others and facilitating comparison and meaning-making that help Ghanaian youth to overcome educational adversity in the country of residence. Hoechner (2020) finds that stays in Senegal equip young people with confidence and a sense of purpose that help them deal with the challenges of living in the United States as part of a racial and religious minority. Recent scholarship identifies travel to the origin country as providing young people access to luxurious spaces and higher status than in their country of residence (Gardner and Mand 2012; Wagner 2019). More generally, scholars are theorising how migrants’ experience of social class is related to geographical location (Coe and Pauli 2020).

This paper zooms in on visits to the country of origin by young people of migrant background and explores how their experiences create opportunities for personal growth. It contributes to a burgeoning literature by foregrounding youth mobility trajectories, a term that refers to young people’s moves in time and space, the concomitant family constellations, and what transpires during their mobility (Mazzucato 2015). In exploring the impact of mobility on personal growth, we respond to a call by Arnot, Schneider, and Welply (2013) to consider the complexity of migration and mobility and the resulting consequences for education. To do so, we draw on research on the mobility of youth without migration background.

In the literature on international student mobility (ISM), mobility is perceived as an educational strategy students use to accumulate different forms of capital and to gain a competitive advantage. Authors often draw on Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1990) to show that ISM can bring material and symbolic benefits, including foreign language competencies and diplomas from prestigious universities (Findlay et al. 2012; Waters 2012). The ISM literature has parallels with travel and tourism studies on the opportunities for personal growth that travel offers both tourists and international students (e.g. Qing, Schweisfurth, and Day 2009). Studies find that personal growth can occur irrespective of the reasons for travel (Falk et al. 2012) and that both long and short trips can bring significant personal change (Alexander, Bakir, and Wickens 2010; Dwyer 2004).

Much personal growth associated with international education happens outside the classroom (Stone and Petrick 2013). Research on primary and secondary school children of higher socioeconomic background who spend significant parts of their youth outside of their parents’ culture, so-called ‘third culture kids’ (Pollock, Van Reken, and Pollock 2017), shows that cross-cultural interactions offer a wealth of learning opportunities. Contextual and bodily experiences are thus prerequisites for personal growth, which highlights the value of physically being abroad.

A key aspect of personal growth is developing self-confidence. Both ISM and travel and tourism research have shown that experiences abroad increase self-confidence in students (Bachner and Zeutschel 2009; Gmelch 1997; Trower and Lehmann 2017), tourists (Alexander, Bakir, and Wickens 2010), and young people taking a gap year (Kerr and Myers 2003; O’Shea 2014). In an educational context, self-confidence is generally understood as a capacity that is valued and part of a ‘scholarly habitus’ (Watkins and Noble 2013). Education research has identified the way positive social interactions, encouragement and constructive feedback boost self-confidence (Agirdag, Van Houtte, and Van Avermaet 2012; Guan and Ploner 2020), and several studies recommend that school curricula focus on improving students’ self-confidence to improve their educational success (Huang 2011; Norman and Hyland 2003).

Periods spent abroad also shape young people’s aspirations (O’Shea 2014; Tran and Vu 2018). Drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and capital (Bourdieu 1990), Tran and Vu (2018) explain how mobility programmes that allow Australian students to spend time in Asia can transform their aspirations for educational, personal and professional development. Aspirations shape young people’s choices and out-of-school transitions (Archer, Hollingworth, and Mendick 2010), and mobility facilitates self-discovery and new ‘life possibles’ (Tran and Vu 2018). The new aspirations students develop abroad can have significant impact on their lives, with potential long-term implications for personal and professional life (Brown 2009). Periods abroad help young people become more appreciative of educational opportunities and more enthusiastic about educational or career pathways (O’Shea 2014).

