Rich work on returnee directors—local individuals with foreign education and work experience—largely centres on their impact on firms in well-established or transitioning economies, where institutional support is robust. Given the significance of institutional frameworks on board and firm behaviour, understanding returnee directors’ impact on firms in different institutional contexts is critical. Addressing this gap, this study adopts a multitheoretical perspective to investigate returnee directors’ impact on firms in countries of weak institutional support. Using hand-collected longitudinal data from annual reports of 224 SubSaharan African firms (2010–2021), the study employs a fixed-effect model. Findings indicate that returnee directors facilitate intra-continental internationalisation activities. Importantly, this suggests that returnee directors with foreign experience outside the region can be of benefit to broader continental objectives, such as economic integration. Additionally, returnee directors may positively influence firm value, highlighting their long-term contribution to performance, though this relationship depends on firm governance, ownership characteristics, and institutional quality. Robustness analyses confirm that the results withstand potential endogeneity issues. The study makes three key theoretical contributions to the literature on board of directors/returnee directors: First, by integrating agency, resource dependency and signalling theories the impact of returnee directors on mitigating agency conflicts, securing essential external resources, and signalling positive corporate governance quality to investors is revealed. Second, the study enriches the current understanding of the value returnee directors in weak institutional contexts showing that they may act as substitutes for traditional corporate governance mechanisms by leveraging their unique human and social capital to address firm and institutional deficiencies.Third, traditional agency theory on directors’ incentives is challenged, suggesting the need to rethink the independence of returnee directors and their incentives to focus on shareholders’ value maximisation. These findings have important implications for organisations, governments and agencies aiming to harness the potential of returnee professionals for economic development