A new plan conceived by the Bank, a "Diaspora Remittances Investment Fund", could take the foreign exchange earned by Africans living abroad who send money back home, and leverage it to fund World Bank organized projects.
What does this mean? The Bank would say that this is an effort to improve the economic impact of remittances. If you are among the critics of the Bank who see the Bank as a global institution which influences the policies of Southern governments to the benefit of multinational capital, this new scheme looks like a shameless attempt to co-opt the flow of African remittances to this purpose.
There will have been four Bank publications on remittances this year alone with the upcoming The International Migration of Women (November 2007). The others are:
-Migration and Remittances Factbook (print version December 2007). Online at www.worldbank.org/prospects/migrationandremittances.
-International Migration, Economic Development & Policy (2007)
-South-South Migration and Remittances(2007)
The Bank has published on its web site (in bold no less) that "recorded remittances to developing countries are estimated to reach $240 billion in 2007. The true size of remittances including unrecorded flows is even larger". Bank and the private sector eyes are popping, and the new fund is the first formal plan from the Bank to directly channel this global financial flow.
The plan may be modeled on similar inititatives in Latin America. The Inter-American Development Bank’s Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) which promotes private sector development in Latin America and the Caribbean, has various programs to manage remittances.
For more information about the "Fund", see:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200712020012.html
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