For the first time in over a decade remittances to sub-Saharan Africa are set to fall in 2009, increasing people’s vulnerability to poverty, officials at the World Bank say.

The World Bank’s latest migration and development brief, published on 11 November, says remittance income in developing countries will decline by about 1 percent from 2008 to 2009.

Dilip Ratha, lead economist and manager of the migration and remittances team at the World Bank, told IRIN the drop could be far sharper. "A worst-case scenario would bring them down by as much as 6 percent."

Remittances to sub-Saharan Africa had been rising steadily since 1995, increasing by 11 percent between 2006 and 2007. Sub-Saharan Africa took in US$19 billion in remittances in 2007, or 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to the World Bank.

Worldwide $265 billion flowed to developing countries through remittances in 2007, surpassing official global development aid by 60 percent, the World Bank says.

"These remittances are more important than credits and foreign direct investment," said Josef Schmidhuber, senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Remittances are expected to peak at around $283 billion in 2008 before falling in 2009.

West Africa

"West Africa receives a lot of remittances from France and southern Europe and will be directly affected since Europe is expected to go into economic recession in 2009," the World Bank's Ratha told IRIN.

In 2007 slightly under three-quarters of remittances to sub-Saharan Africa were sent from the United States and western Europe, while the rest were sent from Gulf states, other developed countries and developing countries, according to the World Bank.
Ten of the 22 countries considered to have the world’s lowest human development indicators are in West Africa, according to the UN 2007 Human Development Index.

Migration link

Remittance income is directly linked to migration flows thus future estimates depend on how destination countries react to the current financial crunch, Ratha said.

"If some countries impose strict...controls on new immigrant flows, this could be a major issue."

Anti-immigrant hostility partly linked to the global financial crisis is also expected to grow in both developed and developing countries, according to World Bank research. This is already happening in the United States and India, Ratha said.

Impact

IRIN spoke to people across West Africa to see whether their remittance incomes have been affected by the international financial crisis.

Dorcas Eyakodevu in Abuja, Nigeria: "We cannot afford to go to the doctor"

Nigeria receives more in remittances than any other sub-Saharan African country, with $3.3 billion in 2007, followed by Kenya with $1.3 billion, and Senegal with $0.9 billion, according to the World Bank.

Dorcas Eyakodevu, 40, mother of two, said when her husband held two jobs in the United States he usually sent $1,250 every three months. He has since lost one job and in September 2008 sent just $800. "I had expected twice that amount for school fees. The high cost of living makes it very difficult to live in Nigeria at the moment, and I rely on the money he sends to keep the family going. It is becoming harder for me to look after my children. We have had to cut back on our food budget and all other expenses, including transport and healthcare. Now we cannot afford to go to the doctor, unless one of us is seriously ill."

Umu Bangura in Freetown, Sierra Leone: "I can no longer pay my daughters’ school fees"

A single parent of four in the capital Freetown, Umu Bangura said she has withdrawn her children from secondary school because an older son living in the United States has stopped sending money regularly. "I used to receive $100 a month from my son in Maryland, but…he is out of a job and now rarely [takes] my telephone calls. I can no longer afford to pay my daughters’ school fees."
Sorie Barrie, manager of Manan foreign exchange bureau in Freetown, pointing to the empty customer benches in his office, said many families are facing situations similar to that of Bangura. "I have watched with pain the low inflow of cash we’ve been receiving over the last four months."

Mamadou Traoré in Koutiala, Mali: "Amadou is the financial support for our whole family"

Amadou Traoré, who lives in Paris, supports 21 family members in Mali – his father Mamadou, Mamadou’s three wives and 17 children. Mamadou said: "Amadou has become the financial support for our whole family. My monthly pension no longer goes very far with today’s high cost of living, and all of our other children are still in school." Working in finance since 2000, Amadou used to send $195 a month to cover the family’s food and preparations for religious celebrations. But in the past few months he has sent $115 at most per month according to his father. "We no longer eat meat regularly, and we have pulled our children out of private schools to send them to government schools."