In this article, we adopt a personal growth lens used in ISM and travel and tourism research, yet with two important additions. First, a personal growth lens is normally applied to research on the mobility of relatively privileged young people without a migration background (but see Engel and Gibson 2020). We use this lens to study young people with a migration background to explore what additional insights can be gained by departing from the ethnic identity and belonging lens that is commonly used in research on country-of-origin visits of migrant youth. Second, while the personal growth lens foregrounds the individual, we examine context-specific experiences in both country of residence and origin. This means acknowledging the particularity of country-of-origin visits, and the personal and emotional attachments migrant youth have to the country. We highlight young people’s embodied experiences in Ghana and the social and built environment in which they take place, and contrast these with their experiences in Belgium. In doing so, we uncover mechanisms through which self-confidence increases during such trips. We explore how aspirations are contextually produced, shaped by young people’s embodied practices, and informed by the social contacts they have access to (Huijsmans, Ansell, and Froerer 2021; Archer, Hollingworth, and Mendick 2010).

To summarise, an emphasis on personal growth allows us to investigate aspects of country-of-origin visits that are not usually addressed in the literature on migrant youth. Further, although we focus on migrant youth, our work aims to make a theoretical and methodological contribution at the intersection of ISM, tourism and migration studies by focusing on the multi-local embeddedness of mobile youth.

A multi-sited, multi-method research design to study embodied travel experiences

This study is part of the Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives (MO-TRAYL) project, which investigates the effects of transnational mobility on Ghanaian-background youth in cities in Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, and Ghana, and is led by the second author (Mazzucato 2015). This article relates to the Belgian case study in the greater Antwerp area for which the first author conducted fieldwork.

Antwerp is home to the biggest Ghanaian community in Belgium. With 3,977 people, Ghanaians are the biggest migrant group from Sub-Saharan Africa in a highly diverse city, where almost half of the population and three quarter of its youth have a migration background (Stad in Cijfers 2021). The size of the Ghanaian community is likely an underestimation due to the number of undocumented migrants in Belgium. According to the Antwerp integration centre, as many as half of Sub-Saharan African migrants might be undocumented in the city (Minderhedencentrum de8 2009). Today, most Ghanaians enter Belgium through family reunification (Heyse et al. 2007), which is reflected in our sample.

The sample consisted of 25 young people (12 male/13 female) aged 14–25 at the beginning of fieldwork. Participants were recruited through Ghanaian churches, African youth associations, schools, and snowball sampling. Selection criteria included (1) having a Ghanaian background, meaning both parents were born in Ghana, irrespective of the participant’s birth place (20 were born in Ghana, 4 in Belgium, and one in the Netherlands); (2) having made at least one international move to or from Ghana in their lives, including migration and/or short visits; and (3) having attended secondary school in Belgium. Participants born in Ghana migrated to Belgium through family reunification, typically aged 14–17 but four young people entered the country earlier aged 7–11. Most Ghana-born participants had spent numerous years in Belgium (4–15 years), four participants less than a year.

While considering accounts of all 25 participants and some key informants in the Ghanaian community in Antwerp, the paper mainly draws on the experiences of those nine participants (three male, six female) who went on at least one visit to Ghana. Four were born in Ghana, four in Belgium and one in the Netherlands, and they made between one and five trips to Ghana throughout their lives, ranging in length from a single week to six months. Visits were made primarily to see family and friends, but sometimes included touristic activities and vocational training. Most participants lived on the outskirts of Antwerp, and belonged to the working class in Belgium. Their parents were predominantly employed in low-skilled professions in the industrial, agricultural or service sector. In Ghana, parents’ backgrounds ranged from not having obtained secondary school diplomas and working blue-collar jobs, to having completed tertiary education. Yet education was highly valued among all participants and parents we spoke to. Young people faced various challenges and educational inequalities in Belgium: they were overrepresented in lower-status vocational and technical tracks, experienced – usually downward – school and track mobility, and often felt like outsiders (see also Van Caudenberg, Clycq, and Timmerman 2020). Further, there is a lack of Ghanaian- or African-background role models in high positions in Belgium that young people can look up to. Only 1% of Flemish teachers had a migrant background in 2014, compared to 15–20% of the students in Flanders (Consuegra et al. 2016) and at least 66% of students in Antwerp (Stad in Cijfers).

