Billions of dollars in remittances flowed to Africa in 2017. The money could go further if it wasn’t more expensive to send money to Africa than anywhere else in the world, a new World Bank study finds.

Immigrants sent a $38 billion (€31.1 billion) back home to Africa in 2017, according to a new World Bank briefing paper.

Nigeria accounts for the lion’s share of this with $21.9 billion, followed by Senegal with $2.2 billion and Ghana with $2.2 billion.

“The [African] diaspora … are making a lot of money and they are willing to share that money with the countries which they first came from,” said Africa commentator Ayo Johnson, who hails from Sierra Leone but is based in the UK. “Remittances are going back to their host countries in huge, huge volumes.”

Although the total amount of remittances sent worldwide hit record levels last year, the World Bank found this wasn’t the case in Africa. However, more money was sent to the continent in 2017 than in 2016 when migrants remitted $34 billion.

The real sums sent to Africa are assumed to be much higher. Not only is official data unreliable (or, at times, unavailable), remittances often flow through informal channels carried by trusted friends or bus drivers across borders instead of Western Union and MoneyGram.

An alternative source of income

Remittances have now become one of the most important external sources of finance for Africa.

“Remittances are a lifeblood,” said Nikki Kettles from Finmark Trust, a South African-based organization working to make financial services more accessible to the poor. She said it was families, especially to women and children, who benefited from remittances in southern Africa where her organization worked.

“People working in South Africa send money home, for example, to Zimbabwe, DR Congo and Malawi. People are using [the payments] to feed or educate, not for other reasons,” she said.

Numerous studies have found that remittances directly benefit the welfare of those receiving the money. In poorer regions and countries, such payments can often buffer the vagaries of poverty or instability by covering basic necessities such as food, school fees, rent and health care.

Remittances are also often used to start a business, build a house or buy a vehicle.

Less opportunity for corruption

One of the big benefits of remittances is that, unlike development aid, they flow directly into the pockets of the intended person.

“The strength of remittances is how they are dispersed,” said Mathieu Jacques, manager of the EU-funded ACP-EU Migration Action Programme (ACP stands for African, Caribbean and Pacific countries).

“There are project management cost savings in the way they reach the community,” he told DW. “And there is less opportunity for [payments] to be siphoned off or change direction.”

In some of Africa’s smaller or impoverished nations, remittances are literally keeping their economies afloat. According to the World Bank’s Migration and Remittances briefing,money sent by immigrants make up a significant share of gross domestic product in African countries such as Liberia (27 percent), The Gambia (21 percent) and Comoros (21 percent).

But even if remittances have the power to lift individual families out of poverty, their effect on a country’s economy as a whole is unclear. Some studies suggest remittances help fuel economic growth; other are less conclusive.

“One of the problems is that because [remittances] go into the community in a diversified fashion, there is no targeted investment,” said Jacques. “And without the targeted investment you can’t see incremental change from an economic perspective.”

Fees eat up nearly ten percent of payments

It costs more to send money to Africa – the world’s poorest region – than anywhere else in the world. This means expensive fees eat up a chunk of cash that could otherwise help the receiving families.

The average fees for transferring remittances to Africa was 9.4 percent in 2017, the World Bank found. This is a slight drop from 2016 (when it was 9.8 percent) but it’s still a far cry from the Sustainable Development Goal of slashing transaction costs to 3 percent by 2030.

“Countries, institutions, and development agencies must continue to chip away at high costs of remitting so that families receive more of the money,” said Dilip Ratha, lead author of the report, in a press release.

Companies like WorldRemit that offer cheaper transaction fees below 4 percent have limited resources compared to their much larger competitors to reach out to people in rural parts of the African continent.

It’s not just the cost of transferring money that is a stumbling block. Sending cash via money transfer companies also usually requires showing a passport or identity card which migrant workers might not have, or might not want to show because they lack work permits or visas.

Many are putting their hopes in mobile money transfers as a way of cutting fees and making it easier for people to send and receive money across Africa’s borders. Some services are already offering cross-border mobile payments – although there are still issues such as compatibility and regulatory differences between countries that need to be ironed out.

