Imagine a newly plastered home on the outskirts of Nairobi, a small store in Accra selling cell phone accessories, or a schoolgirl in the Gambia whose tuition was covered last month by a wire transfer from an uncle in Birmingham. A government budget or an aid report from a donor nation does not include any of these instances. However, they are occurring continuously, covertly, and on a scale that is at last beginning to receive the recognition it merits. In 2024, the diaspora from Africa sent about $95 billion home. The majority of people are unaware of how large that number is, and it continues to rise.
The way this money moves is more remarkable than its size. There is no ministry involved. It doesn’t wait for a procurement procedure in an account. A family in Lesotho pays for medication that week; a mother in Lagos receives a notification on her phone. In contrast to the machinery of official development assistance, which often travels slowly, has conditions attached, and occasionally fails to reach the intended recipients, its directness is almost startling. All of that is circumvented by remittances. The household decides what to do with the money once it arrives.
Africa remittances — Key facts & figures (2024)
| Total remittance inflows (2024) | ~$95 billion — up from $53 billion in 2010 |
| Share of Africa’s GDP (2024) | 5.1% — up from 3.6% in 2010 |
| Comparison to FDI (2024) | Africa’s FDI reached ~$97 billion total, but ~36% came from a single Egypt urban project; remaining FDI (~$62 billion) is significantly less than remittances |
| Top receiving countries | Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco — largest shares of total inflows in 2024 |
| Highest remittance-to-GDP dependence | Gambia, Lesotho, Comoros, South Sudan, Liberia, Somalia — all above 10% of GDP |
| Household reliance (2019 data) | ~65% of Kenyans and ~50% of Gambians depended on remittances for household income |
| Primary uses | Food security, healthcare, housing, education, local trade and community infrastructure |
| Key challenge | Large share still flows through informal channels — hand-carried cash and unregistered transfer systems, especially in DRC, Libya, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Nigeria |
| Lowest receiving countries | Angola, Seychelles, São Tomé and Príncipe — each received less than 1% of total inflows |
| Further reading | African Union on diaspora remittances |
Take a look at the comparison with foreign direct investment to see how important this has become. A single urban development project in Egypt accounted for about 36% of the approximately $97 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) that came to Africa in 2024. After deducting that, the remaining foreign direct investment (FDI) throughout the remainder of the continent amounts to approximately $62 billion. Not as much as remittances. by a significant amount. Development economics has a long-standing tendency to view household transfers as supplemental and private investment as the main source of funding. It seems harder and harder to defend that framing.
The nations that rely on these flows the most provide a crucial insight into the true beneficiaries of remittances. Remittances make up over 10% of the GDP in the Gambia, Lesotho, Comoros, South Sudan, and Somalia. These locations don’t draw a lot of foreign direct investment, and official assistance to some of them has been patchy at best. Without diaspora funds, some communities in these nations might experience a degree of economic vulnerability that no one in the field of international development has a clear plan to address. Although it’s an uncomfortable thought, it’s most likely an honest one.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that this story frequently revolves around numbers but seldom discusses what those numbers actually mean in day-to-day life. In 2019, about half of all Gambians and about 65% of Kenyans said their households relied on remittances. As a primary source, not as an add-on. In economies where formal wages are scarce and social safety nets are weak, that kind of dependence reveals something about how households are actually surviving. The funds cover the cost of a corrugated iron roof before the rainy season begins, school fees in September, and antibiotics in February. It’s infrastructure, but not the kind that’s captured on camera for a donor report.
However, there are actual difficulties hidden beneath this narrative. Unregistered transfer agents, hand-carried cash, and agreements based on trust rather than paperwork still account for a sizable share of Africa’s remittances. Informal transfers are widespread in nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, in part because many people cannot afford or access formal financial services. Because of this informality, it is sometimes more difficult to measure the flows, develop policies around them, and safeguard them. There is still work to be done to get a better picture of the volume actually passing through these channels.
It is becoming more and more obvious that the discussion about who is funding African development needs to keep up with what is actually taking place on the ground. The diaspora did not wait for a communiqué from the conference. They simply continued to send money home.