Data were collected by the first author during 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between January 2018 and February 2020. Most fieldwork was conducted in Antwerp, yet the first author also accompanied three young women on trips to Ghana (6 weeks in total) to gain insights into their embodied experiences through participant observation and her own corporeal sensations. Spending time with participants in Ghana allowed her to experience the sounds, smells and atmosphere in Ghana, and attuned her to noticing young people’s emotions, fleeting encounters and reactions to the environment. She stayed between four and 16 days and accompanied the women during leisure activities, family visits or visits to the neighbourhoods where they grew up. These trips were followed up with interviews in Belgium. Interviews were conducted in Dutch or English and included photo-elicitation methods and walking interviews. In addition to interviews, fieldwork in Belgium consisted of informal conversations and participant-observation in various spaces, including church settings, schools, participants’ homes and parties. The first author attended cultural events, such as performances, exhibitions and film screenings organised by young people of African background, and information events on topics such as racial profiling or diversity in the Belgian education system, which provided insights into some of the challenges young people faced. Mapping tools were filled in together with participants to identify their mobility and educational trajectories. The information was used to visualise young people’s moves in time and space, the resulting family constellations, and the schools they attended. Whenever possible, these maps were cross-checked with participants for accuracy or used to elicit more about people’s mobility and educational experiences (Mazzucato et al. 2022).

Data analysis occurred in stages, using both inductive and deductive coding. In the field, we noticed the personal growth impact of visits to Ghana. Upon return, we consulted ISM and tourism literature for discussions of travel-induced personal growth. Thematic analysis identified patterns within the data. This was done by reading and re-reading fieldnotes and subsequently generating, reviewing and defining themes (Boyatzis 1998). Conceptualisations of personal growth from the literature on student and tourist mobility helped us to generate the codes used in analysis. Data were coded with Nvivo. All names used are pseudonyms.

Mobility as an opportunity for personal growth

In this section, we analyse the personal growth experiences of Ghanaian-background youth during visits to the country of origin, focusing on (1) developing self-confidence, and (2) acquiring new education and career aspirations. In explaining mechanisms for how these personal growth benefits arise, we highlight the experiences, relationships and contexts young people encountered during trips to Ghana and contrast these with their lives in Belgium. The complex mosaic of experiences young people have in different contexts challenges simplistic views of migrant youth as belonging (n)either to a country of residence or origin. Our analysis rather shows young people’s agency in comparing, evaluating and benefitting from different aspects in the respective countries.

Self-confidence

They [people in Ghana] give you the feeling like, ‘you are the future’, ‘you can be someone if you want it’. – Desmond (19, born in Belgium, three visits to Ghana)

Growing up as young people of migrant background in Belgium entailed various challenges for the participants in this research, such as feeling like the ‘odd one out’, being confronted with racial stereotypes, or facing direct discrimination, also in educational settings. Those few participants who attended academic – instead of technical or vocational – tracks, were usually the only African-background children in class. Stereotypical views of ‘Africa’ prevailed in the media and surfaced through ‘ignorant’ questions by Belgian classmates. While many young people mentioned teachers who had been supportive in their educational trajectory, we found that especially participants in vocational tracks were stigmatised by their teachers as being academically incapable or unmotivated (cf. Clycq, Nouwen, and Vandenbroucke 2014). Esther (18), who was born in Belgium and made four trips to Ghana, was advised after the orientation year to follow vocational education despite her excellent grades. Pursuing her academic aspirations meant she had to be confident in her skills, go against her teacher’s advice and change her school as a consequence, but it enabled Esther to obtain her secondary school diploma in the academic track in 2019. Such experiences show the importance of self-confidence in school settings. Trips to Ghana allowed young people to gain self-confidence through two mechanisms: respectful and encouraging treatment, and access to luxurious spaces.

