Description
This ground-breaking open access study offers a unique, critical perspective on how remittance-related and diaspora finance programmes mobilise the money migrants send home for infrastructure development. This is a fast-growing trend that is a key priority among development policymakers and practitioners, but it is not addressed in the existing literature except in the most tangential, generalized economic terms. Focussing on Nigeria, with its substantial diaspora and significant infrastructure challenges, Femi Bolaji offers a much-needed corrective. He explores both direct diaspora investments in Nigeria, which aim directly to better the well-being of family members and friends, as well as indirect investments, which pass through financial intermediaries into collective funds used for both public and private uses. Bolaji enriches his findings with original insights into comparable practices in various remittance-receiving countries around the world, including Israel, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Pakistan, Senegal, Somalia, the Philippines, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. What Bolaji finds is that in Nigeria as well as these other contexts, money takes on not only economic, but also social, political, and intimately personal meanings that complicate the simplistic financial calculations at the heart of current remittance policies. Understanding this leads to new critical insights into what “giving back” means for different actors; into why migrants make the investment decisions that they do; and into the real tensions that exist between governments and their citizens over this issue. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.