<incom> icts and remittances

[Steve Cisler]

Remittances have captured the interest of many people
on all parts of the political spectrum, and Ford
Foundation gave money for some grass roots groups to
look at the issue and the kinds of services they
provided, esp. computer access.  

Because of criticism, at least for Latin American
traffic, major institutions have lowered costs of
moving money securely from US/Canada to many parts of
Latin America, and there are alternative schemes to
use telecenters to do this even more cheaply.

I think Scott Robinson (on this list) could make
extensive comments about the effects remittances have
had on national budgets/efforts to address regional
problems. He has been talking about this and writing
on the subject for ten years or so.

--- Geert Lovink <geert at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> (For me, the remittance story naturally fits into
> the larger picture of 
> ICT4D. As the rich history of Western Union, est.
> 1864, shows, the 
> telco business and sending money, info about markets
> and money, have 
> been linked from the early days. Is more Internet,
> phones and 
> telecenters inevitably going to mean more an even
> larger global 
> remittance industries? Geert)
> 
> http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004564.html
> 
> Remittances | Alex Steffen
> QuickChanges see all posts in this category
> 
> In some African countries, Christopher Lydon reminds
> us on his show 
> Radio Open Source, money sent home from abroad now
> makes up a quarter 
> of the Gross National Product. We're covered
> remittances before (and 
> some of the innovations being tested to make helping
> the homeland 
> easier), but this show is a fabulous introductory
> overview of the 
> concept and the controversies:
> 
> Migrant workers will remit more than $232 billion to
> their families 
> this year. The money migrant workers earn —
> harvesting produce in 
> California, cleaning houses in Singapore, and
> tending children in 
> Kuwait– is meager by the standards of the developed
> world, but it means 
> everything for their families back home. $232
> billion is twice what the 
> world paid out in international aid last year; in
> Latin America it was 
> more than aid and foreign direct investment
> combined. This is big 
> business, and economists are just starting to take
> notice.
> 
> This year, the LA Times has been running a series of
> articles on 
> remittances, calling them “The New Foreign Aid.”
> Policy makers like 
> this line– they like to shrug off questions about
> the slim foreign aid 
> budget by coupling those numbers with the huge sums
> of money that 
> workers are remitting home. It’s all going to the
> same place, right?
> 
> Posted by Alex Steffen at June 12, 2006 04:48 PM |
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