By DW

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Trickle-down has no effect

There was a time when ‘trickle down’ was the favourite word in the lexicon of economists worldwide. According to this theory, as long as an economy is growing, the benefits will eventually make their way through the system.

For the proponents of trickle-down economics, the belief was that rising incomes at the top end of the spectrum would lead to more jobs, less poverty and higher incomes at the lower end – much like a rising tide lifts all boats. However, over time, it has proven to be a fallacy, just like any other belief in equitable wealth distribution as a natural course of events.

The Global Experience: The Rich get Richer

Indeed, a research study published by the IMF in June 2015 has decisively debunked the theory at a global level. The report titled ‘Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality’ in fact goes on to prove that a rise in incomes at the top can actually adversely impact overall growth, poverty and employment.

Looking at data from 159 countries from 1980 to 2012, researchers found that when the wealthiest 20% see their share of income rise by one per cent, the economy grows 0.1 percentage points slower over the next five years. Conversely, raising the income of the poorest 20% by a single percentage point raises annual growth by 0.4% over the same period.

While it lasted, the misplaced faith in the trickle-down theory appears to have exacerbated inequalities globally. A 2016 report by Oxfam has revealed that the richest 1% have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum notes in a 2016 article that the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years.

The African Experience: The Poor stay Poor

In Africa, this woeful absence of a trickle-down effect is borne out by the successive experiences of individual economies that have experienced stellar economic growth, such as Nigeria and Kenya.

Even as Nigeria recently became Africa’s largest economy with growth averaging over 6% each year from 2005 to 2014, the reality remains that most Nigerians still live on less than US$ 2 a day, while the country lags behind in key development indicators such as health.

On the eve of the country rebasing its GDP to factor in the contribution of new sectors to the economy, the then Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank managing director, confirmed to the country’s business leaders that:

“It is clear that the top five to 10% is capturing most of whatever growth there is and people at the bottom are being left behind.”

Similarly, Kenya woke up to economic disparities with the government publishing a ‘Socio-Economic Atlas of Kenya’ at the close of 2014. The report exposed significant disparities in poverty levels across the country. Just before the government survey of income inequalities was released in November 2014, in autumn came news from theWorld Bank that Kenya had seen its economy grow 25% after statistical revision and is now officially a “middle-income country”.

As Nigeria and Kenya, the pin-up economies for Western and Eastern Africa respectively, wake up to trickle down woes, it is clear that the experiences of other African economies that are emulating their wealthier neighbours is likely to be no different.

Development Infrastructure to bridge the divide

Lately, a survey by Afrobarometer of 35 African countries released in January 2016, struggled to find any correlation between the reduction in poverty seen in 22 countries in the survey and the recent rates of economic growth.

Instead, it found that there was a high correlation between creation of development infrastructure and improvement in the lives of the people at large.

“ While growing economies are undoubtedly important, what appears to be more important in improving the lives of ordinary people is the extent to which national governments and their donor partners put in place the type of development infrastructure that enables people to build better lives,” the report noted.

Then, rather than pushing ahead with a blinkered focus on high GDP growth that is clearly not translating into employment security, poverty reduction or inclusive growth, the solution lies in concertedly creating a conducive environment for businesses that create jobs and empower persons at the base-of-the-pyramid.

Impact Investing to build the infrastructure

It is here that impact investing, with a focussed agenda to grow businesses that have significant socio-economic impact, can make a real difference to the lives of those at the base-of-the-pyramid, instead of trusting to trickle-down economics that has so far only seen the top 5-10% push their economic agendas through at the expense of the majority.

Impact investors seek to start at the roots and build a strong foundation for those pioneering entrepreneurs that are seeking to provide basic amenities such as shelter, food, water and education in a sustainable and viable manner, rather than simply choosing an investment that boosts their financial returns and is regarded as a conventionally ‘bankable’ business.

As a specialist SME financier in Sub-Saharan Africa and MENA, GroFin is one such impact investor that is making a difference to the lives of entire communities in its locations of operation. With a concerted focus on investing in small and growing businesses in priority sectors such as Education, Health, Food Security, Energy, Manufacturing and Water/ Sanitation, GroFin is helping local entrepreneurs tackle key community issues such as health, nutrition, education, electricity, water and sanitation.