Visits to Ghana provided a break from sometimes harsh Belgian realities. One key informant, Lucy (aged 30), had to deal with anti-immigrant sentiments throughout her childhood and saw trips to Ghana as reminders of her own value: ‘I need to go back [to Ghana] once in a while, just to remember my self-worth.’ Nana (27) was born in Ghana and travelled there twice since she moved to Belgium aged 11. She emphasised that being in Ghana was like taking ‘a vacation from the world’, which allowed her to disconnect from everyday life in Belgium. Whenever she witnessed racism in Belgium, Nana sought to learn about it because ‘it’s part of you’. By contrast, Nana did not experience racism in Ghana. This put her visibly at ease, as we observed in her interactions with friends, family and strangers while accompanying her on one of her trips. Her ease could be observed in small, everyday gestures and conversations, such as when we went to a restaurant and the waitress spent time joking around at our table. Nana was laughing and explained that this was one of the ‘small things’ in Ghana: ‘No one is taking time for you in Belgium.’ Participants felt recognised and respected in Ghana.

Desmond (19), whose quote opens this section, also emphasised how favourable treatment in Ghana shaped his self-confidence. He was born in Belgium, where he still lives together with his parents and five siblings, and went to Ghana three times for summer holidays with his family. His favourite trip was the family’s third to Ghana when he was 14. As a Ghanaian from abroad, he received special treatment. People were polite, friendly and gave him access to spaces he seldom had access to in Belgium, due to age or skin colour: ‘Tourists are kings in Ghana. So if they see that you’re not from there, well, their mindset is like “okay that’s a tourist, we can let him in [at a nightclub]”. And they did not ask for my ID.’

The highlight of Desmond’s trip to Ghana was training for five weeks in a prestigious football academy that was run by an ex-World Cup champion of Ghanaian background who had moved back to Ghana from France. Desmond described the atmosphere as distinctly different from Belgium. He felt taken seriously by his coach and fellow players. Encouragement and constructive feedback helped increase his self-confidence (cf. Agirdag, Van Houtte, and Van Avermaet 2012; Guan and Ploner 2020): ‘They really see a future [in you] and they give [you] a push’. In Belgium, he had often been substituted during matches without explanation, which, he said, had consequences: ‘Footballers live off their self-confidence. But then you lose your self-confidence. And if you don’t have self-confidence, you cannot achieve anything. You just can’t.’ His Belgian coaches expected too much and put him under pressure. Desmond wanted to change football club and planned to train again in the academy in Ghana because he felt ‘comfortable’ there and it brought out the best in him. ‘When I come back, I am really strong and confident. My mistake was actually that I did this only once, training five weeks intensively in Ghana, even though I know it can effectively improve me.’

Being in Ghana was also an opportunity for young people to strengthen relationships with supportive family members. Esther was born in Belgium but because most of her family lives in Ghana, her mother took her to Ghana four times during her childhood. Esther enjoyed the ‘relaxed atmosphere’ with family, and used WhatsApp to stay in touch with them while in Belgium. Especially important was her mother’s ‘insightful’ and ‘sympathetic’ niece because her advice and encouragement – also on school related issues – made Esther feel confident in herself.

Participants further emphasised the built environment in Ghana and its role in making them feel special, the second mechanisms we identified for building self-confidence. Trips to Ghana involved leisure activities in luxurious spaces, in stark contrast to days in Belgium filled with school and homework, student or vacation jobs, and church activities. While participants dressed up for church on Sundays and big events such as weddings and birthday parties, these events usually took place in warehouses or community centres or on the industrial outskirts of Antwerp. In Ghana, they had access to 5-star hotels and nightclubs attended by middle to upper class customers, venues that often felt inaccessible in Belgium. Desmond described the football grounds in detail to show that he was taken seriously in Ghana: artificial lawn, beautiful housing, swimming pool. When he talked about his accommodation, he emphasised the barbed-wired fence as a sign of status:

So when you’re [in Ghana], you see a really big villa […] and you think ‘oh wow, why don’t we come live here?’ You know. That was my first reaction. It was a rented place, but I didn’t know that at the time. It was a vacation home and I thought it was really nice, luxury for once. Because in Belgium, it’s different. But [in Ghana] you have a house surrounded by barbed wire, with a huge gate to be able to park and to enter.

