Remittances offer something philanthropy cannot: autonomy. Families receiving remittances decide how best to allocate those funds, based on their most pressing needs. Credit: Shutterstock

By Tafadzwa Munyaka
HARARE, Jan 14 2025 (IPS)

Across Africa, economic transformation and development are being fuelled by two significant streams of funding: remittances and philanthropy. Both play vital roles, but as the situations evolve in many African countries, one truth becomes increasingly clear – remittances are emerging as a more sustainable, dignifying force compared to traditional philanthropy.

While philanthropy, often driven by well-meaning donors, tends to create short-term interventions, remittances empower households with the freedom to define their own future.

While philanthropic efforts can provide essential support, a more collaborative approach that prioritizes community engagement and empowerment is crucial in strengthening resilience and enabling communities to chart their own paths toward sustainable development

Remittances are interwoven into the identity of Africans as they support their families and communities, often on the premise and thinking that if one of us makes it, they pull everyone up with them.

With this knowledge, it begs the question, is it not time to reimagine our approach to African development and embrace the profound potential of remittances? A stark distinction of remittances and philanthropy is that the latter is often a result of and comes from excess while the former is derived form a culture and expectation of selflessness.

The Scale of Impact

According to the World Bank, remittances to sub-Saharan Africa exceeded $50 billion in 2023, in a year they were considered to have slowed down, dwarfing the funds allocated by philanthropic organizations and official development aid.

Countries like Egypt, Nigeria, Morrocco, Ghana, and Kenya top the charts, with families using these funds to pay for education, healthcare, and small businesses.

Unlike many charitable initiatives, remittances go directly to the intended recipients – often without the burden of administrative costs or external agendas.

It must be noted that although remittances can be powerful, they often stem from obligation rather than abundance, which can lead to exploitation when the giver is always expected to give, despite the strong bonds that exist.

This dynamic can create a cycle where recipients may feel pressured to rely on these funds, potentially stifling local entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency.

Furthermore, while remittances provide immediate financial relief, they do not always address the underlying socio-economic issues that cause migration in the first place. Ultimately, balancing the benefits of remittances with the need for sustainable development strategies cannot be overstated.

Philanthropic interventions, no matter how generous, often hinge on specific projects determined by donors, who decide which issues take precedence be it education or health.

This top-down approach, while beneficial in the short term, frequently overlooks the unique needs of individual communities, leading to a dependency on cycles of aid rather than embedding empowerment.

When local populations are not engaged in the decision-making process, interventions may miss the mark, failing to resonate with cultural contexts or actual needs.

As a result, communities can become reliant on external resources, which stifles local initiative and innovation, ultimately perpetuating cycles of poverty. Moreover, the focus on immediate results often overshadows the systemic issues that hinder long-term development, creating a dynamic where local leaders feel compelled to align with donor priorities instead of advocating for their community’s true needs.

Therefore, while philanthropic efforts can provide essential support, a more collaborative approach that prioritizes community engagement and empowerment is crucial in strengthening resilience and enabling communities to chart their own paths toward sustainable development.

Empowerment Through Choice

Remittances offer something philanthropy cannot: autonomy. Families receiving remittances decide how best to allocate those funds, based on their most pressing needs.

This flexibility builds and strengthens agency while preserving and promoting dignity, allowing recipients to meet challenges in real time, without waiting for outside interventions.

A woman in rural Zimbabwe, for example, may receive monthly remittances from a relative working in the UK. With these funds, she might choose to send her daughter to school while investing in a poultry business to generate additional income. She is no longer just a passive beneficiary of aid; she is now an active agent in her community’s economy.

This contrasts sharply with philanthropic programs, which may prioritize education or health but overlook opportunities for long-term economic empowerment.

However, we should not overlook that many in the diaspora sacrifice their own financial growth to help their families back home. The impact is real, but the invisible cost to the diaspora is often overlooked.

A Sustainable Alternative

Philanthropy’s Achilles’ heel is often its short-term nature. Donor fatigue, shifting political interests, and economic downturns can abruptly end well-intentioned programs, leaving communities without the support they have come to rely on.

Research highlights how philanthropic underfunding and unrealistic expectations can lead to the failure of nonprofit organizations to sustain their initiatives over the long term, arguably, precisely because of these short-lived commitments.

To contrast this, remittances are a more resilient source of income. Diaspora communities tend to continue supporting their families even in tough times, ensuring a stable flow of funds.

Moreover, remittances are often reinvested locally, creating ripple effects that stimulate small businesses and local markets. This bottom-up economic activity nurtures homegrown solutions to poverty.

In the long term it is expected to contribute to reducing reliance on external aid more so as remittances ensure a stable flow of funds that are often unaffected by political or economic changes in recipient countries.

A 2023 World Bank report highlights that remittances grew by 5% in sub-Saharan Africa, even during global economic slowdowns, underscoring the resilience of these flows.

A New Development Model

To be clear, philanthropy still has an essential role to play, particularly in areas where immediate humanitarian assistance is required, such as in disaster relief or during health crises.

However, as Africa’s economic aspirations grow, there is an urgent need to rethink how development is financed and implemented.

Rather than relying solely on donor-driven models, governments, NGOs, and international institutions should focus on creating enabling environments that leverage remittances.

This means and includes reducing transaction fees, actively supporting diaspora engagement, and building financial infrastructure that allows families to maximize these funds.

If philanthropy is to shake off many of its negative connotations to remain relevant, it must evolve beyond charity. Strategic partnerships with diaspora communities can amplify the impact of both streams of funding, aligning donor goals with grassroots solutions already being tried and tested through remittances.

To sum it up, “philanthropy comes from excess, allowing for strategic, long-term change – building schools, hospitals, and infrastructure that break cycles of poverty.”

Parting shot

Africa’s future lies in empowerment, not dependence. Remittances, with their direct, flexible, and sustainable nature, represent a dignifying form of support available.

As Africans increasingly take charge of their own destinies, it is essential to complement philanthropic efforts with policies that amplify the impact of remittances. The lesson is clear: development is most successful when it flows from the hands of those it is meant to serve.

Pakistani migrant workers on a construction site in Dubai. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jun 15 2022 (IPS)

Here goes another fact: 230 million migrant workers are now a major life-saving source for up to one billion people starving in the world’s poorest communities, as well as a vital lifeline for the economy of their countries of origin.

Migrant workers’ remittances amount to over 600 billion US dollars a year, which is three times greater than the whole Global Official Development Assistance, now situated at around 180 billion US dollars.

Not only: officially recorded remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries are expected to increase by 4.2% this year to reach 630 billion US dollars, according to the World Bank’s latest Migration and Development Brief released on 11 May this year.

Migrant workers' remittances amount to over 6 billion US dollars a year, which is three times greater than the whole Global Official Development Assistance, now situated at around 180 billion US dollars

At the same time, their remittances already exceed by six-fold the ‘profits’ –estimated in some 100 billion US dollars a year– made by the criminal gangs, human traffickers and smugglers, and sexual exploiters.

Moreover, migrant workers remittance flows have increased five-fold over the past twenty years, serving in a counter-cyclical capacity during economic downturns in recipient countries, according to this year’s International Day of Family Remittances on 16 June.

Obviously, this is the case of “privileged” migrants, those who have managed to survive and find a job. Tens of thousands of migrants do not have the same “luck.”

Hellish journeys

Nowadays, more and more millions of human beings are forced to migrate, feeling armed conflicts, man-made climate disasters, severe droughts, devastating floods, high indebtedness, starvation, shrinking humanitarian assistance, and political persecution. And death.

In fact, thousands of migrants are every year reported dead during their land and maritime journeys, in particular in the Mediterranean Sea, while attempting to reach Europe, which is seen as the promised land of democracy, human rights and equality.

The Gulf

Take the case of Yemen. At least 27,800 people have crossed from the Horn of Africa to war-torn Yemen in the first five months of 2022, more than the total who made the journey all of last year along what was the world’s busiest maritime migration route prior to COVID-19, according to the International Organization for Migration (OIM).

The rise in arrivals is “cause for alarm” in a country now grappling with its eighth year of conflict.

Upon arriving in Yemen, migrants face perilous onward journeys to Gulf countries in search of work, IOM reports. They often travel across conflict front-lines and face “grave human rights violations such as detention in inhumane conditions, exploitation and forced transfers across lines of control.”

“Women and girls often report experiencing gender-based violence, abuse or exploitation, usually at the hands of traffickers and smugglers.”

Remittances represent up to 60% of recipients’ families on average and typically more than double a family’s disposable income and help deal with uncertainty, allowing them to build assets. CREDIT: IFAD

The deadliest sea

Meanwhile, migrants who risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean to Europe on flimsy boats often piloted by people-smugglers, are at greater risk of dying now than for years, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) reported on 10 June 2022.

Latest data visualisation figures from UNHCR, shows that there were 3,231 dead or missing at sea last year, a sharp rise from 2020.

The situation is a “widespread, longstanding and largely overlooked tragedy”, said UNHCR.

The UN agency noted that although some of those crossing the Mediterranean want a better life and better jobs, many are fleeing conflict, violence or persecution.

The neglected inhuman cost

During their journeys to life, migrants are easy prey to criminal gangs, human traffickers and smugglers, and fall victims of cruel exploitation and the growing wave of hatred and xenophobia, which is increasingly propelled by most politicians, let alone the right and far-right ones.

Heavily used as an electoral argument in the most industrialised countries, migrants are now perceived by voters as a threat to their own well-being and as a heavy burden to get rid of, as if this would alleviate the impact of pandemics they did not cause, wars that they have not launched, climate disasters they did not generate, and the failure to address ongoing economic hurdles, inflation, recession, etcetera.

The economic cost both migrants and their families are forced to pay for their journeys to survival often comes at the price of high indebtedness.

Meanwhile, smugglers have been demanding more and more money.

For instance, smuggling activities on the passage by sea to Italy has almost doubled, while the fee for this journey jumped from EUR 6.000 to EUR 12.000, according to a non-profit platform DoSomething report on human trafficking.

Swept away

Right now, several European countries are sweeping away migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

In what looks pretty much like an ‘operation dusting’ aiming at getting rid of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers by shipping them far away, the process of ‘externalisation’ of millions of victims of wars, poverty, climate crisis and political persecution, is now growing fast.

IPS already reported on such a practice in four European countries. See specific reporting on the cases of the United Kingdom, Greece, Hungary and Poland by clicking the respective links.

How are migrant workers’ remittances spent?

The United Nations reports the following:

• Remittances represent on average up to 60% of a recipient family’s income, and typically more than double their disposable income. The funds help deal with uncertainty, allowing them to build assets.

• Analyses of 71 developing countries show significant poverty reduction effects of remittances: a 10% increase in per capita remittances leads to a 3.5% decline in the share of poor people in the population.

• In rural communities, half of remittances are spent on agriculture-related expenses.

• Additional income increases receiving households’ demand for food, which increases domestic food production and improves nutrition, particularly among children and the elderly.

• Investment of migrants’ income in agricultural activities creates employment opportunities.

Migrants under fire

Last but not least: in a number of European countries, the demand for workers has been on the rise.

In the specific case of Spain, for example, in addition to the construction sector, hotels, coffee-shops, restaurants and other sectors depending on tourism, have been complaining about the growing shortage of highly needed waiters, cleaners, housekeeping workers, and so on.

The provided explanation is that Spanish citizens are no longer ready to accept highly precarious jobs, low-wages, seasonal contracts and excessively long, arduous working hours.

A quick conclusion would be to allow more migrants to do the job. But…

… But in most industrialised –and wealthiest– countries, migrants are being ‘accused’ by the rising right and far-right political parties for ‘stealing’ jobs, receiving humanitarian assistance, thus depriving the national unemployed, the youth and the elderly, and ‘wasting’ the citizens’ money… let alone of being the cause of crimes and a long etcetera.

What a world!

By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Feb 24 2022 (IPS)

I hope you had a chance to listen to our last episode, Environmental disasters creating more migrants within countries. We talked about the rising number of people who are forced out of their homes because of climate or environmental disasters. Nearly 30 million men, women and children in 149 countries were displaced in 2020, temporarily or for good and the signs are, that those numbers will only grow. Today we’re continuing our series of conversations about people on the move globally, talking about remittances and the migrant workers worldwide who send these earnings home to their families—$200 each month on average according to today’s guest, Pedro de Vasconcelos. He is the Senior Technical Specialist/ Coordinator at the Financing Facility for Remittances of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, or IFAD.

The size of global remittances is astounding—$554 billion US dollars in 2019. More surprising to me is that this sum is greater than combining all of the foreign direct investment (FDI) and overseas development assistance (ODA) sent to the countries of the developing world.

In effect, the workers of the world’s poorest countries are doing more to lift themselves out of poverty than anyone else, but that’s not something you often hear in development discussions.

Of course we couldn’t have this conversation without noting the impact of Covid-19 on remittances and migrant workers. Here in Nepal there were horrifying stories in the media of groups of workers, many in Persian Gulf countries, who were forced out of work during lockdowns, eventually ran out of money, then food, and had to rely on the kindness of friends and even strangers, until they could raise enough cash to buy an air ticket home—when flights were available—or just wait out lockdowns.

Pedro predicts that Covid-19’s impact on remittances will be a wake-up call to the public and private sectors about the crucial role that the earnings generated by the world’s migrant workers play in keeping economies afloat. If those involved can sync their efforts to ensure that the money can be sent home as efficiently as possible and that workers are given more and better options to use their earnings, it is possible to imagine a day when migration for work will be a choice and not a necessity.

Please listen now to my conversation with Pedro de Vasconcelos.

Thanks again to Pedro de Vasconcelos of IFAD for sharing his time with me, especially for agreeing to a second interview within days, and when he was travelling, after online connection problems during our first chat. If you have any thoughts about this episode, you can share them with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn—our handle is IPSNews. We’d also love to hear your ideas for future episodes about People on the Move around the world. Don’t forget—you can follow or subscribe to Strive on Spotify, Google, Apple Podcasts and most other podcast players.

My name is Marty Logan, you can email me at mlogan(at)ipsnews.net. Strive will be back soon and is a production of IPS News.

A landmark United Nations report is calling on governments to declare remittance transfer an essential service. Photo by Christine Roy on Unsplash

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 9 2020 (IPS)

On Dec. 2 Gabriel Arias, 42, left a Washington Heights, New York, money transfer agency after sending money home to the Dominican Republic. For the past eight years, every fortnight he would come to this branch at 171st street after getting paid from his construction job. But things are different this year and he worries about his family back home. Arias lost his job in May, amid heightened COVID-19 restrictions in the state. He told IPS he has tried to work some odd jobs, but has barely earned enough for his monthly apartment rental. This early December visit to send money home was only his second since June.

“It has been hard because for a long time this year, I had no work. I came here speaking no English. I worked hard. Learned to speak and I took care of my mother and the family in the Dominican Republic. I had no job, no work since the COVID,” he told IPS.

Arias is not alone. A landmark United Nations report is calling on governments to declare remittance transfer an essential service and ensure access to humanitarian assistance, legal services and social protection for migrants and the displaced, as COVID-19 shifts the dynamics of global migration and hunger.

The report entitled “Populations at Risk: Implications of COVID-19 for Hunger, Migration and Displacement” is the first joint global report by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and World Food Programme (WFP) and analyses food security trends in the world’s migration hotspots during the pandemic. It warns that COVID-19 and measures taken to contain its spread have disrupted human mobility patterns, the consequences of which could been seen for years to come.