So far, over 16 years of applying its SME finance and business support solution, GroFin has made a difference to 7,000 entrepreneurs, sustained over 62,450 jobs and changed the lives of more than 312,270 family beneficiaries through its investments.

Support impact investors such as GroFin and others in Africa with your efforts as an entrepreneur or funding partner. Remember, the fate of an entire continent could rest in your hands.

 This article was originally published by GroFin. 

But perhaps of even more significance is the demographic transformation that Africa is experiencing, and will continue to experience over the next several decades. Now home to 1.1 billion people, by 2050 the United Nations estimates that Africa’s population will reach 2.48 billion; by 2100, 4.39 billion people, a majority of whom will be youth.

When the slow pace at which Africa is developing is combined with the demographic transformation, contrary to the sentiments of many optimists, the future does not look bright. But it can.

Disruptive Innovations Targeted at Non-Consumption

Through the course of my research with Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton Christensen, we have learned that no country has developed in sustainably without investments in disruptive innovations. There are two types of disruptive innovations, low-end disruptive innovation and new-market disruptive innovation. I write about the new-market disruptive innovations, which are targeted at non-consumption, a circumstance where a majority of people in a society are unable to afford a particular product due to cost, time, or skill constraints. These innovations transform the existing complicated and expensive products to simple to use, more affordable products, thereby making them more accessible to a larger set of people in society, such as M-PESA, the mobile money platform in Kenya. They serve as the engine of economic development in a society.

Can Africa Spur Disruptive Innovations

It is tempting to discount the possibility of executing disruptive innovations in Africa because of the many obstacles to innovation on the continent, including poor infrastructure, the difficulty of doing business, and the very low incomes on the continent. But when these obstacles are framed as opportunities, innovators can build truly disruptive companies.

In fact, it is precisely because these obstacles exist that disruptive innovations can thrive in Africa.

Nollywood and Noodles

Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, has taken many in the world by storm. While Hollywood’s revenues dwarf Nollywood, it is difficult to overlook Nollywood’s impact in Nigeria. The industry, according to a UN report, is now worth approximately $5 billion, employs more than one million people, and generates around $800 million annually. Nollywood has been able to thrive precisely because it is a disruptive innovation targeted at the average Nigerian citizen unable to purchase, watch, and perhaps relate to Hollywood movies. The innovators in Nollywood have keyed into the vast non-consumption of movies in Nigeria, and Africa, and have created relevant and relatable movies that have given birth to a booming industry.

When Haresh Aswani decided to start importing Indomie Noodles into Nigeria in 1988, the decks were stacked against his company, Tolaram. Nigeria was ruled by a military government, GDP per capita was only $256, and 78% of people lived on less than $2 per day. But Aswani began importing noodles into Nigeria and since then, has built 11 factories that manufacture many of the inputs for the noodles. The company directly employs approximately 10,000 people and hundreds of thousands indirectly. A packet of Indomie Noodles costs roughly 18 cents, a product affordable by the majority of Nigerians. Tolaram has begun expansion plans into other African countries. Where many see obstacles, the company sees opportunity.

The Rebirth of an Old Idea

Investing in disruptive innovations is not a new strategy for creating prosperity. The United States, many European countries, the Four Asian Tigers, and many other rich countries followed this strategy with great success. The returns from their investments were then invested in infrastructure, education, healthcare, and in building institutions. It is tempting to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure, institution building, education, healthcare, and other development indicators that are correlated with prosperity. But a closer look at rich countries today shows that investments in disruptive innovations came first. Africa should thus follow suit.

Governments should support entrepreneurs whose business models are targeted at non-consumption. By doing this, they will inevitably create jobs for many people, as was the case with Nollywood and Indomie Noodles. This, our research suggests, will ultimately lead to unfettered prosperity in Africa.

By Efosa Ojomo

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But while large countries such as India, Mexico, and South Africa have benefited from surging investment in the renewable energy sector, many of their smaller neighbors remain off the radar of solar power developers and are struggling to obtain the electricity they need.

