Mobility data struggles: qualculating human movement in West Africa

Amid intensifying datafication, mobility in West Africa is increasingly shaped by struggles over its qualculation, the entwined work of classifying and counting people on the move. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork (2023–24) in Senegal, Mauritania, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria, the article traces qualculation across three sites: the ECOWAS Commission, Senegal’s Comité Interministériel de Lutte contre la Migration Irrégulière (CILMI), and the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM). Bringing together political grammars of mobility and practices of alterity processing, it shows how labels and numbers travel, mutate, and are contested as actors seek to render mobility legible and actionable. Across these sites, mobility data operate as political performances that rescale authority, redistribute legitimacy, and help constitute regimes of (im)mobility. The article shows how classificatory schemes, templates, and institutional arrangements make certain forms of mobility countable, while the demands of counting in turn reshape how mobility is defined and governed.