Earlier this year, countries across the globe instituted various tiers of entry requirements. According to the report, while those restrictions resulted in significantly reduced international migration in the first months of the pandemic, the ensuing dip in unemployment and food security led to a desperate need to search for work elsewhere – and a spike in migration due to necessity.

One of the areas hardest hit by the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns involves remittances. Globally, migrant remittances are a financial lifeline for around 800 million people. World Bank figures put remittances to low and middle-income countries (LMICS) at over $550 billion in 2019. For more than half of these countries, funds sent by migrant workers to their relatives in their home countries account for over 5 percent of gross domestic product. However, remittance flows have plunged drastically in 2020 and according to the report, over 33 million people are at risk of going hungry as part of the socio-economic impact of COVID-19.

“If efforts are made to channel remittances properly and ensure as well that you reduce the financial costs, this would have a greater impact on development. The idea is also that good management of the remittance services can help to speed up the recovery from the crisis,” IOM Senior Emergency and Preparedness Officer Rafaelle Robelin told IPS. 

With remittances to LMICS expected to fall by about $100 billion in 2020 and 495 million full time job losses in the first quarter of the year, the report’s partners say it is possible that many migrants are sacrificing their own consumption and other needs, in order to send money to loved ones in their home countries. The report states that this is not a sustainable means of supporting families in the medium to long-term. It is also bad news for countries heavily dependent on remittances. 

“Coupled with the 32 percent drop projected for foreign direct investments (FDI) in 2020, contractions in the prices of natural resources and a significant decrease in tourism revenues, the drop in remittances will likely impact the financial stability of numerous countries….poverty, food security, nutrition, health and educational attainment are all being directly impacted by mobility restrictions and the decline in remittances,” the report said.

While it confirms the importance of migrant work and its contribution to the economies of home countries, the report also highlights the inherent vulnerabilities that migrant workers face and notes that the pandemic has exacerbated those risks.

“It has been very clear since the onset of the crisis, that the impact of COVID on migration and mobility would be huge,” said Robelin, adding that, “migration has a positive impact from the remittance angle. The fact that many people lost their jobs who migrated for development means, means that in the long term, those benefitting from the positive impact of migration, may suffer.”

The IOM official says restriction of movement may have also pushed people to move under dangerous circumstances. Mobile and displaced populations also face new challenges such as increased exposure to work-related abuse and exploitation, the risk of losing residence status, the lack of funds to buy hygiene items and difficulties accessing COVID-19 tests, as well as restrictions on their general freedom to travel back and forth to their country of origin.

The IOM and WFP predict that partial or full lifting of travel regulations will result in more people leaving home to find work in order to feed their families. They are calling for well-governed migration to be a cornerstone of the global response to COVID-19. They believe that making remittance transfer an essential financial service can help families to meet their food and other needs. They are also advising the global community to ensure migrant access to health services including immunisation and mental health support. The partners are also recommending that government recognise the significant role played by migrants by ensuring they have access to social protection initiatives.

Some governments have implemented COVID-19 relief packages. They vary across countries and regions. IPS spoke to a family in Brooklyn, New York, who has opted to send home barrels of groceries, household and hygiene products to their loved ones in Saint Lucia. Lawmakers on the Caribbean island went to parliament in June and amended a bill that provides for late November to early January duty free concessions on barrels of items for household use. They announced that those tax relief measures would now extend from June 2020 to January 2021, in order to assist the most vulnerable and the thousands of Saint Lucians who lost their jobs.

“We took advantage of the duty-free and were able to send food home. We sent cleaning products and items like hand sanitisers, thermometers, masks and months of supplies that are expensive or not available back home,” one family told IPS.

Recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to be much slower than the 2009 global financial crisis. The report’s joint analysis has concluded that an effective response and recovery plan must take into consideration the link between food security and migration.

Excerpt:

On average, migrant workers send between 200 and 300 dollars home every one or two months. Contrary maybe to popular belief, this represents only 15 per cent of what they earn: the rest –85 per cent – stays in the countries where they earn the money. Credit: IFAD/Christine Nesbitt.

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jun 19 2019 (IPS)

Straight to the point: while right and far-right politicians keep marketing their image with intensive campaigns of hatred, discrimination and stigmatisation against migrants, 200 million migrant workers worldwide will sacrifice over half a trillion dollars from their hard-earned money, to rescue 800 million members of their impoverished families. And that’s only this year 2019.

This huge amount adds up to more than three times the level of Official Development Assistance (ODA) and surpasses Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), stated the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) ahead of the 16 June 2019 International Day of Family Remittances.

In fact, IFAD’s president, Gilbert F. Houngbo, on 14 June announced that remittances from international migrant workers to their families are expected to rise to over 550 billion dollars in 2019, up some 20 billion from 529 billion in 2018.

An impressive figure given that it corresponds to only 15 per cent of migrant workers’ earnings who total around 200 million out of the world’s estimated 260 million migrants.

An essential fact that is most often under-reported or even unreported at all is that 85 per cent of their earnings remain in the host countries.

“Behind the numbers are the individual remittances of 200 dollars or 300 dollars that migrants send home regularly so that their 800 million family members can meet immediate needs and build a better future back home. Half of these flows are sent to rural areas, where they count the most,” IFAD’s chief explained.

Pakistani migrant workers build a skyscraper in Dubai. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

8.5 trillion dollars in just 15 years

An additional staggering fact is that if current trends continue, it is projected that 8.5 trillion dollars will be transferred to families in developing countries over the 15-year life of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

”By then, it is estimated that over 2 trillion dollars (on average 25 per cent of remittances received) will have been saved or invested. If leveraged effectively, remittances can have an unprecedented multiplier effect on sustainable development,” said Houngb.

Five big facts

Here are 5 facts provided, among others, by the UN about the transformative power of these often small – yet major – contributions to sustainable development worldwide:

1. About one in nine people globally are supported by funds sent home by migrant workers

Currently, about one billion people in the world – or one in seven – are involved with remittances, either by sending or receiving them. Around 800 million in the world – or one in nine people– are recipients of these flows of money sent by their family members who have migrated for work.

2. 2. What migrants send back home represents only 15 per cent of what they earn

On average, migrant workers send between 200 and 300 dollars home every one or two months. Contrary maybe to popular belief, this represents only 15 per cent of what they earn: the rest –85 per cent – stays in the countries where they actually earn the money, and is re-ingested into the local economy, or saved.

3. Remittances remain expensive to send

These international money transfers tend to be costly: on average, globally, currency conversions and fees amount to 7 per cent of the total amounts sent.

4. The money received is key in helping millions out of poverty

Although the money sent represents only 15 per cent of the money earned by migrants in the host countries, it is often a major part of a household’s total income in the countries of origin and, as such, represents a lifeline for millions of families.

In fact, it is estimated that three quarters of remittances are used to cover essential things: put food on the table and cover medical expenses, school fees or housing expenses. In addition, in times of crises, migrant workers tend to send more money home to cover loss of crops or family emergencies.

The rest, about 25 per cent of remittances – representing over 100 billion dollars per year – can be either saved or invested in asset building or activities that generate income, jobs and transform economies, in particular in rural areas.

5. Half of the money sent goes straight to rural areas, where the world’s poorest live

Around half of global remittances go to rural areas, where three quarters of the world’s poor and food insecure live. It is estimated that globally, the accumulated flows to rural areas over the next five years will reach $1 trillion.

Why do migrants migrate

Having said that, a harsh question arises: why all these millions and millions of human beings have been forced to abandon their homes and families to fall prey to smugglers, deadly voyages, separation of their children, detention, torture, forced repatriation, etcetera?

Let alone being victims of human traffickers who buy and sell them as just human flesh merchandise to feed the business of prostitution, child recruitment as soldiers, slave-labourers and even for trading their organs?

Three chief reasons lay behind most of the migrants need to flee:

•   Impoverishment: Most migrants and refugees proceed from former European colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, from countries which had been practically enslaved under European military occupation and which, since their formal independence, have been easy prey to intensive exploitation by big private business. One of the dramatic consequences of that occupation and the ongoing exploitation is the deepening impoverishment of native populations, a fact that has been aggravated by the dominant neo-liberalism-led ‘globalisation.’

•   Conflicts: most of the around 40 ongoing armed conflicts are due to either the fictitious splitting of nations and compact ethnic communities through aribitrarian borders imposed by former European colonisers, or more recently directly or indirectly fuelled by the voracious exploitation of natural resources by huge translational private business,

•   Climate crisis: the growing wave of unusual droughts, floods, loss of harvests, of homes and lives, which is caused by climate change, which an immense number of the migrants’ countries of origin did no generate.

Just know that a whole continent like Africa, which is home to around 1,2 billion human beings, has contributed only 4 per cent to greenhouse gas emissions, while bearing the brunt of more than 80 per cent of its dramatic consequences.

These three main reasons lay behind the forced migration of so many millions of human beings, should suffice to explain why the number of people fleeing exploitation, wars and climate change-driven disasters, need to search for other places to feel safer or simply just survive, while working hard to help their families also survive.

NOTE: This article is a follow up to previous two reports of the same author, both published in Human Wrongs Watch: The Most Expensive 529 Billion Dollars, which details the huge human and economic cost of migrants remittances, and The Hellish Cycle focusing specifically on the case of Southeast Asia migrants.

Baher Kamal is Director and Editor of Human Wrongs Watch

In the popular municipality of Estación Central, in Santiago de Chile, a Haitian hairdresser has established a barber shop where Creole is spoken and the nationals are served. At the end of this year, migrants will have sent 466 billion dollars to family and friends in their countries of origin. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Nov 30 2018 (IPS)

At the end of this year, migrants will have sent 466 billion dollars to family and friends in their countries of origin. Despite this record amount these remittances have little to no effect on the dire economic state of affairs in those home countries. Earlier this week in Brussels, a group of experts convened to think of ways to make the sent money work in a way that benefits more than just a few lucky families. 

Though relatively stable as a percentage of the world population, there have never been more migrants than today. Out of the one billion people that moved away from their places of birth, some 258 million have found a place abroad while 760 million remained within their own states. Despite it being a heated political debate in the global North, only one third of all international migration is directed from South to North. The overall majority, some 100 million people, move between states in the global South.

These numbers were presented by Laura Palatini, Belgium and Luxemburg’s mission chief for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Palatini was the first of five speakers on an international conference, organised by IOM, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), several Brussels municipalities and local and international NGOs at the Brussels Parliament this Tuesday.

These one billion migrants each year send home approximately 466 billion dollars. “It is said that if remittances would be country, it would have the right to claim its seat in the G20,” says Valéry Paternotte of Réseau Financité, a Belgian network of organisations for ethical finance, “It is three times the annual budget of development aid world-wide.”

But according to Paternotte, the numbers need a closer look. “In Belgium for instance, 38 percent of all remittances are destined to neighbour France and 4 percent for Luxembourg while Senegal, Congo, Rwanda and Bangladesh together account for less than one percent.” Then again, the estimate of 466 billion is most probably an underestimation, as not all countries are being taken into account, second and third generations are not included, nor are informal remittances – migrants travelling with envelopes, small transfer agencies and possible other unknown practices of sending money home.

Nevertheless the 6.4 billion flowing annually into Morocco is just as important for the economy as the entire phosphate sector or tourism. The nine billion dollars sent to Congo by members of the diaspora accounts for twice the country’s annual budget. Remittances are an indispensable source of income for 750 million people worldwide. Research in 71 developing countries indicates that a 10 percent rise in remittances leads to a 3.5 percent drop in the number of people living with less than one dollar a day.

Researchers on the topic agree that remittances are a stable source of income for developing countries that are not affected by economic shocks or cycles of regression and growth. Moreover, they are the first form of help that reaches regions affected by natural disasters or epidemics. This became most evident with the last ebola crisis in Sierra Leone and the recent earthquake in Nepal.

But as of yet, the money flow doesn’t lead to structural changes in the countries of origins whose economies remain in a dire state. “The first obstacle is that the money received is spent, not invested in the local economy,” says Paternotte, “and this is understandable. In the world’s least developed countries less than a quarter of adults have access to a bank account. The received money is kept under the mattress. That is a very practical but very important barrier to saving and investing in the local economy.”

Traditional banks seem not to be interested in putting up branches in developing areas, let alone rural zones in those developing areas, the expert explains. “Moreover, social projects – schools, hospitals, cooperative farms – aren’t invested in due to poor returns. That is a characteristic of the system and not very different in our own country,” the Belgian national says.

Besides that, lots of migrant communities lack financial literacy, which together with cultural factors leads to inefficiency. Pedro de Vasconcelos, manager of the Financing Facility for Remittances at IFAD in Rome, gives the example of a Filipino community in Italy.

“We found out that they couldn’t say no when someone called for money,” he says, “it’s in their culture. It was a revelation for many of them when we told them that you can refuse when there’s not a good reason. Then we began to save. Two hundred out of every thousand euros, which is a lot. With all these savings we started investing in rural areas around their home town which used to be an agricultural area but now had become an importer of food. From three farms for laying hens we quickly went to five. On Facebook, the diaspora followed everything that happened in the homeland.”

Several of the investors in Italy moved back after the project turned out a success. “Because they see that there are possibilities there. That work can be created. The Philippine government is now looking at how this project can be scaled, to achieve real economic growth through the Diaspora.”

De Vasconcelos’ example shows that remittances can play a role in reversing or even stemming migration. But according to agronomist Jean-Jacques Schul of the Belgian NGO, IDAY International, an important factor should not be overlooked: the involvement of the local government.

“Remittances carry a risk,” Schul says, “because thanks to the money from abroad, the government does not have to listen to its citizens. They can survive without the government’s support. And without a government that listens to its citizens, nobody sees a future in their own country. Which makes them leave. It is a vicious circle. ”

The solution? When it comes to any kind of transfers of funds to the South, civil society and the government must be encouraged to start a constructive dialogue.

“Provide a policy in which remittances, or at least a part of those, serve to start up projects together with the government. If development aid is made available, make sure that citizens’ movements can check where that money is going. That is hardly the case now. Only with collaboration between citizens’ movements and the government will sustainable change occur. Nobel Prize winners Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton have been proclaiming this for years, why don’t we listen?”

A grocery in Nankar, northern Bangladesh. Credit: Rafiqul Islam Sarker/IPS

By Rafiqul Islam Sarker
NANKAR, Bangladesh, Jan 20 2018 (IPS)

Wahid Haider talks about his son’s departure to Italy almost seven years ago without regret or hesitation. Haider has not seen Nayeem, now 30 years old, since he left Nankar in search of better economic prospects, travelling through Romania, where he spent several months, before entering Italy.

Wahid, a former chair of a Union Parishad (Union Council) and an influential person in the community, told IPS in Mithapukur how in 2008, the army-led caretaker government demolished his son’s shop in Nankar village, along with many other shops, in a drive to push out unauthorized commercial businesses.

Nankar has a population of about 3,000 people, most of them dependent on agriculture. It is in Mithapukur Upazilla (sub-district), south of Rangpur, a northern city some 300 km from the capital of Dhaka, Bangladesh where in the commercial section of the sub-district, prices are as high as 600,000 dollars for one acre of land.

Having lost his source of income after the shop was demolished, Nayeem contacted his cousin Ahmed Mustafa in Venice, Italy who had been living there for many years. Nayeem was impressed that Ahmed earned about 1,500 Euro per month as a street vendor and decided to try his luck entering Italy. With help from Ahmed, who managed to sponsor an Italian visa for him on training in electronics, Nayeem made his way to Italy, making an initial stop in Romania.