To bridge this gap, the World Bank Group has launched Scaling Solar, a “one-stop shop” for governments that want to attract private investors to build large-scale solar plants but lack the purchasing power of bigger emerging markets where strong competition has driven down solar prices to virtual parity with oil, gas, and coal-fired electricity.

Scaling Solar includes a package of technical assistance, templates for documents, pre-approved financing, insurance products, and guarantees that take the guesswork out of whether a solar project is viable and bankable for both governments and investors.

Under the program, a country can assess a project, manage a competitive tender, build a plant, and start generating cheap, sustainable solar power within two years—a fraction of the time it would take to do so independently, and faster than other generation sources such as hydro and thermal.

Zambia, for instance, is on track to have two 50-megawatt solar facilities up and running about two years after having engaged in the program. The country’s needs are urgent as several years of drought have significantly reduced the output from hydropower plants Zambia has traditionally relied on.

Zambia’s first tender attracted 48 interested groups including top developers EDF, Enel, and First Solar, and 11 prequalified to bid. This has provided an important boost for the country, which desperately needs new sources of energy but has otherwise struggled to attract investors given the impact of falling copper prices on its economy.

“For quite a long time, we’ve had interest from the private sector to invest in renewable energy including solar. But we haven’t had the coherent structure to implement this,” said Andrew Chipwende, chief executive officer of Zambia’s Industrial Development Corporation. “With Scaling Solar, what we’ve been able to do is develop a transparent process that the private sector and public institutions can work towards.”

Creating Confidence

Following Zambia’s successful launch, Scaling Solar has expanded elsewhere in Africa, with competitive tenders coming soon in Senegal and Madagascar. As the program grows, it is providing more opportunities for clean energy investment and creating a new market standard for developing large-scale solar power.

“What Scaling Solar offers is a robust process, contracts that have been pre-negotiated and which are ultimately going to be bankable, and transparency and speed. For us, as investors, that’s exactly what we are looking for,” said Ashwin West, Investment Principal with African Infrastructure Investment Managers. “It is a robust framework that creates confidence in the market.”

The process begins with feasibility studies led by IFC advisers. They work with governments to establish how much solar capacity should be added to the grid, and select suitable sites. IFC also helps structure and plan a competitive bidding process for developers, who enter the tender with a clear and complete picture of the project. The winning developer can then access financing from IFC should they choose it, as well as partial risk guarantees from the World Bank, and political risk and other insurance products from the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA).

Scaling Solar has the financing support of USAID’s Power Africa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and the Infrastructure Development Partnership Fund (DevCo), a multi-donor facility managed by IFC.

By IFC

According to the Central Bank of Nigeria, 96% of Nigerian businesses are SMEs (US = 53%, EU = 65%). Inclusive growth can be achieved by positioning these SMEs to take advantage of the opportunities in the economy.

Financial services is crucial to SMEs

According to the Small Business Administration of the USA, two of the top 10 reasons why SMEs fail are lack of capital, and poor credit management. It is no different in Nigeria and the rest of Africa. While there are several aggregators/sources of capital including Private Equity (PE) funds, development finance institutions (DFIs) and insurance companies in Africa, the key players in the financial services industry that are optimally positioned to serve SMEs and therefore drive inclusive growth are banks and micro-lenders.

Government macro-economic policies impact SME financing

Lenders operate within the wider macro-economic environment, and government policies regarding inflation and infrastructure are crucial to keeping the cost of funding down. When inflation drives up the cost of funding and ultimately lending costs, it in turn drives up the cost of production, making SMEs less competitive.

Standardisation of physical address systems is another area where African governments can make a meaningful contribution to SME growth. Inconsistent address systems make it difficult for SMEs to establish formal relationships and credit histories with suppliers, customers and transient clients.

What can banks do?

At the credit application and processing stage, banks need to invest in systems that allow more efficient and tailored risk profiling. Such a system rewards diligent entrepreneurs with lower lending rates and greater access to capital.

Post-disbursement, the establishment of dedicated advisory/support teams can help minimise credit risk and improve credit management by educating and advising SMEs on day-to-day financial management, record-keeping and corporate governance. The incremental cost of this will be easily offset by increased patronage and lower default rates.