Ousmane Diedhiou in Dakar, Senegal: "Their wives think they are spending the money on others"

Dwindling remittances are straining relations among family members, according to Ousmane Diedhiou, who manages remittances from two cousins in France and Italy. Between them, they have been supporting the extended family of 12 with $290 a month, though they have recently cut back. "Their wives, whom they left behind in Senegal, think they are spending money on others, or are preparing to find new wives. Our cousins often repeat to us that things are getting hard there [in Europe] but my family doesn’t understand this. [Our cousins] used to help out on traditional holidays, Korité and Tabaski, but more and more often we hear: 'It’s impossible; get by on your own for a few more months'."

IRIN 

While driving a rusty old yellow taxi through Dakar’s potholed streets looking for customers, Abdou Ndoye told IRIN how he and his family of nine gets by on the 2,000 CFA francs [US$4.80] he makes a day.

"Sometimes we eat more, other times less,” he shouted above the noise of the car’s rattling engine. “But we never go hungry. We make the money go far."

Global food prices have risen astronomically in recent months and the cost of fuel has eaten into the earnings of millions of low-income earners such as Ndoye.

“I am spending a third more on fuel than I was a few months ago,” he said, “so I just have to work harder.”

Last month he said he brought home around 60,000 CFA francs (US$144). Almost half that went to school fees for the three younger children in his home. “So all we had left was about 30,000 CFA francs [US$72] and somehow that had to go round,” he said.

Thankfully he doesn’t pay rent. “My cousin in France covers that,” he said. Still, Ndoye has expenses such as electricity and water that must come out of the US$72. The little that is left goes to food.

He tries to buy some meat, fish and vegetables for the family but he said most of the money in fact goes to cooking oil and rice, the country’s staple. A 50kg sack is the minimum quantity his family needs each month, he said.

Ndoye stopped his taxi for a man who turned out to be a friend. He gets in and the conversation quickly turns to food prices “Everyone I know is talking about demonstrating,” said the friend, El Hadj Fall. “They don’t know how else to make the government pay attention.”

People in Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Cameroon have protested over the rising cost of commodities and many of those protests have turned violent. At least one demonstrator was killed in Cote d’Ivoire’s commercial capital Abidjan last week.

“I just paid 13,000 CFA francs [US$31.20] for a sack of rice,” Fall, the friend, said. Ndoye responded saying he bought a sack of rice a month ago for US$20 and has held off purchasing one this month. "I want to wait and see if the government will make the price come down again," he said.

Fall got out near a fruit stand and Ndoye used the opportunity to buy some bananas. He took a bunch and offered the woman seller 400 CFA francs [US$0.96]. She leaned back and laughed. “No, no,” she said. “These days bananas are twice that much.”

Ndoye drove off mumbling about how he had been ripped off.

Next he is waved down by a man in a suit and tie. He and Ndoye haggle over the price before the man gets in.

“I rarely even take taxis these days as they’re so expensive,” the man, Sembou Dial, told IRIN. He said he earns a comparatively good salary at a private security company. “But even I can’t afford nice things anymore.”

Ndoye pitched in, "I can’t even buy clothes for the family."

He also said he cannot afford to fix the window that was cracked in his taxi or the rust which is getting worse by the day.

But after the passenger got out, Ndoye seemed more philosophical. “We Senegalese are resourceful people and we will always find a way,” he said. “We just have to keep working harder.”
Then there was a pause and he added, “But maybe soon it will all become too much.”

IRIN

Not much has been known about sex workers in Swaziland, but a recent report has begun to shed some light on the sex industry in a country with the highest rate of HIV infection in the world.

The study, conducted for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) by the National Emergency Response Council on HIV and AIDS (NERCHA), was prompted by the grisly discovery in late September of about 100 foetuses in a stream used by a peri-urban community at the Matsapha Industrial Estate, outside the central commercial town of Manzini.

