Use remittances for development-UNCTAD advises least developed countries

Use remittances for development
— UNCTAD advises least developed countries
Story: Mary Mensah
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has advised sub-Saharan African countries, particularly the least developed ones, to use remittances from their citizens abroad as alternative resource to enhance their development.
An UNCTAD 2012 Report on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) released in Accra yesterday said LDCs could find ways of channeling the vast and largely private money flows into improving the productive capacities to help empower their economies.
According to the report, nationals of the world’s poorest countries who worked abroad sent home some $27 billion in 2011 and the governments of those countries should strive to employ that vast resource which largely went in private transfers directly to families to improve the abilities of their economies.
It identified the cost associated with remittances as one of the problems which should engage the attention of LDCs.
It said in 2010 alone, remittances sent to sub-Saharan Africa could have generated an additional $6 billion for recipients if the cost of remitting had matched the global average.
The report, on the theme, “Harnessing remittances and Diaspora knowledge to build productive capabilities”, therefore, urged governments to act and reduce the transfer costs associated with sending remittances home.
 It said charges associated with remittances often ran as high as 12 per cent of the amount transferred, which was about a third more than the global average.
The report, which was released simultaneously in Geneva yesterday, said remittances continued to increase, even during the global financial crisis.
Launching the report, Ambassador Kwabena Baah-Duodu, a former Special Advisor to the UNCTAD Secretary General and Chief of Cabinet, said migration from LDCs had taken a South-South dimension in recent decades and 80 per cent of LDC’s migrants moved to other developing countries.
To help ensure productive use of remittances, the report indicated that an appropriate mix of measures would have to be decided by the competent authorities.
It said the number of people having migrated from LDCs rose from 19 million in 2000 to 27 million in 2010, representing 3.3 per cent of their populations, and said educated and highly qualified nationals of the world’s poorest countries who had left to work elsewhere could counter the brain drain effect on their home countries by contributing to knowledge transfer and channeling investment back home.
 The report said LDCs with a critical mass of migrants needed to strengthen their policy framework in order to better harness the development impact of remittances and engage Diaspora agents of development and structural transformation.