Banks also need to create systems for long-term funding by innovating longer tenured liability products. In Nigeria this sort of long-term funding would help the growth of the manufacturing and agriculture sectors, which are better positioned to create more jobs.

Tapping into private equity

SMEs can now look to a wider range of funding sources including private equity, DFIs and diaspora remittances.

PE is critical to developing SMEs. PE institutions are a source of capital that remains largely untapped in Nigeria. They offer a number of secondary benefits that cannot be easily quantified.

PE institutions provide a diversified mix of capital, debt, equity, preferential shares, etc. They also provide capital over every stage of an SME’s growth: from start up to expansion.

PE institutions are good at spotting investment opportunities – risk capital goes where it will work best. They help individual companies fulfil their potential, and the macro effect is to drive efficiency and growth across the entire economy. Their high level of commitment means they offer significant operational support to SMEs (in order to protect their investment).

Furthermore, PE institutions help instil an accounting discipline, something that is often absent from a one-person start up, or even an established family firm. They help to spot talent within an organisation and can provide access to a bigger human capital pool and to training opportunities. They are also able to attract talent, a function that SMEs find challenging as they simply don’t have the resources or skills to find suitable staff.

On an operational level, PE institutions provide the discipline for SMEs to base their operations on the best environmental, social and governance principles. They also use their networks to help SMEs grow and expand outside of their local environment: via acquisitions or via additional capital for expansion. PE institutions are instrumental in launching SMEs into a higher orbit of operations. PE institutions are normally not involved longer than seven years, and at the end of their involvement will help the SME with its IPO, when it becomes a listed company.

DFIs

Development finance institutions (DFIs) are another category of investor that can help power SMEs. Examples of DFIs include organisations such as the International Finance Corporation, the CDC (UK’s Development Finance Institution), and the FMO (the Dutch development bank). Traditionally DFIs will fund SMEs indirectly, by lending to PE institutions, who do the investing.

But there is a trend starting whereby DFIs invest directly in SMEs. At present DFIs limit their loans to between 3 and 5 years, but African economies will greatly benefit from more long-term arrangements.

Diaspora remittances and unclaimed dividends

It is estimated that expatriate Nigerians remit approximately US$21 billion per annum. This is more than three-quarters of the national budget. This inflow can be aggregated to SMEs with the right framework such as through the active promotion of the Nigerian ASeM – the specialised board of the Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE) for emerging business with high growth potential. There could be tax breaks on dividend income earned on diaspora remittances that are directly invested in certain SME categories.

Further, there is an estimated 45 billion naira worth of dividends in unclaimed trust accounts. The government can come up with creative ways of freeing this up to support the growth and development of SMEs.

Breaking barriers to growth

Finally, an African finds it much more challenging to obtain visas and to travel across Africa than an American. Transportation within the continent can be more difficult than trans-Atlantic trips and, according to the United Nations, though intra-Africa trade has enormous potential to create employment and catalyse growth, intra-Africa trade is only about 10% of total trade compared to 50% for Asia and 70% for Europe.

Governments need to allow the free flow of capital across borders into neighbouring countries and this can be achieved through trade. SMEs need to be incentivised to do business within the larger economic region, for example the ECOWAS common external tariff system that seeks to eliminate duties on trade between West Africa countries.

Already the mobile phone revolution is allowing contact beyond national borders. We must go further: the use and development of special banking applications/services to transact across borders must be actively encouraged. Africa has leapfrogged the rest of the world in freeing up its banking platforms and providing financial services to the rural poor.

Moving forward

Compared with large corporates and multinationals, most African SMEs operate, for the most part, at unsophisticated levels. They have a high cost-base, limited product range, and do not benefit from economies of scale. This must change.

For SMEs to compete and benefit from the economic growth sweeping across Nigeria, and other African countries, they need: better infrastructure, macro-economic stability, operational support, longer-term financing at single-digit interest rates, and better financial management principles.

