The European Union’s “assisted voluntary return” scheme is designed to persuade hundreds of thousands of migrants in Libya to return home rather than attempt to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.
But officials administering the scheme have been accused of breaking pledges to provide grants and training packages upon their return home.
In Banjul, the Gambian capital, police were called to the offices of the International Organisation for Migration, a UN-body that runs the scheme in tandem with the EU, after it was pelted with rocks by angry crowds six weeks ago.
Migrants claimed that while in Libya, they had been told they would get £2,660 (€3,000) to help them start new businesses.
Instead, all they received upon their return to Gambia was a 3,000 Gambian dalasi (£50) handout as emergency pocket money.
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The EU migrant repatriation scheme has come under fire from the very people it is meant to help
That compares to grants of £2,000 available to illegal migrants in the UK who register for similar repatriation schemes, and up to €5,000 (£4,440) for those on schemes from Germany.
Around 2,300 migrants returning to Gambia since the scheme began there early last year, only 300 have been offered places so far on job training programmes, none of which have yet started.
The scheme is bankrolled by the £2.84bn (€3.2bn) EU Trust Fund for Africa, set up by member states in 2015 to stem the migrant crisis by encouraging African migrants to return home.
One charity representing migrants’ rights in Gambia told The Telegraph that the entire programme was now at risk of being discredited.
Mamadou Edrisa Njie, of the Global Youth Innovation Network, said: “Returnees are seeing this as a bit of white elephant project. They aren’t getting the support they expected, and they are telling that to other Gambians, who are then deciding they might as well try to get to Europe after all.”
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A migrant gestures from behind the bars of a cell at a detention centre in Libya
Mustapha Sallah, a Gambian returnee, said his batch of returnees had been told they were not eligible for job training at all as the project had not been signed off officially at that stage.
He said: ”They told us there was a package waiting for us, but it turned out to be false information.
“I think it was just to persuade us to come back.”
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates that there may be anything up to one million migrants currently in Libya, most from sub-Saharan Africa.
Nigerians make up the largest national group among African migrants travelling to Libya and trying to cross from there to Italy by sea.
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African migrants have said pledges to help them have been broken
On Saturday Nigeria began evacuating thousands of its citizens, with its foreign minister promising to repatriate all those wanting to return home.
Under the EU/IOM scheme, migrants get a free flight home. But there is a wide disparity between the repatriation “allowances” paid to migrants returning from Libya and those returning from European countries.
In Nigeria, only the government of Edo State – a notorious trafficking hub where 80 percent of Nigerian migrants come from – has put in place a proactive rehabilitation programme.
Returnees get two nights’ hotel accommodation, during which their needs are assessed, plus a £120 stipend to last them for three months. But even here, there are concerns about a lack of capacity for job training programmes.
Solomon Okoduwa, a senior advisor for the programme, said £200,000 had been set aside for training, along with 150 hectares of land so that migrants could learn farming techniques.
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The EU set up a Trust Fund for Africa in 2015 to help stem the migrant crisis
However, he said that it typically cost $100,000 to train 300 people, and that 2,000 returnees had arrived in November and December alone. A further 20,000 are expected in the first quarter of 2018.
“If these people can’t get help, then they will simply become the traffickers of tomorrow in order to make ends meet,” he said.
Referring to the attack on the IOM building in Gambia, IOM spokesman Paul Dillon said it had been made “explicitly clear” in advance to returnees that they would only get a short-term subsistence sum of £50.
He said that “rumours” to the contrary were often spread on migrant social media networks, which may have conflated the repatriation allowances in Europe with those on the Libya programme.
He added: “We understand the frustration of some returnees who are not receiving immediate reintegration support; it is a complex process for which there’s no quick fix.”
An EU spokesman said that more than 18,000 migrants had been repatriated from Libya in 2017. “We will continue to address any issues on these programmes… precisely to better coordinate our respective actions in support to migrants.”