Drawing on discussions with institutional and diaspora partners, Public Partnerships Lead Charlotte Griffiths reflects on what the near future may hold for diaspora engagement policies.
In the first quarter of each year, the EUDiF team takes on the mammoth task of updating the global mapping on diaspora engagement. We conduct desk research and liaise with our partners to identify major policy changes, new institutions and emerging practices to keep the mapping alive and useful for the project and the wider ecosystem.
Keeping such a resource up to date is a huge challenge because of both its scale (123 countries and counting) and the dynamic nature of diaspora engagement itself. Never has this been truer than in the quicksand that is the 2026 geopolitical climate.
As the team logs information to include in the country factsheets, interactive map, practice database and typology of institutions, we naturally discuss what happened in 2025, excited to see which countries have upped the ante and what innovations diasporas have delivered. But we also speculate on what might come next and how this can inform the policy and programming support we provide to partner countries and their diasporas.
With the findings from 2025 now under review (publication scheduled for June-July), we invite policymakers currently designing or reviewing diaspora engagement policies and strategies to consider these five elements – part prediction, part recommendation – for 2026 and beyond…
- Definition expansion: The age-old challenge of defining the diaspora will remain, but the most strategic players will take the opportunity to be more inclusive and expand the pool of people with affinity to the country. Examples already exist, such as Benin and Ghana which welcome all Afro-descendants to claim citizenship.
- Second and subsequent generations: As diaspora communities mature and countries of heritage seek to diversify from remittance-reliance, they will consider more carefully how to approach later generations. In 2024, Kenya’s new diaspora engagement policy went as far as proposing dedicated engagement of later generations.
- N[EU] players: EU countries will develop policies for both their own diasporas and diasporas in residence – Germany is leading the charge on the latter, considering a strategy for engaging the African diaspora. A new dimension of diaspora diplomacy is in the making.
- Towns and cities: Local municipalities in countries of heritage will position themselves more strongly as interlocutors for diaspora, leveraging local-affinity and distancing engagement from national politics.
- Inescapable AI: We predict AI will feature both as a commercial sector for which countries seek support from diaspora to expand and as a tool to improve services for the diaspora. The question is: how to avoid it becoming another buzzword – and that is before we get into the risks of using AI to draft a policy, for which the diaspora topic could be a particularly challenging use-case…
Our predictions all relate to diaspora engagement policy in some form, but it is important to note that although having a diaspora engagement policy is sometimes seen as the gold-standard for diaspora engagement, this can be quite misleading. In fact, some of the most active nations like Mexico and the Philippines do not have a national policy in place.
It is quite plausible that the predictions above will materialise in other forms – such as projects, conferences, or informal conversations, the unofficial building blocks of policymaking and programme implementation. In any case, at EUDiF we are observing an uptick in countries considering developing a diaspora engagement policy, possibly in response to living in an increasingly unstable world where it pays to spread your risk and diversify partnerships. I am already looking forward to next year’s research sprint, when we will find out how well our predictions landed.
In the meantime, what did we miss? Email your forecast to eu-diaspora@icmpd.org