Harnessing the investment potential of migrants’ remittances: the importance of family ties

Family ties are key to securing valuable remittances and financial investment from migrants to their home countries. Although migrants who maintain close family ties frequently send money back home, the investment potential of such remittances is often lost. In order to maximise the contribution of remittances to economic growth, policies need to target not just individual migrants, but their entire families.

Research from the Sussex Centre for Migration Research examines the economic behaviour of migrants from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana who have either returned, or may potentially return, from living in Europe and North America. Based on surveys of over 600 return migrants and interviews with 40 potential returnees, the research found that the migrants could be divided into two categories – migrants whose families greatly influenced their decisions to return (family-influenced migrants - FIMs), and migrants whose return migration was not family-influenced (non-FIMs).

The research found that FIMs are more likely than non-FIMs to have transferred money to their home country. FIMs are also more likely to maintain social networks and contacts gained abroad after they return home. More detailed findings of the research indicate that:

• In both countries, FIMs tend to be low skilled.
• Although both FIMs and non-FIMs emigrate in their twenties, FIMs tend to be younger when they leave, particularly those with a university education and professional background.
• FIMs stay abroad longer than non-FIMs.
• Highly skilled migrants are likely to stay away longer than the less skilled – more than half the highly skilled Ghanaian returnees surveyed had spent over a decade in the UK.
• Less skilled FIMs are not as likely as less skilled non-FIMs to have obtained further educational qualifications while abroad.
• Less skilled migrants, whether FIM or non-FIM, are not as likely as high skilled migrants to have made useful and potentially lucrative contacts by joining migrants’ associations while abroad.
• Family expectations often influence return – some less successful migrants are afraid of coming back with nothing to show for their years abroad.

FIM migrants send home higher value and more frequent remittances which are overwhelmingly used to support families, particularly parents. Of the minority who invest in businesses only a handful manage to establish viable enterprises. To foster the productive potential of migration-generated transfers, policymakers should:

• Stop considering only the migrants and do more to understand the motivations and decisions of their families.
• Provide entire families, not just individual migrants, with business and vocational skills training and advice.
• Realise that migrants are more likely to base decisions on advice from their families than messages targeted at them by state agencies.
• Use local media to provide context-sensitive information for relatives to pass on to relatives working abroad.
• Understand that transparent information flow is central to good governance and should empower every citizen to make informed decisions and weigh up opportunities, constraints and threats.

Source(s):
‘Migration, return and socio-economic change in West Africa: the role of family’ by Richmond Tiemoko, Sussex Centre for Migration Research, Sussex Migration Working Paper 15, March 2003 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 19 March 2004

Further Information:
Richmond Tiemoko
Sussex Centre for Migration Research
School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9SJ
UK

Tel: 44 (0) 1273 678722
Fax: 44 (0) 1273 620662
Contact the contributor: R.Tiemoko@sussex.ac.uk

Sussex Centre for Migration Research, UK

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