To organize this visa and Nayeem’s air ticket, Ahmed charged approximately 15,000 dollars, which was paid by Nayeem’s father-in-law. Nayeem was barely 20 when he married Zulekha and had two children. Zulekha’s father was not cash-rich but owned some land that he agreed to sell at the urging of his daughter, his only child, to finance Nayeem’s voyage to Italy.

Nayeem left Nankar some seven years ago. His children are now 10 and 7 years old and they, along with their mother Zulekha, have not seen Nayeem since. But with the money Nayeem sends home through a local bank, Zulekha lives in a rented house in Nankar. In the meantime, Nayeem has been working as a street vendor selling trinkets in Venice. In the summers, he shifts to the beaches for the lucrative tourist season.

He has a legal visa to stay, which requires renewal every six months. But under his current status, he cannot leave Italy to see his wife, children and parents in Bangladesh as he won’t be able to enter Italy again.

Nayeem’s father Wahid says, “That’s not a problem at all. She is a good girl and she can wait a few more years for her husband.”

Zulekha might feel differently, but IPS was not able to reach her to seek her views on what this means for her future – an absentee husband with no assurance that he will be able to get permission to visit her and his children in the near future.

Wahid told IPS another story about Imran, a 34-year-old man from a neighbouring village who crossed the Mediterranean on a boat but died of fatigue and dehydration on arrival in Italy some two hand half years ago. His father Alim Uddin, 80, and mother Roushanara, 65, refuse to accept their son’s death.

IPS spoke to Alim Uddin and Roushanara at their home in Sathibari, an adjoining village of Nakar. “Can you tell me if Imran is well?” Alim Uddin asked.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 199 people have already died this year attempting the dangerous Mediterranean crossing.

In 2017, IOM reported that 171,635 migrants and refugees entered Europe by sea, with just under 70 per cent arriving in Italy and the rest divided between Greece, Cyprus and Spain. IOM’s Missing Migrants Project (MMP) reported a total of 3,116 deaths in the Mediterranean last year.

Imran was the second of seven siblings – three brothers and four sisters. Agriculture was his family’s sole livelihood. He used to support his father by cultivating crops like rice, maize and potatoes on two acres of their ancestral land in the village. But the income wasn’t enough to support the family, consisting of eleven people including Imran’s wife and daughter.

In the hope of earning more money, Imran flew to Libya with a valid visa in 2007. As an unskilled labourer, he was earning about 200 dollars a month. He worked with a construction company in Tripoli for five years and saved 2,500 dollars over that period.

But Imran lost his job soon after the civil war erupted in Libya and he faced a tough situation to stay in Tripoli.

“Meanwhile, many of Imran’s colleagues left Libya for Italy by crossing the Mediterranean,” Imran’s widow Roksana told IPS.

Akbar Ali, a man from Sylhet, an eastern district of Bangladesh who lived in Libya, offered Imran a trip by sea to Italy at a cost of 1,000 dollars, said Roksana. He agreed and set out by boat in 2012 along with 400 other people from Asian and African countries.

A few days later, “I received a phone call from an unknown telephone number and someone at the other end informed me that Imran had died of fatigue and dehydration on arrival at the Italian port,” Roksana said. “He never came home, not even his dead body that we could see and bury.”

Imran and Roksana had been married for only one year before he went to Libya. She gave birth to a girl the same year he left. They named her Rebeka Begum. She is now ten years old. Rebeka doesn’t know what her father looked like.

Although a widow, Roksana did not leave her father-in-law’s house after Imran died. She said, “I could have remarried but did not do so because of my little daughter. Fortunately, my in-laws are good people. Their granddaughter is a solace for them now that their son is gone forever.”

Roksana ekes out a living laboring in the fields at Sathibari.

“I’ve no alternative to hard work in the field,” she said. She choked up when she told IPS about another relative from Nankar who after spending four days at sea, was detained by the Italian Coast Guard and was eventually moved to a camp. Later, he was able to get all his papers in order and was granted a permit to stay. He is now visiting his family near Mithapukur and making arrangements to take his wife to Italy.

Press Conference on IFAD report at the UN Foundation (06/14/17)

By Roshni Majumdar
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 15 2017 (IPS)

A new report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) says the flow of money from migrants—commonly located in developed countries—to their families in lower income countries has doubled over the last decade.

Dubbed the remittance flow, it increased by 51 percent—from 296 billion dollars in 2007 to 445 billion in 2016—lifting families out of poverty across the world.

Migrants in the United States typically send the largest amount of money, making the U.S. the biggest benefactor, closely followed by Saudi Arabia and Russia, according to the report.

In fact, the top ten countries, largely in Europe and the Gulf Council, account for half of the annual flows.

The increase in flow of money brings good news. First, it increases the leverage of migrant workers all over the world. Second, it boosts sustainable development in countries which benefit from the money, notably China, India and the Philippines, which tops this list.

Asia receives nearly 55 percent of the total money sent from developed countries.

The money sent is used by families to achieve personal goals, such as improving healthcare, educa-tion and food security. This is why, despite the seemingly staggering numbers, Gilbert F. Houngbo, the President of IFAD, said “It is not about the money being sent home, it is about the impact on people’s lives.”

Still, even if the leading blocs account for half of the flow, they represent a tiny fraction of their country’s GDP.

For instance, migrant earnings in the U.S. account for almost 4 percent of the GDP, while the money they send back to their families represents only 0.65 percent of the GDP.

Generally, 85 percent of a migrant’s income remains within the host country.

The value of the money sent back cannot be underestimated—most families rely on this income, which can make up to 60 percent of the household income in rural areas.

However, many criticize the high costs of transactions, especially in rural areas which receive the bulk of remittances.

Pedro de Vasconcelos, lead author of the IFAD report speaks at a press conference (06/14/17).

Speaking about the prospect of building better infrastructure to ensure easy and cheap flow of money, Pedro de Vasconcelos, the lead author of the report, told IPS that it was particularly im-portant in rural areas, “where remittances count the most, and where we can have them count more.” He added that “simply opening a saving account can transform the lives of people” and can go a long way towards eradicating poverty.

In the end, there is a lot of room for innovation and growth as the demand for migrant labour will continue to grow in developed countries.

To understand the scale of this flow, it is important to understand the number of people involved: one in every seven people in the world is directly impacted—either as a sender or a beneficiary. This means that a billion people in the world are involved in the transaction in some way. Even when times get tough, as during the financial crisis of 2008, remittance flows remained steady.

There are two overarching reasons that explain the growth of the flow, and why it’ll continue.

First, it reflects the demand for migrant labour as populations in high-income countries grow older with advances in medicine.

Second, migrant workers are committed to make ends meet for their families at home, and readily make sacrifices—such as eating fewer meals—to ensure money they can send home. This is why this corridor of money has been increasingly referred to as “Family Remittances.”

The flow of money has greatly exceeded migratory flow, which only grew by 28 percent over the last decade. This means that there are as many 800 million people across the world who are reliant on migrant workers, who are about 200 million in number.

Pakistani migrant workers on a construction site in Dubai. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Irfan Ahmed
DUBAI, Sep 21 2016 (IPS)

In the Al Quoz industrial area of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a number of medium and large-sized buses can be spotted transporting workers clad in company uniforms to distant worksites early in the morning. In the evening or, in certain cases, late at night, these workers are brought back to labour camps in the same buses.

At the camps, the migrant workers barely have time to rest before the next workday. They huddle inside small, dingy quarters and the number of occupants may rise up to eight per room. With their belongings stuffed into every corner, they hardly have space to move and are vulnerable to catch infections from each other. Their day starts too early as they have to cook their food to carry to the site and ends late due to long journeys amid frequent traffic jams.“The role of the state becomes important here as migrant workers in the Gulf are voiceless. Without the right to associate and demand rights, they are as helpless as one can think of.” -- Khalid Mahmood of the Lahore-based Labour Education Foundation

The workers at a typical camp hail from different countries, so the common practice is to allocate shared rooms according to their nationalities. At a typical labour camp there can be a Pakistani block, Indian block, Nepali block or Bangladeshi block.

Javed Iqbal, 29, lives in one such labour camp. He has come to Dubai from Pakistan through a middleman who sold a work visa to his family for Rs 300,000 (about 3,000 dollars). The family borrowed money from relatives to complete this transaction. Having not attended school beyond grade 4, Javed cannot read and write and couldn’t find a job in his home country. The same lack of education and any proper skill set makes him ineligible for regular recruitment abroad as well.

The only option he had was to come to Dubai on whatever salary he could get and gradually build his fortune there. But things did not work out well and he is stuck in a construction sector job that pays a paltry 240 dollars per month. He says it’s hard for him to cover his personal expenses, let alone send anything back home. Meanwhile, he is under immense pressure from his family to pay back the loan that bought his visa.

A labour camp in Dubai. Workers are allocated sleeping quarters based on nationality, and the number of occupants may be as high as eight per room. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

Javed is not the only one in this situation. There are thousands of Pakistanis like him who are told fairytales about career growth prospects in UAE but once there, nightmares await them. These workers are mostly unskilled and employed in the construction sector, which is not performing well in the oil-rich countries of the Gulf region. With oil prices down in the global market, the government is facing difficulty clearing payments of construction companies.

“I was inspired by the story of a village fellow who went to Dubai as a mason three decades ago. Now he owns two houses and several acres of land in the village,” Muhammad Iqbal, a migrant worker from Gujranwala district, told IPS. Everybody in the village wants to emulate him regardless of the situation that exists in the Gulf region, he adds.

Dependence on remittances

Pakistan relies heavily on remittances to build on its foreign reserves and they constitute around 6.9 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to a World Bank report. More than half of the remittances come from two countries – Saudi Arabia and Dubai. There are around 1.3 million Pakistani workers in the UAE and close to 4.3 million in Saudi Arabia.

In the last fiscal year, the country received remittances worth 19.9 billion dollars, but in July they dropped by 20 per cent as compared to the figure of the same month last year. There are speculations that layoffs and non-payment of salaries to migrant workers in this region are the cause of this drop in volume. Some fear there is more to come as a large number of Pakistani workers could face job losses due to the slump in the construction sector where they are mostly employed.

But Ashraf Mehmood Wathra, governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, argues it is a temporary phenomenon and things will improve as these countries are revising their economic policies to offset the impact of the crash in oil prices.

Skills matter

A major problem with Pakistani migrant labour in Gulf region is that it is not diversified and has remained confined to mostly one or two sectors. The Pakistani government has long ignored this aspect and left the shaping of international labour migration trends at the mercy of the private sector. Of late, following the layoffs of around 9,000 Pakistani workers by construction companies in Saudi Arabia, there is a realization that an overwhelming dependence on this sector will not be a safe bet in the future.

Zahid Mahmood, General Manager at Material Lab, a leading material testing company in Dubai, says Pakistani labourers are considered matchless for working in the construction sector. “They can survive in the worst possible working conditions and endure extreme heat,” he told IPS.

He said that Pashtuns from the northwestern part of the country are high in demand for this very reason. But this, he says, has a negative side as well because little has been done to capture share in other sectors. These workers may be employed for as low as 210 dollars per month, although masons, carpenters, fabricators, supervisors, welders and other skilled workers can earn more.

Zahid says there are very few Pakistanis in the services sector, which is dominated by Indians due to their skills and better educational status. There are very few Pakistani security guards or hospitality sector workers despite the existence of a heavy demand for these professions.

The country will have to devise a proper human resource development strategy to stay in the highly competitive and evolving labour market of the Gulf region, he adds. He is also worried about the low wages paid to Pakistani workers and says there should be official efforts to set a minimum benchmark, for example, 300 dollars per month.

Dilip Ratha, a World Bank economist who recently authored a Migration and Development brief, points out that the Gulf region construction boom funded by oil-based revenue is over and now there is less need for unskilled migrant labour. These economies are also trying to create space to employ their own nationals – something that will further shrink the job market for foreign nationals.

Government initiatives

Though there is a lot to be done, the government of Pakistan has announced certain initiatives that it claims will promote safe and decent employment for its migrant workers. These include production of trained, skilled and certified workforce with enhanced employability.

Irfan Qaisar, chairman of the Technical Education & Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA) of the most populous Punjab province, told IPS that they have a developed a Labour Management Information System (LMIS) that maintains the latest information about local and foreign job markets. He says the focus of this government-run institution is on producing demand-based labour and doing away with the unplanned policies of the past.

TEVTA is training people for the hospitality industry, drivers with the help of national Motorway Police and security guards. “Recently, we have announced training of 50,000 security guards on modern lines and with the support country’s law enforcing authorities,” he said. “I am quite hopeful they will be high in demand in international markets once trained on these lines.”

Way forward

Government efforts notwithstanding, there are calls for active engagement between labour-sending and receiving countries to improve the lives of migrant workers. Expecting desired results without government-to-government level negotiations is asking for too much, especially in monarchies.

Khalid Mahmood, director of the Labour Education Foundation (LEF), a Lahore-based labour rights group, put it this way: “The role of the state becomes important here as migrant workers in Gulf are voiceless. Without the right to associate and demand rights, they are as helpless as one can think of.”

Migrants at Lampedusa, Italy. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Jun 15 2015 (IPS)

One in five migrant workers – about 50 million people – lives and works in Europe, making the region home to a quarter of global remittance flows, according to a new report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Migrants living in Europe sent 109.4 billion dollars in remittances to lower-income European countries and to the developing world last year.

And the actual figures for many countries could be substantially higher than official estimates due to the frequent use of informal channels to transfer money.

“We need to make sure that this hard-earned money is sent home cheaply but more importantly that it helps families build a better future for themselves, particularly in the poorest rural communities where it counts the most,” said Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of IFAD, about the report’s findings.

IFAD estimates that globally 80 billion dollars could be available for investment if migrant workers and receiving families in rural areas were given more options to use their funds.

Of the total remittances sent by migrants living in Europe, about one-third (36.5 billion dollars) remained within 19 countries in Europe, while two-thirds (72.9 billion dollars) were received by poor families in over 50 developing countries outside Europe.

The report comes at a time when Europe is taking heavy criticism over its policies towards migrants, especially with respect to the Syrian refugee crisis.

In the last two decades, the Mediterranean – the most lethal of Europe’s barriers against irregular migration – has claimed nearly 20,000 migrant lives.

Figures for 2014 and this year indicate that the phenomenon is on the rise, with more migrant deaths than ever before.

However, people to continue to brave the perilous crossing, or over land borders, and an estimated 150 million people worldwide now benefit from remittances coming from Europe.

The report says that most remittances are spent on staples like food, clothing, shelter, medicine and education. However, studies indicate that up to 20 per cent of remittances could be available for savings, investments or to repay loans for small businesses.

With 40 per cent of remittances going to rural areas, the report also suggests that remittances play a critical role in the transformation of vulnerable communities. In fact, remittances are estimated to equal at least three times official development assistance to developing countries.

“The immense potential of remittances for development is still largely underutilized but it is within our capacity to make every hard-earned euro, ruble, pound, krona, or Swiss franc sent home count even more,” said Nwanze.

Western Europe and the Russian Federation (26 total sending countries) are the main sources of migrant remittances in Europe.

The top six European sending countries account for 75 per cent of the flows: the Russian Federation (20.6 billion dollars), the United Kingdom (17.1 billion), Germany (14 billion), France (10.5 billion), Italy (10.4 billion) and Spain (9.6 billion).

“Remittances offer a unique opportunity to bring millions into the formal financial sector,” said Pedro De Vasconcelos, co-author of the report and Coordinator of the Financing Facility for Remittances at IFAD.

“Given the frequent interaction between remittance senders, receivers and the financial system, remittances could spark a long-term and life-changing relationship.”

