Education, language, and postcolonial legacies in West African borderlands: Togolese students in Ghana

This article examines the educational experiences of Togolese migrant students attending public schools in rural Ghanaian border towns, focusing on everyday forms of South–South educational mobility in West Africa. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 40 Togolese students, the study explores why students cross the Ghana–Togo border for schooling, how they navigate differences between the two national education systems, and how they negotiate social integration and identity within Ghanaian schools. The findings show that educational migration in this context is shaped by aspirations to acquire English, access Ghana’s fee-free basic education, and avoid institutional barriers such as grade repetition in Togo. While shared ethnic and linguistic ties support social belonging in border communities, they do not guarantee inclusion within schools. Inside classrooms, English-only instruction, placement practices, and assessment regimes rooted in postcolonial education systems often devalue prior learning acquired in Francophone contexts, producing institutional exclusion despite social familiarity. At the same time, students actively draw on multilingual repertoires, peer networks, and cross-border knowledge to navigate these constraints, creating limited and uneven forms of hybridity within formal schooling.