Migrant Workers Invest in Home Countries
FrontLines - February 2009
Remittances can be a financial life line between migrant workers and their families and friends back home in developing countries.
The money is also proving to have profound importance to the economies in these countries.
In 2007, migrant workers worldwide sent more than $300 billion to developing countries—almost twice the amount of foreign
direct investment. And in the United States, where total resource flows to developing countries amounted to $158 billion in 2005, more than a quarter of that money came from recorded remittances.
 
In the Pirang District of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, a woman scoops cocoa beans that will be weighed and graded for quality at a cocoa trading station as part of the Amarta Sulawesi Kakao Alliance. At right, a man weighs and grades a sack of cocoa as the farmer watches.
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To harness this power, USAID is working with other development institutions, the private sector, and migrant, or diaspora, communities in the United States to make these remittances go farther and work harder for beneficiaries.
Through the new disapora Networks Alliance, USAID and its partners are awarding grants to migrant entrepreneurs and organizations for projects geared toward investing back in their home countries.
“Diaspora direct investment offers immense possibilities given the willingness, motivations,
and resiliency of the diaspora’s investment approach in these risky markets,” said Thomas Debass, a senior GDA advisor at USAID. He added that, through the alliance, “USAID will address an area that has long been neglected by development practitioners and policymakers.”
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