Africa Up Close

A Somali man photographed after receiving remittances in Mogadishu, Somalia. Photo courtesy of AMISOM Public Information via Flickr Commons. 

The increasing importance of remittances in global financial flows has elicited calls by experts in the development community for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries to harness the enormous potential of remittances for development. In response to these calls, migration and remittances featured extensively in deliberations on financing implementation of the post-2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Ebrié port in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

“We went through, just in the last 20 years, this big debt forgiveness for a lot of African countries……now all of a sudden are we going to go through another cycle of that?” These were the remarks of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy at a press conference in Pretoria, South Africa in June 2019. He was, of course, referring to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative that was rolled out by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1996 with the noble mission of ensuring that “no poor country faces a debt burden it cannot manage.” The initiative resulted in billions [i] of dollars in debt relief for the world’s poorest countries—mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa.