Global human mobility and knowledge transfer: Highly skilled return migrants as agents of transnational learning

This peer-reviewed study investigates how highly skilled Ethiopian return migrants act as agents of knowledge transfer between developed and developing-country contexts. Drawing on interviews with 22 postgraduate-educated returnees from the United States, Europe and Japan, the article argues that knowledge transfer is not a one-way flow from host to home countries but a “relevance discovery process” (pp. 311–314). Returnees primarily transferred non-technical organisational knowledge—work discipline, problem-solving, quality management (e.g., Kaizen), leadership, time management—rather than specialist expertise. They enacted knowledge transfer through “engagement, alignment and imagination”: creating organisational spaces for new practices (e.g., engineering consultancy, SME training), brokering partnerships, adapting foreign practices to local constraints, and initiating future-oriented reforms such as Kaizen institutes and infrastructure capacity building (pp. 323–327). The study highlights how “aspirational learning” motivates returnees to envision and build better institutional futures in Ethiopia.