Personal remittances to Africa, which exceed foreign direct investment, have been reduced as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, severely undermining the food security of the continent’s poor.
The wages and employment of many migrant workers evaporated overnight. Jobs in the service sector have been greatly affected as migrants running in hotels, restaurants, beauty salons, groceries and farms continue to lose their jobs. Health care professionals who are still in operation have struggled to send cash due to time constraints and closures.
For the African continent, this will have a catastrophic impact.
The remittance point in 2019 will not be reached by 2020. Major remittance countries (United States, Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy, united Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) are still seeking to restart their economies.
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Short-term participation is a sharp decline in food security for Africa’s poor. This is especially true for African countries that were already suffering from a lack of food confidence before the epidemic. Millions of others are at risk of falling back into the excessive poverty they have recently emerged from.
Remittances to low- and middle-income countries, according to the World Bank, are expected to fall by 20% to $445 billion by 2020, a loss of vital importance for many vulnerable families in the South.
Covid-19 showed the ugly and hidden aspect of non-public remittances. Foreign personnel in Western countries, the Middle East and China faced dangerous and harmful race situations during the pandemic. In Canada, for example, unrest was expressed in the agricultural sector, coupled with lack of access to protective equipment, overcrowding situations that did not allow physical removal, and lack of access to well-balanced food during quarantine.
In addition, remittances are expensive to send, reducing the amount of cash earned in Africa.
These realities deserve to be taken into account in policy-making through African governments, whose migrant staff largely work in low-skilled, harmful and low-wage sectors. Personal remittances will therefore have to be noted as a mandatory evil in the short term that will have to be prevented as African economies integrate physically powerful and prevent the export of human capital.
Africa cannot depend on exporting its other people abroad to paintings and sending cash home. The continent’s leaders will need to build physically powerful economies that absorb and use the continent’s human capital.
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For decades, Africa has debated the “brain drain.” It is estimated that approximately 70,000 professional professionals migrate from Africa each year. African governments will have to put in place methods to end this exhaustion. Africa wants to expand and retain its professional workforce, which is essential to expanding its own productive capacity and creating wealth, thus ending the concept that our responses are outdoors on the continent.
Africa’s human capital can be used more internally than as a volatile source of foreign funds.
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