Spending parts of their holidays in luxury apartments or hotels was common for participants. Ama (19), who grew up in Ghana with her grandmother before reuniting with her parents in Belgium at age 9, went to Ghana on three trips from the age of 17 to visit her grandmother and have a vacation. Accompanying her on her trip in 2019, and following via status updates on WhatsApp, we witnessed that she enjoyed dressing up to visit places and documenting her experiences on social media. Besides visiting the University of Ghana, she spent a day at the pool of a 5-star hotel where she took pictures and videos to share with friends. Bars and restaurants in luxury hotels in Ghana are generally open to the public free of charge and pools can be used for a small fee. In Antwerp, in contrast, young people of migrant background are followed with suspicion, and on several occasions, we observed how the concierge of a 4-star hotel in the city asked migrant-background youth to vacate the hotel’s front steps.

Nana went on her first trip to Ghana after finishing tertiary education when she was 24. At the time, she did not have the financial means for visiting Ghana, but her good friend Emmanuella, who lives in Ghana, invited her, paid for the flight and handled all costs whenever they were together during Nana’s six-month stay. Emmanuella organised an internship for Nana in her own company, which allowed Nana to gain valuable professional experiences and travel across the country. On Nana’s trip in 2019, she and Emmanuella participated in a fine dining event for a few selected people. The event was paid for by Emmanuella’s company and took place on the rooftop terrace of a ‘fancy’ apartment in Accra, with a pool and a fantastic view over the city. When we accompanied her, we stayed together in Emmanuella’s big house in an up-and-coming neighbourhood in Accra and were taken around the city by a private driver. One day, we went to an expensive Chinese restaurant located in a luxury hotel where the Accra fashion show was taking place next to a pool in the inner courtyard.

Physically being in Ghana offered unique opportunities to learn about one’s country of origin and engage with motivational others, and use this knowledge to reflect on and positively reframe negative stereotypes about Ghana. Rebecca (22), Desmond’s older sister, was born in Belgium and went to Ghana for the first time when she was 12 years old. This trip marked an important event in her life:

[My parents] are always working from 10 to at least 9 because they are self-employed. […] When they got home, we saw them about 30 minutes before we had to go to bed. We did not get that much from them, so to say. So when we went to Ghana, that was more of a self-study to get to know your country. My father brought us everywhere, all touristic activities that there are. We went from Accra to Kumasi, from Kumasi to the Volta region, we really did a lot.

Together with her family, Rebecca learned about the country’s nature and history as well as her family’s cultural background. Her visit allowed her to form her own picture of her parents’ origin country that contrasted sharply with representations in the media and stereotypes held by peers in Belgium. The trip made Rebecca feel empowered by sharing photos of her trip with friends and classmates on social media that countered images of a ‘poor Africa’:

For them it was like ‘ah, we didn’t know all of this’. They received more information and I still remember the very first time [chuckled], I really exaggerated. I posted 500 photos on Facebook! […] So in the end, they also have a different image about [Ghana]. It changed for everyone in my environment.

Visits to Ghana thus provided a platform for embodied experiences. Young people experienced spaces, sounds, climate, and connections with others, as well as the emotions these interactions with the environment gave rise to. Engaging with encouraging others and spending time in luxurious spaces contributed to young people feeling recognised and valued, and helped to reframe negative stereotypes about Ghana. Such experiences in the country of origin cultivated a sense of self-confidence and contributed to their personal growth.

Travel as stimulation for future aspirations

Just going to Ghana, you will then see what life is about. Because if you remain here [in Belgium], that is just like being in a box. You’re just walking in circles without knowing what’s outside. – Mufasa (24, born in Ghana, migrated to Belgium aged 14, one visit to Ghana)

Trips to the country of origin also informed young people’s educational and career aspirations. In Belgium, participants had to deal with low teacher expectations, which can be detrimental to young people’s aspirations (cf. Nouwen and Clycq 2019). Marilyn (24) shared her experience in reception class after arriving in Belgium at the age of 14: ‘You have to learn Dutch for a year and then choose what you want to do. They give you many options but also suggest what you could do. And they said, “[care work] is good for you, everyone from Africa does it.”’ As the opening quote by Mufasa also shows, young people’s options sometimes seemed limited in Belgium. Visits to Ghana multiplied potential pathways for the future, not yet fixed in space, through two mechanisms: ‘comparative confrontation’ (van Geel and Mazzucato 2021) and Ghanaian role models.