While significant progress has been made over the last few years to lower transfer costs, De Vasconcelos added that more could be done through increased competition. By reducing transfer costs to 5 per cent, as per the G20 objective set in 2009, an additional 2.5 billion dollars would be saved for migrant workers and their families back home.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Credit: Oxfam/Petterik Weggers

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, Feb 24 2015 (IPS)

After twin suicide bombings at a popular Mogadishu hotel last week that killed 25 and wounded 40, news reporters were seen swarming through the city, spotlighting the victims, the assassins, the motives and the official response.

This left actor Barkhad Abdi, who played opposite Tom Hanks in the movie Captain Phillip and was making his first visit to Somalia since age seven, unlikely to have the usual paparazzi following his every move.Ordinary Somalis have been facing life without a lifeline since the shutdown of money transfers that have been key in rebuilding Somali lives.

Yet Abdi, a Goodwill Ambassador for Adeso, a Kenya-based development charity, was there to bring attention to the plight of ordinary Somalis, facing life without a lifeline since the shutdown of money transfers that have been key in rebuilding Somali lives.

The money – over a quarter of a billion dollars from the U.S. alone – comes from families in the diaspora, the charity Oxfam America reports.

“The small amounts of money that members of the Somali diaspora send their loved ones comprise Somalia’s most important source of revenue,” wrote OxfamAmerica on its website. “Remittances to Somalia represent between 25 and 45 percent of its economy and are greater than humanitarian aid, development aid, and foreign direct investment combined.

“Remittances empower women and help give young men alternatives to fighting in armed groups. The money is the country’s lifeline.”

Because Somalia lacks a formal banking system, small companies were established, run by money transfer operators who could safely and legally deliver money to relatives and friends in Somalia. These companies used bank accounts to wire the money but most of those banks have shut down including the California-based Merchants Bank just last month.

According to the banks, around one percent of money transfer firms could not be properly investigated and pass due diligence checks by the federal currency control office. Yet this decision ignored the 99 percent of money transfer businesses which have been operating in this sector for decades.

Most money wired to Somalia originates in the U.S.

The move by Merchants Bank to pull the plug on the money transfer network could force law-abiding U.S.-based Somalis to choose between three options, according to Professor Laura Hammond of the UK School of Oriental and African Studies.

“They can stop sending money to their relatives living in the Horn of Africa. They can try to find alternative legal channels, but as a result are likely to be charged much higher transfer rates, reducing the amount of money their relatives receive. Or they can use unregulated and illegal ways to send money.”

Opinion writer George Monbiot put it more strongly. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which triggered the bank closings, is, he charged: “The world’s most powerful terrorist recruiting sergeant… Its decision to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in one of the poorest, most troubled places on Earth could resonate around the world for decades.

“During the 2011 famine in Somalia, British Somalis saved hundreds of thousands of lives by remitting money … reaching family members before aid agencies could mobilise,” he wrote in The Guardian newspaper.

“Government aid agencies then used the same informal banking system – the hawala – to send money to 1.5 million people, saving hundreds of thousands more. Today, roughly 3 million of Somalia’s 7 million people are short of food. Shut off the funds and the results are likely to be terrible.

“Money transfers from abroad also pay for schooling, housing, business start-ups and all the means by which a country can lift itself out of dependency and chaos,” he continued. “Yes, banking has its uses, as well as its abuses. Compare this pointless destruction with the US government’s continued licensing of HSBC.”

Alternative, if more expensive, means of sending money legally, for instance through Western Union, are possible for some but not for people sending money to smaller towns and rural areas in Somalia and other parts of the Horn, where Western Union and smaller companies that still send remittances do not have a presence.

Instead, according to Oxfam, a large proportion of the 200 million dollars sent from the U.S. to Somalia each year will be forced underground. People will send money the way they did before Somali money transfer companies were formed: in cash, stashed in bags and pockets, or in other ways that will be impossible to track.

Meanwhile, as Abdi made a tour of his country of birth to see the impact of the diaspora dollars, he came in for a shock.

“Based on what you hear on the news, I expected to see a shattered country,” Abdi recalled from his visit. “But what I saw instead was a place full of resilience, entrepreneurship and hope.”

Accompanied by his sponsor, the Nairobi-based Adeso service agency, he said he met with young men who were learning how to become electricians to take part of the rebuilding of their country, and with women who were using newly acquired skills to come together and open successful businesses.

“When I was in Somalia I didn’t just see conflict, drought, and hunger,” Abdi said. “I saw people building a better future for themselves. And part of the reason why they’ve been able to do so is because of the remittances they receive from overseas. Let’s not threaten that lifeline and risk reversing all the gains that are being made.”

Hawala is one of Africa’s great success stories, wrote Monbiot. “But it can’t work unless banks in donor nations are permitted to transfer funds to Somalia.”

The report, “Hanging on by a Thread,” by Oxfam, Adeso and the Global Center on Cooperative Security, can be found on the Oxfam website.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Migrant workers ride in a bus through northern Kazakhstan in May 2014 on their way to find employment in Russia. As the value of the Russian ruble continues to fall, labour migrants from Central Asia say they are less inclined to work in Russia. Credit: Konstantin Salomatin

By EurasiaNet Correspondents
TASHKENT, Dec 26 2014 (EurasiaNet)

Sardor Abdullayev, a construction worker from eastern Uzbekistan, had planned to go to Russia next spring to join relatives working construction sites in the Volga River city of Samara. But now, he says, “I am better off staying at home and driving a taxi.”

As the value of the Russian ruble plummets and Russia’s economy tumbles into recession, millions of Central Asian migrants have seen their real wages dwindle. On top of that, Russian authorities are introducing new, expensive regulations for foreigners who wish to work legally in the country.The return of tens of thousands of labour migrants and the prospect of them joining the vast pool of the already unemployed is making some officials nervous.

Some Uzbek migrants in Russia now say they are contemplating a return home. Such an influx of returnees could have uncertain ramifications for their impoverished country.

According to Russia’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, there are about three million Uzbek labour migrants in Russia, the most from any Central Asian country. Others estimate the number of Uzbeks could be twice that.

Unofficial estimates put their remittances in 2013 at the value of roughly a quarter of Uzbekistan’s GDP. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are even more dependent on labour migrants, with remittances contributing the equivalent of 30 percent and roughly 50 percent to their economies, respectively.

Data from Russia’s Central Bank shows that the funds Uzbeks send home dipped nine percent year-on-year during the third quarter of 2014. Analysts predict the fall will continue. The Russian business daily Kommersant estimates that remittances fell 35 percent month-on-month in October alone.

That was before the ruble, which has steadily fallen since Russian troops seized Crimea in February, nosedived earlier in December. Thanks to Western sanctions, the low price of oil, and systemic weaknesses in Vladimir Putin’s style of crony capitalism, the currency has lost roughly 50 percent against the dollar this year. Most migrants convert their rubles into dollars to send home.

“My salary was 18,000 rubles a month, which several months ago would be equivalent to 500 dollars. Now, it is less than 300 dollars,” Sherzod, a 29-year-old from the Ferghana Valley who was working at a shop in Samara, told EurasiaNet.org.

Sherzod returned home in November and he is not planning to go back to Russia. “The salary is too low.”

It is not only falling wages that labour migrants must consider. Starting on Jan. 1, Russia will require labour migrants to pass tests on Russian language, history and legislation basics, as well as undergo a medical examination and buy health insurance (the entire package will cost migrants up to 30,000 rubles (currently about 500 dollars), by some accounts).

The Moscow city government is also more than tripling the fee for work permits, from 1,200 rubles monthly to 4,000 rubles (currently 64 dollars).

Citizens of countries that are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which will come into force on Jan. 1, will not be affected by the new regulations. That adds an incentive – some might say pressure – for migrant-feeder countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to join. (Kyrgyzstan is hoping to join in early 2015).

Sherzod, the Uzbek labourer, says that faced with falling real incomes, many Uzbeks working in Russia find themselves in a quandary. Thousands are eager to return home. But many simply do not have funds to buy a return ticket. Others worry about being seen in their native villages as failures.

Russian media outlets have quoted a migrant community leader who projected new requirements for guest workers, along with the falling ruble, will prompt up to 25 percent of migrants to leave Russia in the coming months.

With fewer dollars entering Uzbekistan, the Uzbek sum has fallen 15 percent against the greenback on the black market, according to several Ferghana-based shop owners interviewed by EurasiaNet.org. (The tightly managed official exchange rate has declined about 11 percent against the dollar this year. To help support it, from Jan. 1 fruit and vegetable exporters will be required to sell 25 percent of their hard currency earnings to the state at the official rate, Interfax news agency reported Dec. 18).

Despite the economic fallout from Russia, Uzbek leaders remain open to doing business with the Kremlin. During a visit to Tashkent on Dec. 10, Putin wrote off most of Uzbekistan’s 890-million-dollar debt. That deal paved the way for new loans from Moscow. It is unclear what Uzbek leader Islam Karimov promised in return.

Uzbek authorities and well-connected businessmen claim they are prepared to manage the economic fallout, and the large number of returning migrants.

“We have numerous [state-sponsored] urban regeneration construction projects across the country. One can say that the whole of Uzbekistan is a massive construction site. So if migrants return, many of them will find work,” Nazirjan, a former government official who how heads a private construction company in the Ferghana Valley, told EurasiaNet.org on condition his surname not appear in print.

On Dec. 15, President Karimov signed a decree that increased state employees’ salaries by 10 percent. Still, the return of tens of thousands of labour migrants and the prospect of them joining the vast pool of the already unemployed is making some officials nervous.

“The SNB [former KGB] has instructed local authorities and mahalla [neighbourhood] committees to create lists of labour migrants who are returning from Russia. The arrival of migrants usually increases the crime rate, and local authorities have also been instructed to be more vigilant,” a secondary school teacher in the Ferghana Valley told EurasiaNet.org.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Pensioner Jyparkul Karaseyitova says she cannot afford meat anymore. At her local bazaar in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, the price for beef has jumped nine percent in the last six weeks. And she is not alone feeling the pain of rising inflation.

Butcher Aigul Shalpykova says her sales have fallen 40 percent in the last month. “If I usually sell 400 kilos of meat every month, in September I sold only 250 kilos,” she complained.On Oct. 20 a “large player” also sold about 600 million dollars, which kept the tenge stable at about 181/dollar. Observers believe the “large player” is a state-run company with ample reserves, but are mystified that the Central Bank refuses to comment and concerned that the interventions appear to be growing.

A sharp decline in the value of Russia’s ruble since early September is rippling across Central Asia, where economies are dependent on transfers from workers in Russia, and on imports too. As local currencies follow the ruble downward, the costs of imported essentials rise, reminding Central Asians just how dependent they are on their former colonial master.

The ruble is down 20 percent against the dollar since the start of the year, in part due to Western sanctions on Moscow for its role in the Ukraine crisis. The fall accelerated in September as the price of oil – Russia’s main export – dropped to four-year lows. The feeble ruble has helped push down currencies around the region, sometimes by double-digit figures.

In Bishkek, food prices have increased by 20 to 25 percent over the past 12 months, says Zaynidin Jumaliev, the chief for Kyrgyzstan’s northern regions at the Economics Ministry, who partially blames the rising cost of Russian-sourced fuel.

In Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, remittances from the millions of workers in Russia have started to fall. In recent years, these cash transfers have contributed the equivalent of about 30 percent to Kyrgyzstan’s economy and about 50 percent to Tajikistan’s. As the ruble depreciates, however, it purchases fewer dollars to send home.

Transfers contracted in value during the first quarter of 2014 for the first time since 2009, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said last month, “primarily due” to the downturn in Russia. The EBRD added that any further drop “may significantly dampen consumer demand.”

“A weaker ruble weighs on [foreign] workers’ salaries […] which brings some pain to these countries,” said Oleg Kouzmin, Russia and CIS economist at Renaissance Capital in Moscow.

This month the International Monetary Fund said it expects consumer prices in Kyrgyzstan to grow eight percent in 2014 and 8.9 percent in 2015, compared with 6.6 percent last year. Kazakhstan and Tajikistan should see similar increases. A Dushanbe resident says he went on vacation for three weeks in July and when he returned food prices were approximately 10 percent higher. In Uzbekistan, the IMF said it expects inflation “will likely remain in the double digits.”

The one country unlikely to feel the pressure is Turkmenistan, which is sheltered from the market’s moods because it sells its chief export – natural gas – to China at a fixed price.

One factor that could sharply and suddenly affect the rest of the region is a policy shift at Russia’s Central Bank, which has already spent over 50 billion dollars this year defending the ruble. Some, like former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, have condemned efforts to prop up the currency, arguing that a weaker ruble is good for exports.

The tumbling ruble and the drop in the price of oil have helped steer Kazakhstan’s economy into a cul-de-sac, slowing growth projections, forcing officials to recalculate the budget, and suggesting the tenge is overvalued. The National Bank already devalued the currency by 19 percent in February.

On Oct. 21, National Bank Chairman Kairat Kelimbetov urged Kazakhs not to worry about another devaluation, but investors grumble that he said the same thing less than a month before February’s devaluation.

Another devaluation would send a distress signal to investors, says one Almaty banker. Astana “lost a fair bit of credibility last time,” the banker said on condition of anonymity, fearing new legislation designed to combat panic selling.

“They need to be much more careful about how they handle expectations going forward. And that is affecting how things are happening this time. People seem to be a lot more dollarised compared to a year ago and more hesitant to hold large tenge balances.”

“My personal position?” the banker added. “I’m not holding tenge.”

Meanwhile, a mystery investor has been propping up the tenge by selling hundreds of millions of dollars a day, according to Halyk Finance in Almaty. On Oct. 21 “a larger player, again offsetting the intraday trend, sold about 650 million dollars,” Halyk said in a note to investors.

On Oct. 20 a “large player” also sold about 600 million dollars, which kept the tenge stable at about 181/dollar. Observers believe the “large player” is a state-run company with ample reserves, but are mystified that the Central Bank refuses to comment and concerned that the interventions appear to be growing.

In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, central banks have dipped into limited reserves to ease their currencies’ slides. Nevertheless, the Kyrgyz som has fallen by 12 percent against the dollar this year, the Tajik somoni by about 5 percent. The World Bank said this month it expects the somoni to sink further.

Renaissance Capital’s Kouzmin cautions against the bank interventions in Central Asia, which use up reserves and widen trade deficits. “It makes sense for the national banks of these countries to let currencies depreciate to some extent to keep national competitiveness,” he told EurasiaNet.org.

Overall, the slowdown in Russia has long-term effects on Central Asia. “Portfolio investors look at the region as a whole. If you’re a CIS fund, the news on Russia has been bad and has caused the withdrawal of funds” from the region, said Dominic Lewenz of Visor Capital, an investment bank in Almaty. “So the trouble in Russia has hit things here.”

GDP growth projections have fallen markedly across the region, but nowhere near the levels seen during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Everything, it seems, depends on Ukraine. Any worsening scenario there would have “far-reaching implications” for the region, possibly on food security, according to the EBRD.

Back at the bazaar in Bishkek, Orunbay Jolchuev was forced this month to increase by 15 percent what he charges for flour. But at least sales have not been affected. “We all need flour, we all need to eat bread, macaroni, dough,” Jolchuev said. “It’s not something people can cut back even if it becomes too expensive.”

