Unpacked narratives on migration governance: missing voices of female migrants in migration policies in West Africa

Much of the narratives on West African migration ignore gender perspectives or tend to focus on women ‘as’ gender, while men are portrayed as, perhaps unwittingly, neutral or un-gendered. These present different perspectives on how migration and gender intersect in the region. Unfortunately, narratives on migration governance and gender that perceive female migration as disempowering and a breakdown of traditional family systems have dominated the West African regional migration narratives, and shaped how male and female migrants and migration broadly in these contexts are also perceived and understood, as well as the policy approaches. Migration narratives from West Africa tend to focus on the migration of males as the ‘breadwinners’ and, therefore, the ‘movers’ at the expense of females as the ‘stayers’; this restricts our understanding of the complexity of the gendered issues in the region. To decolonise knowledge production on such narratives, this paper unpacks the discourses surrounding the linkages between migration governance and gender for a better understanding of the competing and counter-narratives framing debates and policy, the actors of such narratives and the effects of the narratives in shaping migration governance and gendered issues within the region.