2024-01-04 09:44:34
According to World Bank projections, remittances from expatriates from Africa are expected to decline slightly this year, to around $95 billion. This decrease is caused by Egypt, which monopolizes more than a quarter of shipments.
While migrant remittances around the world are expected to increase by 3.8% in 2023, compared to the previous year, the World Bank forecasts a slight decline for the African continent.
According to projections, the volume of transfers is expected to reach $95 billion. However, these transfers should be unequally distributed. The ten largest beneficiaries concentrate 81.90% of the volume of transfers. The latter, taken as a whole, fell by -3.73% to 77.70 billion dollars, once morest 80.60 billion dollars in 2022.
Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa should see the volume of its transfers increase by 1.9% to $54 billion. The largest increases will be recorded by Mozambique (48.5%), Rwanda (16.8%) and Ethiopia (16%). Among the major beneficiaries, transfers to Nigeria will increase by 2% to reach $20.50 billion and those to Senegal by 16%.
In this region, besides Nigeria, the biggest beneficiaries of diaspora transfers are Ghana ($4.9 billion), Kenya ($4.2 billion), Zimbabwe ($3.1 billion), Senegal ( 2.9 billion), the DRC (1.4 billion) and Uganda (1.3 billion), Mali (1.2 billion) and Sudan (1 billion).
However, in this region, the volume of transfers is far from reflecting reality. Indeed, a large part of the transfers from diasporas in this region are made via parallel channels.
In addition to the development of parallel transfer channels, the costs of transfers to the continent are high. According to the World Bank, “rates remain high, with an average cost of 6.2% for sending $200 (data available as of 2e quarter 2023)”, adding that “banks remain the most expensive intermediaries (with a cost of 12.1% on average), followed by post offices (7%), money transfer operators (5.3 %) and mobile service operators (4.1%).
In North Africa, transfers fell to $40.80 billion. This decline is mainly due to Egypt, the main beneficiary of migrant transfers on the continent.
Only $2.7 billion for Tunisia
According to World Bank forecasts, these transfers are expected to decrease by around 15% in 2023 to $24.2 billion. Note that during the first half of the year, according to data from the Central Bank of Egypt, remittances from the Egyptian diaspora fell by 38% to $10 billion, compared to $16.3 billion a year earlier. reaching the lowest transfer level in the country for many years. Given the weight of Egypt, which represented around a third of fund transfers to Africa, the decline in this market has a negative impact on that of the continent.
This drop in transfers on the Egyptian market must, however, be put into perspective and is mainly explained by the sharp drop in remittances sent through official channels. A similar situation has been observed for years in Algeria where the exchange rate differential between the official market and the parallel one is so high that the Algerian diaspora prefers to use parallel channels at very advantageous rates compared to those of the banks. As a result, the volume of transfers from the Algerian diaspora is low in official statistics, but does not reflect reality.
Due to the decline recorded in the Egyptian market, transfers in the North Africa & Middle East region fell by -5.3%. However, at the regional level, transfers to Morocco are expected to increase by 8.03% to $12.1 billion. A situation which is largely explained by the importance of the diaspora’s recourse to official channels, in particular via Moroccan banks established in Europe.
If transfers from the Algerian diaspora should remain identical to those of last year at $1.8 billion, those from Tunisia will drop by -12.90% to $2.7 billion.
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