Editor’s note:  David Trilling is EurasiaNet’s Central Asia editor. Timur Toktonaliev is a Bishkek-based reporter. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Samoan mother Siera Tifa Palemene receives financial support from her sons who emigrated to Australia and New Zealand for employment opportunities. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
APIA, Sep 29 2014 (IPS)

The small South Pacific island state of Samoa, located northeast of Fiji, attracts tourists with its beaches, natural beauty and relaxed pace of life, but similar to other small nations with constrained economies, it is experiencing an exodus of young people, who are unable to find jobs.

Samoa has a net migration rate of -13.4, while in neighbouring Tonga it is -15.4 and in the western Pacific island state of Micronesia it is -15.7, in contrast to the average in small island developing states (SIDS) of -1.4.

In Apia, Samoa’s capital, Siera Tifa Palemene, a fit, active woman in her late sixties, is one of many mothers to have watched her children migrate to larger economies in the region.

Palemene presides over an extensive family, with five sons and five daughters. Four of her married sons, now in their thirties, live in Australia and New Zealand, where they work in construction and building trades, such as welding.

“A lot of our people are migrating overseas to earn a living, leaving behind their parents, so there are elderly people now who have no-one living with them." -- Tala Mauala, secretary-general of the Samoa Red Cross Society
“The salaries are too low here in Samoa and my children have large families,” Palemene told IPS, emphasising that one of her sons has seven children. “My sons want their children to get a better life because over here there are not that many opportunities.”

Contraceptive prevalence in Samoa is an estimated 29 percent and the total fertility rate is 4.2, one of the highest in the region. However, while the country has a high natural population increase rate of two percent, emigration reduces population growth to 0.8 percent. Emigrants residing predominantly in Australia, New Zealand and the United States number an estimated 120,400, which nearly matches Samoa’s population of 190,372.

Twenty years after the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994, many small island states are still striving for sustainable economic development, equality and employment growth to match bulging youth populations.

Despite stable governance, Samoa’s economy, dependent on agriculture, tourism and international development assistance, suffers from geographic isolation from main markets. It was also impacted by the 2008 global financial crisis, an earthquake and tsunami in 2009 and Cyclone Evan in 2012, which damaged infrastructure and crops.

Livelihoods for most people centre on fishing, subsistence and smallholder agriculture, as well as small commercial and informal trading, with an estimated 27 percent of households striving to meet basic needs.

International migration, therefore, is an important avenue to economic fulfilment for young educated people with increased lifestyle aspirations and there are benefits for family members living in Samoa, such as remittances.

“My sons send money to help out the family; this helps pay all the household bills, such as electricity, and to send the grandchildren here to school,” Palemene said. According to the World Bank, remittances to Samoa in 2012 were an estimated 142 million dollars, or about 23 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

As Palemene’s offspring face more expenses with their own families, remittances are becoming infrequent.

“I know they have their families to support and that life overseas is very expensive with so much to pay for, but when I need it, I call them and they give me money,” she said.

Still, Palemene, who receives a state pension of 135 tala (about 57 dollars) per month, works as a housekeeper at a guesthouse in Apia for extra income.

She supports the decision of her sons to emigrate and is keen for them to “have their own good future,” but added, “The only thing is that I worry that something might happen to them when they are so far away.”

Elderly relatives who remain in Samoa also face vulnerabilities when the social safety net traditionally provided by the younger generation in extended families is diminished.

“A lot of our people are migrating overseas to earn a living, leaving behind their parents, so there are elderly people now who have no-one living with them,” Tala Mauala, secretary-general of the Samoa Red Cross Society, observed. So, in times of natural disaster, for example, they need extra forms of community or state assistance.

There are other losses for high emigration countries such as the outward flow of educated professionals, known as the ‘brain drain’, due to the lure of higher salaries in the developed world, making it more difficult to progress much needed infrastructure and public service development. In Samoa the emigration rate of those with a tertiary education is 76.4 percent.

According to UNESCO, remittances are also primarily spent on consumption, rather than contributing to productivity, and the state’s trade deficit has grown as families in Samoa with additional disposable cash demand more imported goods.

Palemene sees her children when they pay her airfare to visit them or when they attend family events, such as weddings, in Samoa, but she doubts they will return to live permanently in the beautiful Polynesian country.

This story originally appeared in a special edition TerraViva, ‘ICPD@20: Tracking Progress, Exploring Potential for Post-2015’, published with the support of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. The contents are the independent work of reporters and authors.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Numbers or people? Migrants at Lampedusa. Credit: Ilaria Vechi/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, May 10 2014 (IPS)

On the eve of a major international conference on migration in Stockholm, a major think tank here is calling on the delegates from more than 150 countries to recognise the importance of migration in forging development policies.

“International migration and development are inextricably linked,” says a statement by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in advance of next week’s seventh Global Forum for Migration and Development (GFMD).The hope is that including migration in the post-2015 goals will generate greater political will and financial resources to address the various challenges faced by migrants.

Through remittances, the money sent from migrants back to their country of origin, and by creating new networks for technology and knowledge, migration reduces poverty and helps improve access to education, according to MPI.

Banking remittances allows recipients to mobilise their savings to earn interest, buy insurance, and build credit.

“After seven years of sending money home in Mexico, I was able to buy a house for my family,” Erick Chavez, a migrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, who lives in Washington, D.C., told IPS.

Its positive effects act on both a micro and macro level, for both countries of origin and countries of destination. Yet this powerful network for development remains widely untapped, the statement asserts.

“Migrants have been instrumental in achieving development goals,” H. E. Eva Åkerman Börje, Secretariat for the Swedish Chairmanship of the GFMD, at a teleconference last week. “But potential gains are left on the table due to poor policies.”

The three-day conference, which will feature discussions among civil-society organisations (CSOs), followed by inter-governmental meetings that will include Sweden’s Princess Victoria and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, will contribute to the ongoing process of formulating the world body’s post-2015 Development Agenda that will succeed its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The hope is that including migration in the post-2015 goals and creating relevant targets and indicators will generate greater political will and financial resources to address the various challenges faced by migrants, including the costs associated with migration, such as transportation, brokers’ fees, cultural adaptation, remittances, and migrants’ rights to health, education, and fair labour.

“States have come to appreciate the magnitude of migrants’ contributions,” said Börje. “Most directly this happens through higher earning potential and hundreds of billions of dollars of remittances each year which are invested in education, health, and housing, but also through filling needs in the labour market, encouraging trade and skills between markets, and sharing ideas and technology.”

Previous GFMDs have had success in improving national policies, including gaining greater respect for migrants’ basic rights. Some of the key goals at this year’s forum include gaining consensus to reduce the cost of both remittances and international labour recruitment.

Organisers also hope that agreement can be reached on the importance of according recognition by the host countries of the professional skills, training, and education acquired by migrants in their homelands.

Migration also benefits the country of destination, according to MPI.

“Migrants are more mobile than native born workers…so they smooth out some of the discontinuity in the labour market,” Kathleen Newland, director of MPI’s Migrants, Migration, and Development Programme, told IPS.

“Also, there are studies that show a migrant population tends to be correlated with higher trade flows between countries of origin and investment and facilitate FDI (foreign direct investment) in both directions.”

Remittances, a neglected form of foreign aid

Remittances are the main driver behind development fueled by migration. Yet the high costs of relocation, finding a job, and sending the money back home limit their potential benefits.

Erick Chavez had to borrow 3,000 dollars at a steep interest rate in order to get his visa and work in the U.S.

“Back home, I worked 12 hours a day etching designs in stone. It’s very hard work. Here I can make better money…All the money I make here I use to pay my bills, then send the rest to Mexico…I send money about every two weeks through transfers at Western Union. Some goes to help my family, like paying for my brothers’ education. Even elementary school is not really free because of inscription fees,” Chavez told IPS.

Remittances like Chavez’s are an important resource enabling their families to attend school, gain access to health services, and even afford food. The money can reduce individual and household poverty and stimulate local economies to an extent that equals or exceeds the impact of official development assistance.

In 2011, formal remittances to Spanish-speaking Latin American nations totaled more than eight times foreign aid, according to a 2013 report by the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project.

Remittances also affect a country’s macro-level economy. In El Salvador, remittances accounted for 16.5 percent of GDP in 2012. Since 2009, the World Bank has included remittance inflows in its measure of national creditworthiness.

“The important effect of remittances on a national level is often overlooked,” said Newland.

“The money comes in as foreign payment, as dollars or pounds, but is received by local people in local currency…. It has a positive impact on a country’s balance of payments and allows a country to borrow international capital.”

Research on improving remittances focuses on two things: reducing their cost and injecting them into the formal banking system.

Newland named “competition, transparency, and technology,” as the keys to reducing the cost of remittances.

“A number of countries have set up websites that show people different costs of services to help them pick the cheapest one and to place pressure on companies to meet the lowest price.”

Another policy suggestion encourages people to use banks to both deposit and transfer their earnings.

“It’s very desirable to get people to send money through formal transfers instead of by hand. Unofficial transfers don’t get counted in macro benefits,” Newland told IPS.

In addition to reaping macro benefits, banking remittances provide migrants and remittance recipients with financial inclusion.

“Basically, being able to formally save [money], own assets, have access to financially affordable institutions, earn more than subsistence wages, manage your funds well are the ingredients for economic well-being and financial independence,” Manuel Orozco,an  expert on remittances at the Inter American Dialogue, an inter-hemispheric think tank here, told IPS.

Dwindling land access in Ethiopia is a critical issue for 80 percent of the population who make a living as small farmers. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Ed McKenna
ADDIS ABABA, Dec 21 2013 (IPS)

The return of 120,000 young undocumented migrant workers from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia has sparked fears that the influx will worsen the country’s high youth unemployment and put pressure on access to increasingly scarce land.

As a result, a growing number of young Ethiopians are choosing to migrate to Sudan to circumvent an indefinite travel ban slapped by the Ethiopian government last month on Ethiopian workers traveling to Middle Eastern countries."I was forced to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I was not allowed to leave the house. It was hell." -- A 23-year-old woman who just returned from Riyadh

Esther Negash, 28, is from a family of nine that lives on a four-hectare farm dedicated to growing maize in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. She has been out of work since leaving school 10 years ago.

Negash’s family recently decided to use their savings to fund her migration to Khartoum in search of employment.

“In the last two months, there have been many people returning from Saudi Arabia. This makes things worse for people like me who cannot find work,” she told IPS.

“The rains were short this year and we did not have a good harvest. My family is large, if we don’t get a good harvest then it is very difficult. We heard about work opportunities in Sudan and thought this was our only solution.”

A large number of Ethiopians migrate every year in search of brighter economic prospects, with the Middle East being the dominant destination.

Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on undocumented foreign workers began after a seven-month amnesty period expired on Nov. 3. Since then, 120,000 Ethiopian migrants have been repatriated to Ethiopia after being corralled in a deportation camp for two months, where conditions are reportedly abject.

Many Ethiopians have reported human rights violations at the hands of their employers as well as while under the control of security forces inside the camps.

IPS spoke to a 23-year-old woman who had just arrived in Ethiopia after working as a domestic in Riyadh for two years. Her account is similar to many other experiences narrated by returnees.

“My employer would sexually abuse me and beat me. I was forced to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day. I was not allowed to leave the house. It was hell,” she said.

“They did not pay me for one year even though I worked also for their relatives. I am so tired and so sad. [But] I am so happy to be back in Ethiopia,” she told IPS.

Despite the many terrible experiences recounted by Ethiopian returnees, poverty and limited economic prospects will continue to force Ethiopian workers to migrate to countries like Sudan and overseas, says the International Labour Organisation, which is working to make regular migration methods more attractive for Ethiopians instead of using unaccountable and illegal brokers to facilitate their migration.

“After the ban, people will try any means possible to work abroad due to a lack of employment opportunities in their home country,” George Okutho, director of the ILO Country Office for Ethiopia and Somalia, told IPS.

“These returnees travelled to Saudi Arabia looking for economic opportunities with a greener pasture mindset in the hope that they could send their family remittances to raise living standards at home. However, most of the time migrant workers are acting on misinformation about the prospects and country of destination,” he said.

A lack of education and skills make Ethiopian migrants especially vulnerable to working in dangerous and exploitative working conditions, both at home and abroad, said Okutho.

“The problem is many of Ethiopia’s migrant workers are uneducated and ill-eqipped even for the domestic work they seek outside the country,” he said. “The result is that even if they go to the Middle East or Sudan, they can earn a little more than when at home, but because they are untrained they end up working in very extreme and difficult circumstances without knowing their rights. “

The Ethiopian government’s planning and logistical capacity has been overwhelmed by the rapidly rising number of returnees. An initial expectation of 23,000 returnees jumped to 120,000 in one month.

“We are engaged with the Saudi government and we are working hard to return Ethiopians stranded in Saudi Arabia,” Dina Mufti, foreign affairs spokesperson, told IPS.

“The number of Ethiopians working illegally is much higher than we anticipated. The Ethiopian government recognises that these people will need employment and so we are trying to create opportunities to assist these people, many of them young, and rehabilitate them back into their communities,” she said.

Dwindling land access in Ethiopia is a critical issue for 80 percent of the population who make a living as small farmers. In the mountainous region of Tigray, the average land availability per household is 3.5 ha.

As life expectancy increases, the potential for subdividing farm plots reduces, leaving many of Ethiopia’s youth food insecure and unemployed.

In the last year, a large number of young people have joined regular protests staged in the country’s main cities to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with high unemployment and inflation.

The inundation of over 120,000 people has the potential to further disenfranchise youth in Ethiopia, where the majority of the population of 91 million earn less than two dollars a day.

Hewete Haile, 18, lives outside Sero Tabia, a small town where youth unemployment is spiraling. Out of 2,200 households, 560 young people between 17 and 35 are unemployed, without access to land or income.

Outside the Sudanese embassy in Addis Ababa, Haile is queuing with several hundred other young girls, mostly from remote rural villages, in hopes of obtaining a visa to allow her to look for work in Khartoum.

Hewete’s friends say a domestic in Khartoum is paid eight dollars a day compared to four dollars in Addis Ababa.

“I would not be leaving my country if there was a way for me to work and make a good income here in my country,” she told IPS.

“If Sudan does not work out then I will travel from there to the Middle East. I know what happened in Saudi Arabia. I would not be leaving Ethiopia if I could get work here, but it is getting more difficult all the time,” she said.

The number of international migrants continues its inexorable climb even as reports of slave-like conditions continue to proliferate.

There are now a record high of 232 million people living and working outside their countries of origin, generating over 400 billion dollars annually in remittances, and counting."It is exceedingly unlikely the upcoming dialogue will result in anything more than nice words." -- Joseph Chamie

Migrant earnings were nearly four times the 126 billion dollars in official development assistance (ODA) from rich to poor nations last year, according to figures released by the United Nations.

The river of cash flowing into developing countries, including India, Bangladesh, Morocco, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Egypt and the Philippines, is one of the more positive effects of migration.

But what is a blessing for some is a calamity for others.

On the darker side is the continued exploitation of migrants, mostly in the Middle East, because of an increase in “slave labour” where workers suffer from low wages, inadequate medical care and atrocious working conditions.

Joseph Chamie, a former director of the U.N. Population Division who has written extensively on international migration, told IPS that while there is generally universal condemnation of such migrant “slave” labour, prohibitions are difficult to enforce, as it often takes place in households and small work sites.

One strategy to address this is the International Labour Organisation’s Domestic Worker’s Convention, aimed at stopping the abuse of domestic workers, which went into effect last month.

Speaking on the eve of a high-level dialogue on international migration and development, Abdelhamid El Jamri, chair of the Committee on the Rights of Migrant Workers (CMW), stressed Wednesday that migrants are not commodities but human beings.

“Changing patterns of migration and the exploitation and discrimination faced by migrant workers in sectors such as construction and agriculture have made protecting their rights more crucial than ever,” he said.