Spontaneous encounters and embodied experiences allowed participants to compare different contexts and facilitated meaning-making, also called comparative confrontation (cf. Cheung Judge 2016; Hoechner 2020). Ama (19) had a serendipitous encounter with a childhood friend that made her reflect on what her life could have been had she not migrated to Belgium at age nine. When we visited Ama in Ghana in 2019, we went together to the neighbourhood where she grew up and ran into a former friend of hers. Even though Ama’s age, the friend had a young child and was busy with housework when we passed. Later, Ama compared her life with that of peers in Ghana:

I really have a different mentality. […] Maybe if I had stayed in Ghana, it would have been different. But maybe because I am here [Belgium], I have this mentality, like, ‘no, I want something better for myself!’ […] People there, they don’t have any motivation to do better. They think to go to school until secondary school and then stop and then work. That’s the most important. And then marry, surely the girls. That’s the most important for them. Maybe if I was there, it would also be important for me because everyone does it, my cousins do it, so why not? But here, yeah, it’s different.

Such confronting experiences in Ghana encouraged young people to compare life in different places. Ama’s trips to Ghana acted as reminders of what could have been and strengthened her aspirations to continue with tertiary education.

Chance encounters further gave young people the opportunity to compare contexts, re-evaluate their lives and transform their aspirations. Mufasa (24) saw himself in a unique position because of his mobility. He was different from Belgian-born Ghanaians who had never been to Ghana and were more likely to end up on a ‘bad path’. Being in Ghana allowed him to ‘see what [he] ha[s] to do to get further in life’. At the age of 14, Mufasa joined his mother in Belgium, where he followed the vocational track of secondary school. Vocational training, however, did not prepare him for education at an applied university, and he discontinued his studies in the first few months. Instead, he went on a trip to Ghana with his mother, who had always told him to visit Ghana before getting ‘serious’ in life. He reported learning many ‘life lessons’ in Ghana, one of which was the realisation that he was not making the most of educational opportunities in Belgium. After a spontaneous encounter with an older woman who was unable to pay for meat at a street food stall, he reflected on how little some people have in Ghana, though they still manage to get by. The experience put his own life in Belgium into perspective and made him question whether he was striving for the right things. He thought about what his aspirations were and whether there was a way he could realise them now. Having just dropped out of tertiary education, some would judge this as an educational failure, but Mufasa perceived the opportunity for a ‘refresh’. Upon his return to Belgium, he decided to work towards his dream job as a police officer and has been taking small steps to make this dream come true. Despite having had several setbacks, he is now aware of his opportunities in Belgium: ‘I want to work hard for it and do my best. […] Although some things are difficult for me, if I just keep trying, I will achieve it at one point. […] Not everyone gets this opportunity.’

Serendipitous encounters sometimes revealed career opportunities in Ghana. Marilyn got the idea to open a business after a spontaneous encounter with an acquaintance of a friend during her second trip to Ghana at age 24. She grew up in Ghana but graduated from secondary school in Belgium with a specialisation in cooking, before completing three more years of cooking school. While she always planned to open her own restaurant in Belgium, the chance encounter in Ghana not only reinforced this aspiration but gave her access to someone who could help her take the initial steps. In her view, opening a restaurant in Ghana was a strategy to get ahead faster because fewer start-up resources were needed than in Belgium. Mufasa also developed business ideas while in Ghana. He valued local Ghanaians who could tell him about demand in the Ghanaian market. He got the idea to start an Uber or taxi business in Ghana after meeting people in a shop who told him that these forms of transport were in high demand. Starting a business in Ghana was also a strategy for dealing with potential discrimination in the future:

Just imagine you live here [Belgium] and you think ‘okay, Belgium is everything’. You can also found a business in Ghana, which might be good for you. Because imagine, in 10 years or 100 years, the Belgian government just says ‘okay, all foreigners need to leave, whether you have the Belgian nationality or not, everyone needs to leave’. Then, when you go to Ghana, go back, you always have something to fall back on. […] So you always need to think on two sides.

Besides spontaneous encounters, experiences with business infrastructure and networks in Ghana can provide young people insights into opportunity structures and inform their aspirations for the future. Attending professional events gave Nana (27) a ‘feeling’ for the industry. She learned about how she could contribute and extended her professional network, further nourishing aspirations of opening her own company in Ghana. Desmond (19), on the other hand, noticed the success of tourist attractions in Ghana:

I believe in the growth of Ghana. Because for the past 10 years, a lot of tourists came there. There are a lot of lounges, bars, disco’s, beach things, nice activities. And I believe that I can contribute to that growth in the future. Really have a hotspot for tourists so that people know ‘I can come here for nice moments’.

Desmond saw building a luxury tourist business in Ghana as a way of countering stereotypical images about Africa. His experiences in Ghana also informed his educational choices, and he aspires to study international business as a consequence of his mobility.

Role models play another important role in shaping youth aspirations as the social contacts young people have access to habitually inform plans for the future (Huijsmans, Ansell, and Froerer 2021; Guan and Ploner 2020). They help show young people that they can achieve whatever they set their mind to. There is a notable lack of Ghanaian role models in high positions in Belgium, but travel to Ghana allowed young people to see, learn about and connect to Ghanaians with influence or in prestigious positions. Our participants felt inspired by historic figures, famous people of Ghanaian background as well as people in their personal network.

Rebecca (22) first learned about Yaa Asantewaa – the queen mother who led the war against British colonialism and is celebrated for this accomplishment – on her first visit to Ghana. Yaa Asantewaa turned into a role model:

It all started with my first trip to Ghana. My father brought us to museums, national parks, etc. In Kumasi, you have a museum that tells you everything about Yaa Asantewaa. And how [the guide] told the story about her was really interesting. […] I thought ‘wow, what a story’ […] and it really stuck with me. So when we were told that we have to represent our regions [for a project], I immediately thought of Yaa Asantewaa, a very strong woman. And I can’t imagine that anyone wouldn’t want to be like her.

While Rebecca first took notice of Yaa Asantewaa in Ghana, a community education project in Belgium provided the framework for further reflection. Yaa Asantewaa inspired Rebecca to become a role model for the Ghanaian community in Belgium. It was especially important to her to convey to other young people the importance of education, which should be the ‘highest goal’.

For Nana, her good friend Emmanuella was a role model. Nana mentioned Emmanuella several times in interviews and conversations prior to her second trip to Ghana. Both were born in Ghana, migrated to Belgium at a young age and grew up together. Yet Emmanuella moved back to Ghana in her 20s, became a successful businesswoman and founded her own company. When we spent a day at the beach together in Accra, Emmanuella highly recommended life in Ghana because of the career opportunities and the quality of life. Emmanuella was a real-life example of what was possible and often surfaced in conversations with Nana about starting a business in Ghana. Role models with similar backgrounds as young people can give them a special confidence to succeed in the future.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article has looked at visits to the country of origin through the prism of personal growth, a lens commonly found in the literature on international student mobility (ISM) and in travel and tourism research. ISM and tourism studies have established that travel facilitates personal growth by cultivating self-confidence and by offering space to nourish educational and career aspirations. Our findings are similar. But by using a personal growth lens, we were able to identify elements of country-of-origin visits that have scarcely been highlighted in research on migrant youth. Like young people without migration background, young people with migration background benefit from trips abroad in terms of their personal development.

Our study highlights the importance of situating the experiences of transnationally mobile youth in both the country of origin and residence. Only through focusing on contextual elements and face-to-face interactions in both Ghana and Belgium could we identify mechanisms for how migrant youth cultivate self-confidence and aspirations through travel to the origin country. This acknowledges that migrant youth often have personal connections to the country of origin, resulting in personal growth mechanisms different from those identified for international students and tourists.

We find that self-confidence is strengthened through respectful treatment by people in Ghana and access to luxury spaces, experiences largely missing from young people’s lives in Belgium where many face discrimination and belong to the working class. Experiences with people and places in the origin country helped to positively reframe negative stereotypes of Ghana that prevailed in Belgium, further increasing self-confidence. Travel shapes young people’s educational and career aspirations through ‘comparative confrontation’ (van Geel and Mazzucato 2021), a process in which young people compare different opportunity structures in Belgium and Ghana and gain insights into the advantages and disadvantages of life in both countries. Rather than resulting in a sense of non-belonging or in-between identity (e.g. Vathi and King 2011), we find that country-of-origin visits multiply potential future pathways that are not yet fixed in space. Finally, role models in Ghana serve as inspiration and provide awareness of ‘life possibles’ (Tran and Vu 2018) that shape young people’s aspirations. This is especially important considering the lack of African role models in Belgium, and low teacher expectations that have been shown to negatively impact migrant youth’s education and career aspirations (Nouwen and Clycq 2019). Although transnational studies show that one can develop a transnational identity or sense of belonging even without travelling (Levitt 2009), our findings illustrate the physicality of being in Ghana and the importance of young people’s embodied experiences for personal growth.

The experiences of transnationally mobile youth bear two implications for research and practice. First, visits to the country of origin – just as travel of youth without migration background – should be acknowledged as enriching the lives of youth and equipping them with valuable resources. This is important considering that travel by migrant youth is often perceived detrimental to their educational outcomes, which is also reflected in educational systems that penalise with hefty fines the missing of school due to travel (van Geel 2019). Second, the experiences transnationally mobile youth have in different contexts, ranging from respectful treatment and luxurious experiences to discrimination, teach them about stereotypes, privilege, and different notions of and possibilities for success. To further solidify personal growth and situate their own experiences within global structures of inequality, young people would benefit from spaces to reflect on these experiences and process them with others (see also Dyrness 2021).

Researching personal growth of mobile youth has important methodological implications. Theoretically, much of the ISM and travel and tourism literature emphasises the importance of contextual and bodily experiences for personal growth (e.g. Pollock, Van Reken, and Pollock 2017). Methodologically, however, most of these studies consist of survey research or one-off interviews, usually conducted within the country of permanent residence (Stone and Petrick 2013). Our multi-sited, multi-method research design, by contrast, allowed us to observe and, to some extent, experience with our own bodies what transpires during young people’s travels. Rather than only focusing on the individual through retrospective interviews, we were able to see things as they happen in different contexts and research mobility as it unfolds. As such, we heed recent calls for putting mobility central, in theory and methodology, when studying young people’s lives (Cheung Judge, Blazek, and Esson 2020; Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar 2018; van Geel and Mazzucato 2018).

This paper’s limitations suggest promising avenues for future research. First, some participants travelled to locations outside Ghana, to Europe, North America, the Middle East and North Africa. It would be fruitful to explore how international travel to places other than the origin county shape the lives and personal development of increasingly mobile migrant youth. Second, our youth-centric study has captured young people’s experiences with country-of-origin visits as they live through them during their teens or early twenties. Longitudinal research could investigate how young people’s increased self-confidence and aspirations play out later in life to advance current knowledge about country-of-origin visits that is almost exclusively based on adults’ recollection of their youth.

We have sought to ‘de-migranticise’ research on migrant youth (Dahinden 2016; van Geel and Mazzucato 2021) by bringing different types of mobility – student mobility, tourism and visits to the country of origin – into the same analytical frame (Salazar 2018). Doing so, we have shown that there is no reason to apply different theoretical frameworks to the analysis of trips made by people with and without migration background. For both, travel can foster self-confidence and aspirations, albeit through different mechanisms. Overall, our research findings demonstrate the need to pay attention to the personal growth opportunities of country-of-origin visits, and the potential these have for empowering migrant youth in the country where they reside.

Social media handles

Sarah Anschütz @anschutz_sarah (Twitter)

www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-anschütz-9ab15581/ (LinkedIn)

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Ruth Cheung Judge, Hannah Hoechner, Noel Clycq, Noel Salazar, the MO-TRAYL team and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council under Grant [682982].