From Backway to Business: Aspirations, Self-Efficacy, and Future Orientation

Young Gambians who exit the education system without university entry qualifications — whether as school dropouts or graduates who did not attain university entry requirement face a severe structural vacuum. Unable to access higher education and alienated from vocational pathways, many orient toward irregular migration via the Mediterranean, locally known as "the Backway." Existing evidence from The Gambia shows that information campaigns consistently fail to shift this behavior, because the binding constraint is not awareness but aspiration: these young people cannot picture a locally achievable future worth working toward. 

This pilot evaluates the Local Possibilities Programme, a light touch, group-based intervention targeting out of school youth aged 15 to 24. Unlike conventional youth programming, the LPP provides no capital or technical training. Instead, it works upstream, addressing three psychological constructs identified as binding constraints on local economic agency. First, structured exposure to credible local role models expands participants' aspirational reference group beyond migration. Second, a progressive mastery task sequence generates direct experiential evidence of local agency, building self-efficacy. Third, guided future self-visualization paired with backward induction planning strengthens future orientation and reduces the psychological salience of migration. Sessions will be delivered by trained community facilitators to cohorts of 18 to 24 participants. The pilot targets 120 treatment and 100 comparison participants across peri-urban and rural communities will validate psychometric instruments for all three constructs in the Gambian context, assess facilitator fidelity, generate preliminary effect size estimates, and document per participant costs to power a future cluster randomized trial.