The International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families (ICRMW) is one of the core international human rights treaties. However, the convention, which has been in force for 10 years, has been ratified by just 47 of the U.N.’s 193 member states.

No major destination countries, among them the United States, the member states of the European Union (EU) and Gulf countries – where millions of migrants live and work – have ratified it, El Jamri said.

Asked about the U.N.’s high-level dialogue, scheduled to take place Oct. 3-4, Chamie said given current political realities and the continuing rift between labour-importing and exporting nations, “it is exceedingly unlikely the upcoming dialogue will result in anything more than nice words.”

The sharp division between the two sides, he said, relates mainly to family reunification, migrant rights, undocumented migration and responsibility sharing.

Kul Gautam, a national of Nepal and a former U.N. assistant secretary-general who was deputy executive director of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS migrant earnings are now the number one source of national income in his home country.

Remittances comprise about 25 percent of Nepal’s gross national product (GNP), or four billion dollars per year, he said.

Of the 400,000 young adults who enter the job market annually, about 300,000 seek jobs as migrant labourers. The largest concentration of Nepali migrant workers are in Qatar and Malaysia (about 400,000 each), followed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.

Gautam was critical of the harsh treatment meted out to migrant workers, specifically in Gulf countries.

He said the latest allegation of modern-day slavery comes from one of the richest countries in the world, Qatar, where large numbers of migrant labourers from one of the poorest countries in the world, Nepal, have reportedly been mistreated in a high-profile construction project to build the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup football games.

A recent investigative report by the British newspaper The Guardian paints a chilling picture of thousands of migrant labourers forced to work in inhuman conditions, without getting paid for long periods and lacking safety equipment.

The Nepalese government announced this week that 70 Nepalese migrants have died working on World Cup construction sites in Doha in the past two years.

Regarding the strengthening of international norms, Gautam said “it was hard to tell if the high-level dialogue [this week] will have significant impact – but it should.”

In Nepal, very few people have heard about it, he said, adding, “I do not think the Nepali delegation is well-prepared with specific proposals.”

“But I think migration for development is far more important than say, aid, trade, foreign direct investment, etc. in Nepal’s current context, and in the context of many countries that depend on remittances as a key source of their income.”

To be fair, he pointed out, it is certainly not the policy of the government of Qatar to practice or condone slave-like conditions. Rather, it is unscrupulous private companies, contractors and middlemen, both in Qatar and in Nepal, that are responsible for such inhuman practices.

Asked whether the United Nations was doing enough to prevent abuses, Chamie told IPS the issue of international migration has not been brought “front and centre” at the United Nations.

In contrast to other global issues, such as children, trade, environment, finance, women and ageing, all of which were the focus of U.N. world conferences, international migration is the U.N.’s “neglected stepchild”.

“It is now – and for the foreseeable future – outside the U.N. system, and addressed via the Global Forum on Migration and Development,” he said.

Asked why, he said: “The destination countries, especially the more developed countries, wish to keep it outside the United Nations.”

Bangladeshi workers at a Singapore construction site. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

By Roger Hamilton-Martin
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

New international migration figures released by the United Nations Wednesday show that more people than ever are living abroad. Around 232 million of the global population of seven billion are considered international migrants, simply defined as persons living outside their country of birth.

The statistics collected by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs show that despite having been dampened by the international economic crisis, international migration has weathered the storm and is still on the rise – if at a slower rate than in 2008 when figures were last released.

In a statement, Wu Hongbo, U.N. under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs, stressed the positive impact of migration on development, saying “migration broadens the opportunities available to individuals and is a crucial means of broadening access to resources and reducing poverty.”

The U.N. team has been preparing estimates for the last four years, with a majority of the data being drawn from national censuses. When data is missing for a country, estimates are made by extrapolating a trend based on previous censuses. This can be difficult – for example in Lebanon, the last census was taken in 1930. In Afghanistan, the government is currently trying to collect data, but it has been decades since the last census.

The United States is still the world’s most popular destination, with around 45.8 million migrants, having gained around one million migrants per year since 1990. The second largest gain since 1990 has been Saudi Arabia which has received seven million. Europe and Asia are the continents with the largest migrant populations hosting around two-thirds of all international migrants worldwide.

In 2013, 72 million international migrants were residing in Europe, compared to 71 million in Asia. The statistics show that migration is highly concentrated in 10 countries, including the U.S., Russia, Germany and Saudi Arabia.

According to Bela Hovy, chief of the Migration Section at U.N. DESA, a strong trend has been the rise in movement from countries in the Southern Asian region to countries in Western Asia.

“What’s new is enormous construction activity in West Asia, causing movement from developing countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, to move to those areas,” he told IPS. “Saudi Arabia is the biggest recipient, along with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.”

Currently, there are 2.9 million people from India living in the UAE.

This has implications for development in that remittances are becoming a big factor for people in those South Asian countries. “It’s good for migrant families and their countries. The kids staying behind are able to go to school and get healthcare,” said Hovy.

However, there have been issues with rights violations of workers in the West Asian destination countries, notably for domestic workers, often women. Human Rights Watch has expressed concern that workers are especially vulnerable in the Middle East.

“The failure to properly regulate paid domestic work facilitates egregious abuse and exploitation, and means domestic workers who encounter such abuse have few or no means for seeking redress,” the group notes.

A landmark change has been the recent drafting of the International Labour Organisation’s Domestic Workers Convention, which came into effect last week.

Hovy explained the changing face of international migration in terms of population migration from developing to developed countries.

“In 1990, most international migration was global South to global South, but since 2000 this has changed,” he said. “Now, South-North has become as common as South-South. Most international migrants originate in developing countries, but they are settling almost equally in countries of the global South as the global North.”

Nowadays, six out of 10 international migrants reside in the global North.

The population of working-age people among international migrants proved to be significantly higher than in the global population, reflecting the large movement of workers to West Asian countries. Some 74 percent of all international migrants are aged 20-64, compared to only 58 percent of the global population.

In Europe, Germany, France and the United Kingdom host the largest migrant communities. However, as a percentage of their total populations, relative to other European countries their figures were among the lowest.

Worldwide, refugees accounted for a small part of the migrant population, according to the report. The UN-DESA works closely in conjunction with The U.N. Refugee Agency to incorporate accurate figures for refugees in its migration data. Asia hosts the largest number of refugees at 10.4 million, with this number affected in recent years by conflicts and unrest in the Middle East.

A port of entry into Myanmar (Burma) from Thailand. Credit: Preethi Nallu/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
BANGKOK, May 23 2013 (IPS)

Nangnyi Foung reaches into the dryer, pulls out another pair of pants and places it on the ironing board. “I still have several more loads to go,” she says as the clock strikes nine p.m., marking the start of her 14^th hour on the shift.

She has been on her feet in this laundromat in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai since seven in the morning and had been hoping to call it a day when two more customers walked in.

She is not in a position to turn anyone away: “I need the money. My family needs me to work,” she tells IPS, her voice tinged with desperation as she begins yet another load.

Six do-it-yourself washing machines stand like sentries at the entrance of this storefront-turned-laundromat. A flight of stairs leads to Nangnyi Foung’s living quarters, where she retires late at night only to collapse in exhaustion before waking up and beginning all over again.

Originally from the Shan State in neighbouring Myanmar (formerly Burma), Nangnyi Foung came here saddled with debt.

Fleeing persistent violence in her home country, she took out loans and paid middlemen hefty sums in order to win safe passage to Thailand, where, she had heard, employment opportunities awaited.

Ten years later Nangnyi Foung is still working to pay off her debt, awaking daily to a rigorous fourteen-hour shift of washing and ironing. Her earnings after seven days’ work without a single day off amount to little over six dollars, much of which is remitted back home.

Reaching for the steaming iron Nangnyi Foung tells IPS she saves on living expenses by sleeping in the basement of this facility. If she also had to pay for lodging she would not be able to send money home to her family of four.

Accounting for over 80 percent of Thailand’s 2.5-million-strong migrant labour force, Burmese migrants like Nangnyi Foung provide a lifeline to cash-strapped families back in Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia’s poorest countries that is struggling to recover from decades of economic stagnation.

Today, the minimum wage in Myanmar – about 180 dollars a month – buys eight to 10 times fewer daily consumption commodities like rice, salt, sugar and cooking oil than it did twenty years ago. The average Burmese lives on less than a dollar per day.

Though Myanmar is the world’s largest exporter of teak, jade, pearls, rubies and sapphires, and boasts lucrative extractive industries such as mining, timber and power generation, very little of the country’s natural wealth trickles down to the masses: approximately 32 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, while unemployment is at 5.4 percent.

According to a 2006 survey of migrant workers from Myanmar, conducted by the Asian Research Centre for Migration, more than two-thirds of the 600 respondents admitted to being unemployed before migrating to Thailand.

Remittances jump hurdles

While migrant workers fill crucial gaps in Thailand’s labour market, and their remittances account for five percent of Myanmar’s gross domestic product (GDP), neither government has attempted to make the flow of money between workers and their families any easier.

Despite the existence of commercial banks or official ‘Xpress Money’ outlets, most migrants prefer to use the informal remittance channel known as the “hundi” system.

These unauthorised transactions involve dealers in Thailand relaying messages to members of their network in Myanmar, who then deliver the necessary amount to the family.

Some migrants rely on friends and loved ones who travel between the neighbouring countries to act as conduits, thereby circumventing costly bank transfers.

“The banks can’t be trusted and they require a work permit, a letter of recommendation from our employer and a passport,” Nangnyi Foung says, documents very few migrants have access to.

Migrants with families in rural areas go through brokers, who deliver cash to the recipient’s doorstep, eliminating the hassle of them having to locate cash points.

According to a new report released Monday by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Asian countries dispatched over 60 million migrants into the world, “who sent almost 260 billion dollars to their families in 2012. This represented 63 percent of global flows to developing countries.”

Yet the continent seems ill equipped to deal with the influx of remittances, which benefit one in 10 Asian households.

“Although the clear majority of the region’s population lives in rural areas, 65 percent of payment locations are in urban areas,” the report found. In most Asian countries, only banks are authorised to deal with foreign currency transactions, making it difficult for poor rural communities to access funds coming in from abroad.

The report stressed the urgent need to provide remittance-receiving families with “more options” to secure and spend this money, especially since nine Asian countries currently receive remittances “exceeding 10 percent of GDP.”

The report has particularly vital policy implications for Southeast Asia, where 13 million migrants are currently living and working abroad. Thailand has become a “net importer” of migrant labour – attracting more than double the number of migrants to work in its expanding economy than it is sending abroad.

Women forfeit rights for employment

Constituting nearly 49 percent of the global population of 214 million migrant workers, women are responsible for the lion’s share of remittances flowing around the world.

Acutely aware of their families’ needs, like food, housing costs, education for children or younger siblings, and healthcare – women often endure extreme conditions in order to remit money back home.

The town of Mae Sot, located along the Thai-Myanmar border, hosts the largest number of women migrant workers in Thailand, who toil over fifteen hours a day in garment factories. In 2012, this sector netted estimated profits of 6.3 billion, while labourers who keep the industry running earned between 66 and 100 dollars per month.

Kyoko Kusakabe, associate professor of gender and development at the Asian Institute of Technology and co-author of ‘Thailand’s Hidden Workforce’, told IPS that most female migrants in Mae Sot “avoid labour strikes and forfeit their rights in favour of (continued employment).”

She says this is part of a culture that forces women to be “responsible” from a very young age, while their male counterparts have few obligations.

According to Kusakabe, this culture is reflected in remittance patterns: when the economy is booming, remittances from men increase, falling again when the economy enters a slump. Remittances from women, on the other hand, remain steady regardless of the overall economic climate, suggesting that women save more, or forego their own needs during times of economic austerity in order to preserve their family’s lifeline.

Her research found that even if women are not paid their salaries, or lose their jobs, they borrow money in order to send home, fearful that their children or parents will starve without financial support.

Migrants employed as construction workers in Thailand receive little training or safety equipment. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
CHIANG MAI, Thailand, May 21 2013 (IPS)

On the outskirts of the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, a group of twelve migrant families lives in a makeshift camp comprised of houses constructed from scrap metal.

They share three toilets between them, and each home consists of nothing more than a single room, whose flimsy walls and roof provide little privacy, and are no match for the heavy monsoon rains that lash northern Thailand between the months of May and November.

Sounds of splashing water fill the air as both male and female migrants, returning from a long day’s work, unwind with a shower in the rudimentary, open-air structures that contain nothing more than a rap connected to a water tank.

Most of these workers are employed on a residential construction site just north of here, where they pour cement, plaster walls, build roofs or install electrical wiring from seven in the morning until six in the evening, seven days a week. They do not have much to show for these gruelling hours on the job, returning home with as little as six dollars a day.

One of this shantytown’s residents, Nang Soi Sat, tells IPS the long working hours and paltry income are not even her biggest concerns: she is more worried about maintaining her legal status in the face of multiple challenges.

Thailand is home to an estimated 2.5 million migrant workers. The country’s economic boom – which has seen an 18.9 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) since 2011 – relies heavily on a constant influx of labour from neighbouring countries. Over 82 percent of the workers hail from Myanmar (Burma), 8.4 percent from Laos and 9.5 percent from Cambodia.

Those from Myanmar say ethnic strife and civil conflict sent them fleeing in search of better opportunities in the region. A network of garment and furniture factories housed in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that dot the Thai-Myanmar border quickly absorb incoming migrants to work for a pittance.

Other key areas of employment for migrants include the seafood and agricultural sectors.

For migrants like Sai Sun Lu, the search for better opportunities did not end with his arrival here. Originally from Myanmar’s volatile Shan State, Lu works over nine hours a day at a site in Chiang Mai, constructing high rise buildings that will likely be converted into commercial centres, residential condos or offices, without a single day off.

He tells IPS he did not want to come to Thailand, but was forced to as a result of intense fighting in his home. His hopes for greener pastures on the other side of the border have been dashed and he now finds himself living in a kind of daily nightmare, toiling in what rights groups have called “appalling” conditions.

According to the U.S. State Department’s report on migration and refugees, Thailand ranks alongside some of the worst offenders of migrants’ rights, including Afghanistan, Chad, Iran and Niger.

Because migrant labourers are typically unskilled, with little awareness of occupational safety, they are easy prey for employers looking to cut corners by dismissing safety concerns.

In the construction sector, inadequate training in the proper use of machinery and a lack of protective equipment such as body harnesses or guardrail systems pose a grave threat to those who work on buildings as high as 27 to 69 stories.

On Sai Sun Lu’s construction site, “there have been many accidents and deaths. Some workers have slipped and fallen from the high rises but we receive very little or no compensation,” he said.

“As Burmese we have to be extra careful because if we make any mistakes then our employers can terminate our work without any explanation.”

Fear of this last consequence is, for many workers, second only to the fear of death, and a very common one among migrants from Myanmar who account for 75 percent of Thailand’s one million undocumented workers, according to the Institute for Population and Social Research at Mahidol University.

The 2008 National Verification Programme (NVP) was intended to legalise the status of incoming migrants and provide them with basic protections under Thai labour laws, such as access to social security schemes, official work accident compensation and the ability to apply for driving licences.

However, rights activists contend that the NVP’s registration fees are “extortionate”, often requiring three times the average worker’s monthly salary of between 100 and 167 dollars.

According to this year’s World Report, published annually by Human Rights Watch (HRW), Thai employers frequently seize migrant workers’ documents, thus rendering them bonded labourers, while government policies – like the Thai cabinet’s 2010 resolution to fine employees if their papers carry outdated information – impose severe restrictions on migrant workers’ ability to change jobs.

