Diaspora remittances — IFAD data on Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and what corridor economics look like

<p>Diaspora remittances to sub-Saharan Africa reached approximately USD 54 billion in 2024 according to World Bank Migration and Development Brief data, exceeding both foreign direct investment and official development assistance to the region. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), through its Financing Facility for Remittances, has tracked the corridor-level economics since 2007 in the most granular available dataset. The Senegalese, Ghanaian, and Nigerian corridors are particularly informative.</p> <p>Senegal received approximately USD 3 billion in formal remittances in 2024, representing around 10% of GDP and far exceeding the country&#x27;s coffee, cotton, and groundnut export earnings combined. The main corridors are France (Mouride and Soninke migrant communities), Italy (Touba-Italy migration via Modena and Brescia), and the United States (concentrated in New York and Atlanta). Average corridor cost — what migrants pay to send funds — has declined from over 12% in 2008 to around 6% in 2024, driven primarily by mobile-money-enabled receiving channels (Wave, Orange Money) competing with Western Union and MoneyGram.</p> <p>Ghana&#x27;s corridor structure differs. Ghanaian remittances of approximately USD 4.5 billion in 2024 come predominantly from the US (Ashanti and Akan migrant communities in New York, Chicago, Washington DC), the UK, and increasingly the UAE. Ghanaian remittance corridor costs have lagged Senegal&#x27;s reduction, partly because Bank of Ghana FX controls during the 2022-2023 currency crisis pushed substantial volume into informal channels — *hawala*-style person-to-person transfers that the official statistics miss. The Tinubu-era Nigerian devaluation may produce a similar effect on Ghanaian recorded flows in 2025.</p> <p>Nigeria, the largest sub-Saharan recipient at approximately USD 20 billion in 2024, has the most contested data. Pre-2023 unification, formal Nigerian remittance receipts were depressed by the multiple-exchange-rate regime — diaspora senders captured economic value by routing through parallel-market channels rather than through licensed IMTOs that paid in CBN official-rate naira. Post-unification, formal flows recovered substantially. The Central Bank of Nigeria has been actively courting the diaspora through licensing initiatives for digital-first remittance providers like LemFi and Sendwave.</p> <p>The IFAD Sending Money Home report (2024) makes the strategic argument that remittance corridors are infrastructure. They carry not only money but also informal credit, business knowledge, and migration intentions. The countries that have most aggressively reduced corridor costs — Kenya, Senegal — capture more development value from the same gross remittance flows. The countries that have under-invested in corridor competition — including much of CFA-zone Central Africa — leave roughly a fifth of the diaspora-to-household value in the hands of intermediaries who do not invest it locally. The remittance economy is real. It is also unevenly captured.</p>