The first part of the series, composed of seven episodes, features members of Youth Against Irregular Migration (YAIM), an advocacy organization founded by young Gambians who met in a Libyan detention center. Through their reflections, the series explores why regular migration is often unattainable; documents the journeys, detentions, and returns of migrants; and examines how “return and reintegration” policies are lived, negotiated, and resisted.

The second episode explores the material and symbolic motivations for Gambian youth choosing the backway to Europe, contrasting the modern, individualized pressure to provide for family through remittances with the more communal and respected social status of “semesters” (emigrants) from previous generations.

In this episode YAIM members retrace their perilous backway journey towards Europe in 2016/2017, across West African borders into Libya, highlighting the systemic violence, corruption, and gendered abuse inherent in these routes

In this episode, YAIM members recount their experience of detention in Tariq al Sikka, one of Libya’s official detention centers, where they were held for three to four months in early 2017 following the violent raid in Gargaresh.

In this episode, YAIM members describe how they kept their sanity inside Tariq al Sikka through music, shared prayers, and solidarity across nationalities, before recounting what happened once they were repatriated to The Gambia through what IOM calls Assisted Voluntary Return.

In this episode, the conversation turns to the structural conditions that make the backway feel like the only viable option for so many Gambians. Moving from the individual to the systemic, the episode examines how unemployment, an inherited colonial education system that teaches in English and ignores local knowledge, nepotism in the job market, and the extractive exploitation of Gambian resources – from fishing deals with the EU and China to pharmaceutical dumping – reproduce poverty and dependency across generations.

In this final episode, the conversation turns to advocacy – what it means to do it from within a country shaped by donor dependency, short-term project cycles, and the structural inequalities discussed in the previous episode. Drawing on seven years of experience, participants reflect critically on why most funding for migration-related civil society work comes from European organizations whose primary interest is keeping people from reaching Europe, and what gets lost when programs arrive already designed, with local actors reduced to implementers.