Even migrants with all their legal papers in hand often go to pains to avoid encounters with the police for fear of being harassed, physically abused, or arrested.

In desperation, many have turned to personal networks of friends and family members to gain access into the country.

In rural Myanmar, where most migrants come from, informal transporters linked to smugglers with networks along the border facilitate entry into Thailand. This system has led to the proliferation of so-called recruiters, or agents, who charge exorbitant fees in exchange for providing such services as remitting money, establishing communication channels between families, or securing employment.

Following allegations of rampant corruption among recruitment agencies, the Labour Ministry of Myanmar recently banned 12 agencies from sending migrant workers to Thailand, according to an internal memo obtained by ‘The Myanmar Times’.

Earlier this month, Myanmar’s Deputy Labour Minister Myint Thein assured labour activists and migrants that the state was doing everything possible to rein in illegal actors and ensure safe, affordable passage between the two countries. It has a vested interest in doing so: a 2010 ILO report found that the average migrant worker in Thailand sent home about 1,000 dollars every month, with total remittances from Thailand accounting for about five percent of Myanmar’s annual GDP.

Ahead of President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico and Costa Rica, experts here are expecting that security will take a back seat to issues of economic cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Credit: cc by 2.0

But some Washington advocacy groups are sounding alarms about shifting away too soon from critical security and rights concerns.

“A lot of the focus is going to be on economics,” President Obama told reporters Tuesday. “We’ve spent so much time on security issues between the United States and Mexico that sometimes I think we forget this is a massive trading partner responsible for huge amounts of commerce and huge numbers of jobs on both sides of the border.

“We want to see how we can deepen that, how we can improve that and maintain that economic dialogue over a long period of time,” he continued.

This shift is notable, as issues of security, law enforcement and combating crime formed the backbone of U.S.-Mexican relations during the previous Mexican administration.

“Even before [former Mexican President Felipe] Calderon took office, it was part of the discussion with the U.S., and the U.S. and Mexican administrations went on to develop a close and complex relationship on security matters,” Eric Olson, associate director of the Latin America programme at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

President Obama is slated to meet with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto later this week before meeting with Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla.

“President Obama having a visit [early in his second term] symbolises the importance of Mexico to the U.S.,” Chris Wilson, an associate at the Mexico Institute, a think tank here, told IPS.

The United States is Mexico’s largest trading partner, and the two countries engaged in nearly 500 billion dollars worth of trade in 2012. Much of that trade is in what are known as intermediate inputs, referring to semi-finished U.S. goods that are finalised with Mexican resources, a process seen as increasing the competitiveness of both countries.

Remittances sent home from Mexican immigrants living in the United States are also a substantial factor in the countries’ economic ties, totalling more than 20 billion dollars last year.

The upcoming summit’s focus on economics squares with a narrative gaining traction in media coverage and academic circles in recent years that paints a picture of an economically booming Mexico.

“During the administration of Calderon, the perception of Mexico in the media was largely one of drugs and violence – the headlines about Mexico were about drugs and trafficking, organised crime, gruesome violence,” Wilson recalls.

“But the new [Mexican] administration has come in at a time when economic growth is pretty robust. They are trying their best to shift the narrative of Mexico by talking more about these economic issues: the reforms that are happening in Mexico that will promote growth, new investments coming into Mexico that will promote growth.”

Development’s Achilles heel

Still, for a country like Mexico that is still struggling with issues of citizen security and rampant crime, many suggest that economic growth would have to start from the bottom, with more robust social programmes and safety nets, before the international community becomes too optimistic about economic and trade booms.

Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin America programme at the Wilson Center, calls Latin America “far behind” in developing policies that might leverage inclusive growth.

“There is not a sense of shared responsibility … when your social policy is remittance, when your lack of social policy is permitted,” she told reporters on Friday. The region, she said, needs “a widespread recognition of the role the private sector needs to play in paying taxes, improving government … [and] institutions.”

In a telephone interview with IPS, she noted that the U.S. relationship with Central America is likely to remain more focused on security concerns.

“There is a growing consensus in the development community that sustainable growth can’t and will not happen unless levels of violence are brought under control,” she told IPS.

The World Bank recently called citizen insecurity the “Achilles’ heel of development” in Latin America.

Members of the U.S. Congress and advocacy groups here are also wary of turning a blind eye to human rights concerns in Mexico.

“The dire human rights situation in Mexico is not going to solve itself,” Maureen Meyer, a senior associate for Mexico and Central America with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group, said in a statement.

“As the bilateral agenda evolves, it is critical that the U.S. and Mexican governments continue to focus on how best to support and defend human rights in Mexico.”

In a press release issued last week, WOLA expressed agreement with a letter from 23 members of Congress to Secretary of State John Kerry that stressed that “[t]he human rights crisis will not improve until there are stronger legal protections, increased human rights training for Mexico’s security forces, and more government agents held responsible for the human rights violations they commit.”

Even as the focus of U.S.-Mexico relations turns to economics, there is no broad agreement on how exactly a shift toward trade relations will strengthen the “economic competitiveness” of both countries.

“Part of the challenge is that we have this term, but we have a laundry list of issues that could fit into that term,” the Mexico Institute’s Chris Wilson said.

“What we still don’t have is a coherent agenda or a way in which the leadership from the top level can engage the public or business community or civil society … and create something more [meaningful],” he told IPS.

The face of migration is changing dramatically as women and girls now represent about half of the over 214 million migrants worldwide.

Bolivian migrant in the airport in El Alto, next to La Paz. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

And in some regions of the world, they outnumber their male counterparts, says Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).

Addressing a weeklong meeting of the 46th session of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development (CPD), which concluded Friday, he pointed out that many women migrate on their own as heads of households, to secure a livelihood.

“Others leave their homes in search of more open societies, to get out of a bad marriage, or to escape all forms of discrimination and gender-based violence, political conflicts, and cultural constraints.”

Like other migrants, Dr. Osotimehin said, women contribute to the well-being of their households, through remittances that benefit the family.

An increasing number of migrants were women and children who bore the brunt of human rights violations around the world.

After a contentious debate, the CPD adopted a belated consensus resolution late Friday, recognising the central role of sexual and reproductive rights giving it prominent visibility.

This year’s CPD session focused on new trends in international migration. And the change in the gender composition among migrants is one of the growing new developments.

Yasmeen Hassan, global director of the New York-based Equality Now, told IPS, “In our experience, the so-called migration of women is deeply linked to trafficking, whether for sex or for domestic labour.”

She said women who see themselves as voluntary migrants find themselves trapped in situations of deep exploitation.

“And these are made possible and exacerbated by their vulnerable legal situation, their lack of social and family contacts, their isolation, their inability often to understand the language or to access systems of protection,” she said.

These factors make them a very attractive target of traffickers, said Hassan, formerly with the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women and who worked on the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Speaking on behalf of the United States, Margaret Pollack said women migrants were often the victims of exploitation and sexual abuse, often lacking access to health care. She said this was particularly true for young migrants and others belonging to vulnerable migrant populations, such as LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) persons and the disabled.

Pollack called for specific policies aimed at helping those groups and for the collection of data on the abuses to which migrants were subjected.

A study released last week by the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILO) said an estimated 600,000 migrant workers “are tricked and trapped into forced labour across the Middle East”.

Based on more than 650 interviews conducted over a two-year period in several countries, including Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the report points out the Middle East alone hosts millions of migrant workers, who in some cases exceed the number of national workers substantially.

In Qatar, about 94 percent of workers are migrants and in Saudi Arabia the figure is over 50 percent.

Last month a Sri Lankan maid, accused of allegedly killing an infant in her care, was beheaded in Saudi Arabia.

“Human trafficking can only be effectively tackled by addressing the systemic gaps in labour migration governance across the region,” Frank Hagemann, ILO deputy regional director for the Arab States, told the commission.

The resolution, adopted by the commission, calls on all member states to ensure migration is integrated into national and sectoral development policies, strategies and programmes.

At the same time, there should be due consideration to the linkages between migration and development in the further implementation of the 1994 Programme of Action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, and in the elaboration of the post-2015 development agenda.

The resolution specifically calls for the protection of the rights of migrant women and children, including those related to sexual and reproductive rights.

In a new report on migration released last week, the United Nations says new poles of economic growth in the global South have created new migratory flows between countries of the South.

In recent years, there has also been a significant increase in migration from developing to developed countries.

“Growth in migration from the South to the North has generated significant remittance flows to the South that can spur economic growth,” the report said.

And according to the World Bank, officially recorded remittances to developing countries reached 406 billion dollars in 2012.

Many of the rapidly growing economies in East and Southeast Asia, South America and West Africa have become poles for migration within their respective regions, the study adds. In addition, the oil-producing countries of Western Asia and some countries of Southern Europe experienced a rapid growth in the numbers of international migrants between 1990 and 2010.

Following the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, some trends slowed or reversed temporarily, but more recent national data indicate that migration to most of those countries rose in 2011.

A rise in militancy in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has forced residents to flee in search of employment. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHWAR, Pakistan, Dec 16 2012 (IPS)

Fifty-nine-year-old Sherdil Shah, a resident of South Waziristan – a hotbed of militancy in northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – used to run a modest grain shop that fetched enough money to keep his family of 10 well-fed and looked after.

That is, until a 2006 army operation against the Taliban destroyed his business and devastated the arable land on which he cultivated his grain.

After that, “We couldn’t use our agricultural land,” Shah told IPS. He was forced to sell his property for a paltry sum of money and, in a final act of desperation, sent his sons abroad to work – a decision that ended up completely changing his life.

His sons, both working in Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), now send home about 1,500 dollars every month, enough for the entire family to live on comfortably.

Five years since the boys left for the Gulf, “I have bought a house in the adjacent Dera Ismail Khan district and started my business again here,” Shah told IPS over the phone.

Militancy means migration

Shah’s story is not an unusual one. A majority of the 5.5 million people living in FATA have been similarly affected by the decade-old militancy, which began in earnest in 2001 when U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul, forcing the militants to cross over to Pakistan and establish sanctuaries along the 2,400-kilometre-long border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

FATA soon became infested with Taliban cells. As Pakistan emerged as a frontline state in the U.S.’ ‘war on terror’, armed forces poured into FATA in a full-scale military offensive in 2005 designed to root out the Taliban.

The army offensive, coupled with the militants’ resistance, made it impossible for civilians to carry on with everyday life.

Now, for the first time in years, people like Shah are finally starting to see improvements in their lives, as remittances from a younger generation of migrants who fled the region in search of employment abroad streams into FATA, easing the financial burden of unrelenting militancy.

Usman Wali once hailed from the Orakzai Agency, one of FATA’s seven tribal districts, which has been battered by endless violence. Life there was hard, with most families confined to their homes by the threat of the Taliban’s activities or army-imposed curfews.

Under the shadow of conflict, “We lost everything we had,” Wali told IPS. Even acquiring the basic necessities of life was a daily struggle, due to a lack of money and mobility.

“One day we decided to leave our ancestral village and take refuge in a government-run camp in the Hangu district of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

But life in the camp was like hell on earth, and soon the family of 13 knew they had no choice but to leave. “Then a local contractor took my two sons and a brother to Saudi Arabia, which changed our lives,” he said.

With the help of remittances from his family, Wali recently migrated to the nearby Hangu district and established a booming cloth business there.

“Now, we own a beautiful house and a cement business,” he added.

A daily wage labourer named Ghaffar Khan, from the violence-wracked Mohmand Agency says the radicalisation of FATA and an escalation in militancy ironically brought him benefits.

“In 2005, I earned about five dollars per day but now my daily income is more than 120 dollars,” Khan, who is currently on leave from his job in the emirate of Sharjah, the third largest in the UAE, told IPS.

His house in Mohmand Agency is still intact but his seven-member family has moved to the nearby Charssada district of the KP province due to the deterioration of law and order in their native village.

Khan returns home for a month every year to spend time with his family.

Abu Zar, an official at the FATA Secretariat, told IPS that the militarisation of the region has brought misery to many residents but has also fuelled a wave of migration to Gulf states like the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, which is now helping people get back on their feet.

“Currently, more than 400,000 FATA residents are living and working in foreign countries”, up from less than 100,000 prior to 2005, he said.

“The younger generation has been going abroad in droves because of the prolonged insurgency”, in order to escape a sharp decline in trade, business opportunities and income in FATA, he added.

Akhunzada Mohammad Chittan, a lawmaker from Bajaur Agency, says immigrants from FATA have a reputation for being “extremely hard working. Once they land abroad they can earn a lot because they are honest and dedicated,” he said.

About 95 percent of the tribal residents currently working abroad are uneducated, and initially lacked skills, but have performed very well in their new jobs, Chittan added.

“I know at least 500 people who learnt skills such as driving, tailoring and carpentry before going abroad, showing their dedication (to starting life afresh),” he told IPS.

Adnan Ali, manager of a Peshawar-based overseas recruitment agency, says that the demand for FATA migrant workers in the Gulf is growing exponentially.

“Last month we sent 100 young men from different FATA areas to the UAE, Qatar and Dubai. All of them are very happy,” he told IPS.

According to Najamuddin Khan, an overseas employment manager, “We place advertisements in newspapers about various vacancies in foreign countries.

A majority of the respondents are youth from FATA who are desperately looking for work, he told IPS in Peshawar.

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

Remittances to the world’s poorest countries reached a record 27 billions dollars in 2011, according to a report released Monday by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva.

Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Credit: Communications and Information Unit/UNCTAD

Analysing trends in the 48 least developed countries (LDCs), the report noted that remittances – monies sent back home by nationals working abroad – are now second only to official development assistance (ODA), which stood at 42 billion dollars in 2010.

Remittances were almost double the value of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows to these countries, which amounted to 15 billion dollars last year, making them a much more important source for LDCs than for other country groups.

Indeed, remittances amount to 4.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the LDC bloc as a whole and 15 percent of exports. These shares are three times higher than in other developing countries.

While these numbers are impressive, experts like UNCTAD Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi believe governments are missing a vital opportunity to mainstream these financial flows into industrialised policies that favour long-term development.

Panitchpakdi sat down with IPS correspondent Isolda Agazzi to discuss how these private transfers, more beneficial to LDCs than trade and investment, can harness the potential of migrant workers to drive sustainable growth in their national economies.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Why have remittances to LDCs seen this sudden jump in recent years?

The primary purpose of these private transfers is to help (migrants’) families back home and very few countries are trying to (turn that money) into profits for the whole economy. Some migrant workers have managed to set up small businesses, but the potential is far from being fully harnessed.

Q: How can UNCTAD help turn a wasted opportunity into a profitable one?

A: UNCTAD has a unique position to deal with the LDCs and persuade governments to adopt specific policies to mainstream remittances into national development strategies. These private flows should be linked to new industrial policies. Development institutions should provide supplementary financing to returning migrant workers to encourage them to use their knowledge and accumulated savings in building productive capacities.

Governments should be able to protect small businesses by sequencing trade liberalisation. Infant industry protection may appear a bit naïve nowadays, but governments still need to support small and medium enterprises in certain areas, though not forever.  Adopting permanent trade distorting policies is not the way. We still believe in free trade.

Q: Given that 80 percent of LDC migrants move to other developing countries, shouldn’t industrialised countries revise their migration policies and open up their border to unskilled labour?

A: While full trade liberalisation would only add one percent to the world’s GDP, full labour liberalisation could (result) in a 100 percent increase since a person’s productivity can double when going abroad. Recently, people have been looking at migration through a different lens. The more mobile labour becomes, the more productivity increases. And there is no crowding out because most of the time migrant workers go into areas of employment where nationals don’t want to work.