SMEs are the spark that will ignite and launch the economic rocket that is Africa. The untapped capital is there. PE institutions and DFIs are eager to provide long-term capital. Governments are also making progress in getting systems in place. Stand by for lift-off!

by Dapo Okubadejo

Si on l’applique au contexte africain, et selon les critères de l’Union africaine, il s’agit des « personnes d’origine africaine vivant hors du continent africain, qui sont désireuses de contribuer à son développement et à la construction de l’Union africaine, quelles que soient leur citoyenneté et leur nationalité ».

C’est ce lien spécifique entre la personne établit à l’étranger et son pays d’origine qui rend la diaspora comme un élément déterminant pour le développement (durable) du continent. De par son importance à travers le monde, la diaspora africaine joue un rôle primordial pour nombre de pays du continent, notamment à travers ses apports financiers, matériels et humains. C’est dans cette optique, que la diaspora africaine est devenue un acteur de premier plan dans la mise en œuvre à la fois de l’Agenda 2030 de développement durable de l’ONU, mais aussi pour l’Agenda 2063 de l’Union africaine.

Dynamiques mondiales

L’étude des flux migratoires ne peut se faire sans lien avec le phénomène de mondialisation. Cette dernière n’est pas sans incidence dans les dynamiques migratoires à l’échelle internationale tant dans ses causes que ses formes. Elle rend ainsi ce phénomène difficile à appréhender.

Cette complexité porte à la fois sur les données chiffrées du phénomène, mais aussi sur la manipulation de la question à des fins politiques (en particulier par les mouvements populistes aux relents xénophobes et anxiogènes).

Ainsi, les données concordantes fournies par plusieurs organismes font état de plus de 230 millions de migrants pour l’année 2013 dont six sur dix vivent dans les pays à hauts revenus. L’OCDE estime que la population née à l’étranger dans les pays de l’OCDE s’établissait en 2013 à 177 Millions traduisant une hausse de 40% par rapport à l’année 2000. Cette tendance était en progression pour l’année 2014 avec 4.3 millions d’entrées, soit une hausse de 6% par rapport à 2013.

Cependant, l’objectivité nécessite d’affiner ces données pour qu’elle reflète de la meilleure des manières la réalité de cette migration internationale. Tout d’abord, il faut dire que cette migration internationale renvoie à des couloirs migratoires divers et non en sens unique, c’est- à-dire exclusivement du Sud vers le Nord. La migration internationale recoupe le flux migratoire du Sud vers le Nord estimé à hauteur de 35 à 45% dans la migration mondiale, celui du Nord vers le Nord représenterait 15 à 25% de cette migration. Les flux migratoires du Sud vers le Sud avoisineraient 34 à 41% cachant ainsi la forte progression migratoire du Nord vers le Sud qui aurait concernée 7 à 13 millions de personnes.

La continuité des flux migratoires mondiaux se retrouve dans plusieurs niveaux. Tout d’abord, les destinations d’accueil de ces flux migratoires sont les mêmes à quelques exceptions près. Le classement fourni par l’OCDE est assez explicite sur l’absence de bouleversements notables à ce niveau. Les USA occupent toujours la première place avec 1 million d’arrivées pour l’année 2014. S’en suit l’Allemagne, qui est le premier pays européen d’accueil. Le Royaume-Uni occupe aussi une place de choix dans ce classement comme l’Espagne, le Canada et la France. Ces pays ont connu soit une hausse des flux migratoires, soit une stabilisation de ces flux sur leur territoire.

Au titre de cette continuité, il convient aussi de mettre en exergue l’absence de changement dans les modalités et les raisons de cette migration. On peut observer que cette migration repose sur ses éléments traditionnels qui peuvent être des liens historiques, politiques, économiques et culturels. Ces couloirs que les experts qualifient de champs migratoires bilatéraux expliquent la propension de certaines populations à émigrer vers des pays spécifiques. Ainsi, les populations d’Afrique subsaharienne érigent la France en pays d’immigration en raison des liens historiques. Toutefois, ces champs migratoires ne sont pas seulement basés sur des liens historiques, ils peuvent aussi être physiques ou géographiques. C’est par exemple, le cas en Europe de pays comme la Finlande, la Suède ou la Norvège.

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By Dr. Malick Sanghare and Julien Chambolle