Q: Is the emphasis on remittances an acknowledgement of the failure of trade and investment in the LDCs?

A: It is true that FDI and remittances have flowed in reverse correlation. For the weaker countries, FDI goes only into extractive industries that do not (create) jobs. And due to the ‘race to the bottom’ (competition between host countries to attract investment by lowering wages, taxes and standards), these countries have lost revenue.

UNCTAD is also worried by the involvement of transnational corporations. The problem with FDI is that it is tied to conditionalities and driven by gain, whereas remittances are not conditioned by anybody. Therefore, given that one in five people with university-level education from the LDCs lives abroad, mainly in developed countries, improving and mobilising FDI would be one way for LDCs to avoid the brain drain.

Indeed, brain drain is the downside of remittances: two million educated people from the LDCs live abroad. The loss of knowledge and know-how for the home countries in key sectors like health and education – there are more Ethiopian university professors in the United States than in Ethiopia – could outweigh the benefits of remittances. Other adverse effects are the potential distortion of local prices and the increase of the exchange rate.

(END)

Excerpt:

Migrants waiting in El Naranjo, Guatemala for the 'coyote' who will smuggle them into Mexico. Credit: Wilfredo Díaz/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 20 2012 (IPS)

Despite recession in Europe and a weak recovery in the United States, remittances to developing countries have been growing at a strong pace over the last year and are likely to accelerate further through 2015, according to a new report released here Tuesday by the World Bank.

High oil prices in energy-exporting nations, especially in the Gulf and Russia, appear to be one important reason for the increase in remittances to poor nations, which, according to official statistics, hit a record 381 billion dollars in 2011 and will likely climb to 406 billion dollars in 2012.

Because those statistics reflect funds that move only through formal or official channels, the actual amount of money migrants send to their families back home may be considerably more. Some experts say total remittances to developing countries could total as much as twice the official figure.

By 2015, according to the 12-page briefing, official remittances to developing countries should reach as much as 534 billion dollars. That would be roughly equivalent to four times the amount of official development assistance (ODA) provided by wealthy countries to poor nations last year.

According to the report, remittances to the developing world have proved remarkably durable despite the 2008 financial crisis which produced a slight dip in remittances in 2009, the first since serious efforts were first made to track remittances in 1990. Since 2009, however, remittances have bounced back strongly.

“Although migrant workers are, to a large extent, adversely affected by the slow growth in the global economy, remittance volumes have remained remarkably resilient, providing a lifeline to not only poor families, but a steady and reliable source of foreign currency in many poor remittances recipient countries,” said Hans Timmer, director of the Bank’s Development Prospects Group.

“What came as a surprise both to governments and experts in the field was how little the dip caused by the economic recession affected remittances compared to other financial flows, such as ODA,” Jeanne Batalova, a senior policy analyst at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI), told IPS.

The strongest growth over the last couple of years, according to the report, was found in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, largely due to the economic dynamism in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations.

India, for example, will likely receive an estimated 70 billion dollars in remittances this year – the most of any country, while Egypt, which has seen a surge in remittances since 2010, possibly due to concern among migrants in the Gulf about political instability at home, is likely to rank sixth with 18 billion dollars, just ahead of Pakistan and Bangladesh (14 billion dollars each), and number 10, Lebanon (seven billion dollars).

Similarly, countries in the former Soviet Union have benefited from Russia’s oil boom. Remittances to Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Tajikistan are all estimated to have grown this year.

Indeed, as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), remittances to Tajikistan (47 percent) was the world’s highest in 2011, while Kyrgyzstan ranked third. Remittances to that Central Asian country made up 29 percent of its GDP last year.

By contrast, countries that have relied more heavily on remittances from migrants in western Europe – notably, Eastern Europe, some Central Asian and Muslim countries, and Africa – have not done nearly as well due to the continuing recession and unemployment problems in the European Union, as well as the related growth in anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia there.

“Political and other conditions affect how much immigrants can send,” according to Batalova. “When anti-immigrant feeling spreads out, especially in European countries, it might make it more difficult for immigrants to find jobs that would allow them to send more home. They may be less likely to come or stay.”

While economic recovery in the United States has been weaker than hoped, remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean have kept pace, although remittances to Mexico have been no greater this year than in 2011, possibly due to tighter border controls and fewer construction jobs, as well as changes in the peso/dollar exchange rate.

So far this year, China ranked just behind India as the largest recipient of remittances (66 billion dollars). It was followed by the Philippines and Mexico (24 billion dollars each), and Nigeria (21 billion dollars), Africa’s most populous nation.

The briefing found that exchange rate fluctuation can make a big difference in remittance flows. The appreciation of the Philippine peso over the past year, for example, had an adverse effect on remittance flows there. Conversely, the depreciation of South Asian currencies since mid-2011 was followed by significantly greater remittance flows.

The cost of sending remittances also affects flows. In a bid to boost remittances, the Group of 8 countries in 2008 and the Group of 20 nations three years later committed themselves reduce the global average remittance cost by five percentage points in five years. In fact, remittance costs for the 20 largest bilateral remittance sources have declined only slightly over the last four years – from 8.6 percent in 2008 to about 7.5 percent this year, according to the report.

It’s cheapest to send remittances from Russia – where the average cost comes to only two percent of transfers – while costs in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Qatar, and the U.S. range from four to six percent. The most expensive is Japan at 17 percent, although Germany, France, and Australia all exceeded 10 percent, according to the report.

Another factor is the perception of need back home. “In Egypt or other Arab countries that experience political unrest, the family members who live abroad are more likely to step up and send remittances because the need is even greater than during just the good times,” according to Batalova.

“It was similar with Haiti after the (2010) earthquake when many Haitian immigrants in the U.S. were not in a strong economic position at all. Yet, despite the (effects of the financial) crisis, they were sending remittances back home at a higher rate,” she said.

Over the next three years, remittances to developing countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are expected to grow most rapidly, followed by East Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. In South Asia, the rate of growth is expected to slacken next year before recovering, while sub-Saharan Africa will trail. The slowest-growing region is expected to be the Middle East and North Africa.

Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy inaugurates a meeting of non-resident Keralites in Thiruvananthapuram. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Oct 8 2012 (IPS)

For the first time in over four decades, the number of people migrating out of the southern Indian state of Kerala, home to 33.3 million people, is on the decline.

A comprehensive study conducted by the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) in Thiruvananthapuram on international migration from Kerala revealed that growth in migration levels will reach zero by 2015.

The report said that the number of Kerala migrants living abroad in 2008 was 2.19 million and 2.28 million in 2011.

Back in the 1970s, a loss of jobs in agriculture, lack of productive ventures and widespread education among the middle class led to an exodus of residents from Kerala, 90 percent of whom headed straight for the Gulf region in search of better jobs and higher wages.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) quickly became the most popular destination, absorbing 40 percent of Kerala’s job seekers, while Saudi Arabia plays host to 25 percent of the migrants.

But now, higher wages at home have begun to stem the outflow of human capital from Kerala. The average wage for unskilled workers increased from 150 rupees (three dollars) to 450 rupees (nine dollars) per day during the first decade of this century, making Kerala an attractive and competitive labour market.

B. Soman, an engineer in the petroleum sector in Oman, said that even unskilled workers already settled in the Gulf are now opting to go back home in search of better salaries.

John Mathew, a 35-year-old driver working in Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district, who recently returned from Qatar where he had spent the last seven years driving taxis, told IPS that comparatively low wages in the Gulf made a strong case for coming back home.

“Now I earn at least ten dollars a day. It is a decent wage, and my family is happy,” said Mathew.

In addition, Kerala has achieved a level of human development comparable with many advanced countries, including the highest life expectancy rates in the country – 75 years for men and 78 years for women.

Ironically, it was remittances from the Gulf that first began to improve the quality of life in Kerala and created a consumer culture in the state.

The purchase of land and construction of houses received priority among expatriate Keralites, followed by the purchase of vehicles, jewellery and imported electronic items.

Banks say the state received remittances totalling 500 billion rupees in 2011 compared with 432 billion rupees in 2008.

Dr. Sreelekha Nair, junior fellow at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies in New Delhi, told IPS, “While migration to the Gulf was dominated by unskilled workers, recent years witnessed a relative increase in the migration of highly skilled personnel to the Gulf.

“Flexible changes in ownership and business rules, at least in some Gulf countries, resulted in a rise in the number of entrepreneurs.  This also boosted the flow of remittances to Kerala,” she added.

According to the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India, remittances from non-resident Indians in the current fiscal year are likely to exceed 75 billion dollars, up from 66 billion in the 2011-2012 period.

Dr. S. Irudaya Rajan, professor at CDS and an expert in international migration, told IPS that structural changes in the state’s population – namely a steadily ageing population coupled with low birthrates – also contributed to this decreasing emigration trend.

Due to a contraction in the supply of young labourers, and a higher standard of living enabled by remittances, wages for construction and manual jobs are relatively high in Kerala compared to other Indian states, making the former an attractive destination for internal migrants, Soman told IPS.

Internal migrants come largely from West Bengal, Orissa, and Assam and take jobs as domestic workers, farm labourers, masons, and shop helpers, among others.

They say economic hardships, caste-based exploitation, a crumbling agricultural sector and dwindling investment in rural infrastructure in their home states propel them towards Kerala in search of decent livelihoods.

Kalka Das, a mason from Murshidabad in West Bengal, told IPS that unskilled workers like him barely earned enough to survive.

“The prices of commodities are increasing day by day and people are constantly in search of decent wages. Today, Kerala is the Gulf (of India) for internal migrants,” he added.

Ram Gopal, a domestic worker hailing from Assam, told IPS that even though migrant workers in Kerala do experience some exploitation, “we at least get better work and a little bit more money”.

(END)

At the battered terminal of Tripoli’s tiny Mitiga airport, over 150 young men and women jostle to be repatriated home to Nigeria on Libya’s Buraq airlines. This journey to Lagos is one of hundreds the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has facilitated since the start of the uprising against Gaddafi’s regime over a year ago.

IOM estimates that one million migrant workers were in Libya sending remittances home before the crisis, a heavy footprint for a Libyan population of under seven million.

Early on in the uprising, workers from Asia, the Middle East, and neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt fled across Libya’s borders. But Somali and Eritrean political refugees continued to arrive in Tripoli throughout the war; braving the harrowing journey north through Sudan.

IOM’s current flights are now filled with West Africans who traversed Niger and Chad to Libya seeking a better economic future, but whose ultimate hardships have forced them to return.

At Mitiga, many Nigerians don the brand new green sports jackets and shoes given to them by IOM, with their meagre possessions stuffed into plastic suitcases and shopping bags.

“The major problem is citizenship verification and temporary travel documentation,” explains Jeremy Haslam, IOM’s mission chief in Libya. “If they don’t have their documents – which I can say is (true for) over 90 percent – the first thing we have to do, before we can even think about repatriation, is confirm where they are from.”

While a few Nigerians look relieved to return home and laugh with comrades, the majority are in despair. After a costly and arduous car trip with smugglers over the desert into Libya, they have spent most days searching for piecemeal day labour, and living in perpetual fear of being harassed, robbed and detained by the Libyan militias policing the streets. They will now return to families – often indebted to smugglers – empty-handed.

“When I got to Tripoli I worked at a car wash and got up to 50 Libyan Dinars (40 dollars) a day,” says Dennis, a soft-spoken 24-year old. “When the war came however, it was hell. I lost my passport and money to the militia. They arrested me for 20 days and beat me up. During the war the militias were always stopping me, so I stayed indoors.”

Migrants interviewed by IPS often had their passports confiscated or lost early on, and none possessed entry visas. Libya is not a destination country for most, but a stepping-stone to Europe. While stigma towards Sub-Saharan migrants may have lessened since the war – when Muammar Gaddafi employed black mercenaries to fight against the rebels – racism is still pervasive, they say.

Many Nigerians at the airport terminal know each other. Each forked out around 1,200 dollars for a dangerous boat ride to Europe late last year, only to be apprehended by Libyan authorities while at sea and jailed in Tripoli’s Ain Zara prison for the past three months.

One among them is Shauna, a 38 year-old mother to daughters Angel, 4, and Blessed, 1. She was heavily pregnant when her husband reached Italy by himself at the start of Libya’s conflict. She gave birth to Blessed in an apartment in Tripoli, and then paid for a boat ride.

She was arrested with both daughters, and all three spent time in prison. “I don’t have any money,” Shauna says, opening her fake leather handbag full of torn, waterlogged documents and children’s drawings. “What am I to do?”

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that roughly 50,000 people attempted to cross the Mediterranean by boat in 2011, and close to 2,000 drowned. Rumours persist that Gaddafi encouraged the crossings to Europe in retribution over NATO strikes. However, the numbers are small in the context of last year’s overall migration from Libya; the largest in the region since World War II.

“It’s a very complicated picture,” says IOM’s Haslam. “Migrants may have been moved from a basement of a house where they were protected for some time, and then whoever was protecting them couldn’t handle it any longer. They pass them to the next entity, person, group, militia – and they are bouncing all over the place. They may have been working in forced labour to earn their keep.

“Maybe some opportunistic types have seen they can actually trade migrants,” says Haslam. “It gets into the whole debt-bondage deal. Migrants are being sold on now for 260 – 800 LD (208 – 642 dollars) per person. You come across enough cases to see a trend. We saw a discount on one particular day of 21,000 LD (16,875 dollars) for 78 people – that’s a knocked-down price for West Africans, with women and children among them.”

Economic and political refugees now face another new threat. Libya’s minister for labour, Mustafa Ali Rugibani, has declared a Mar. 4 expulsion deadline for irregular workers. Despite the lack of a transparent system to process people in place, he says, “if they are not legalised they will be deported.”

“I hope they won’t expel people who should not be expelled, such as asylum seekers and refugees, or people in need of international protection,” says Emmanuel Gignac, UNHCR’s mission head in Libya.

On a sodden, winter day at a Tripoli railway yard that a Chinese company was building before the war, hundreds of refugees from Somalia and to a lesser extent, Eritrea, live in ramshackle housing. The government-owned property is now ‘managed’ by a local militia, replete with 4×4 trucks patrolling with anti-aircraft guns, and a detention cell.

This militia is entrepreneurial – charging refugees 24 dollars each per month to stay, and assigning them laminate ID cards. They offer ‘protection’ and paid daily labour – as well as harassment, the residents claim.

Seventeen-year-old Ayan is originally from the war-torn Ogaden region in southeast Ethiopia, but had been living in Mogadishu. It took her seven months to reach Libya, and after some boys accidentally hit her during an overcrowded car ride through the desert, she developed physical pain that won’t go away. Her friend, Fawza, 20, is also from Mogadishu. “In Somalia, there is forced marriage and no education. Every day people are dying from the war,” she says.

All the residents interviewed by IPS say they want to go to Europe, despite the fact that 15 recently washed-up bodies from a shipwreck were Somalis from their camp.

“I am going to Italy, I have many friends there,” exclaims Theodras from Eritrea, who is able to find work three days a week loading trucks. When asked about the labour ministry’s threat of expulsion, he replies: “Who cares – we will get to where we are going.”

Meanwhile, across Tripoli in an Italian-era Catholic church a festive crowd gathers in glittering gowns and headdresses. This is a Nigerian wedding, replete with traditional musicians, food, and a chance for dancing, gossip and laughter. On this rare morning, the tight-knit migrant community can forget their daily hardships, at least for an hour. (END)