Commercial sex workers were initially blamed, but police sources also suspected that underpaid women working at the Matsapha factories and selling casual sex after hours might have used a local abortionist, who then disposed of the foetuses.

After the controversy died down, health workers wanted to assess the nature of the sex trade to formulate a strategy for reaching this high-risk group, but finding sex workers was difficult because the practice is illegal and perpetrators face prison terms.

The first phase of the research was a "snap survey", which interviewed 53 women aged 15 to 39 and eight men. A follow-up report covering other areas where the sex trade is conducted, such as the Ezulwini suburb of the capital, Mbabane, where the main tourist hotels are located, is due in early 2008.

Although the study shows that there are more women in the profession than men, "it must be noted that a growing number of males are joining the trend," said Margaret Thwala-Tembe, National Programmes Officer for UNFPA in Swaziland. The men engaged in sex with wealthy female small-business owners or company executives. "The report is just the beginning of much still to be covered by phase two of the study."

Selling sex for extra income

An increasing number of factory workers were also resorting to sex work, or "night duty", to make ends meet because they were underpaid, said researcher Alfred Mndzebele, but delegates attending this week's conference of the Swaziland Partnership Forum on HIV and AIDS stressed that these women should not be labelled sex workers.

"These are industrial workers; these are working women, they are not prostitutes. If they are forced into prostitution it is because they are not paid enough to support their families. The price they pay is HIV infection, and the price the whole nation pays is an expansion of the AIDS epidemic," warned Mathew Myeni, an HIV counsellor in Manzini.

The rising number of women resorting to sex work has been attributed to worsening economic and humanitarian conditions in the country.

Instances of violence against women engaged in commercial sex were also documented. "Some were taken to bushes and threatened with death by customers who refused to pay, whilst others were injured on duty," said Thwala-Tembe.

The survey distinguished between working women who engaged in sex for cash - usually in parked cars or at the homes of clients whose spouses were absent - and women who had multiple sex partners as part of economic arrangements. Such women would be homeless if they could not spend the night with one partner, and hungry if they were not given meals by a second sex partner.

Both groups of women said they did not use condoms at the insistence of their clients; nor did the men. The report cited one candid woman who had informed a potential partner that she was HIV-positive, but the unperturbed man hired her for sex anyway, saying he was also HIV positive. Swaziland's first household health survey, conducted this year, found that one out of four sexually active adults was HIV positive.

The sex survey confirmed that working women, who had been impregnated when they engaged in commercial sex, had aborted the foetuses, despite abortion being illegal.

Since the late 1990s, Swaziland has attracted Asian garment manufacturers that set up shop to take advantage of favourable trade treaties with the West, including the African Growth and Development Act (AGOA) with the US. However, low pay and complaints about working conditions have led to labour tension.

The garment factories are opposed to a new labour law that expands maternity leave for women, and sick leave for people living with HIV and AIDS. The textile industry employs mainly women as seamstresses and other semi-skilled labour. These are the type of workers at Matsapha found to be engaged in commercial sex and vulnerable to HIV infection.

Their highest-paying clients were members of parliament, religious officials, lecturers at the University of Swaziland campus adjacent to the Matsapha industrial estate, police officers, businesspeople and well-heeled tourists.

A session with a sex worker costs a typical client R50 (US$7), but can escalate to R1,000 ($146) for some pastors. Member of parliament and other wealthy clients reportedly paid nearly R3,000 (US$439) per session.

At least 120,000 Burundian refugees have still to be repatriated from Tanzania, despite plans by the host government to close all refugee camps by mid-2008, officials said.

More than 40,000 Burundians returned home from Tanzania in 2007, home affairs minister Joseph Mungai told a meeting on 3 December in the Burundian capital of Bujumbura. The latest returns, the Tanzanian minister added, brought to 430,000 the total since 2001.

The Burundian minister for repatriation, Immaculée Nahayo, said most recent returnees came back between July and November.

The repatriation process, according to Bo Shack, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Burundi representative, would continue.

The returnees were encouraged to go back home by the introduction of cash grants, four to six months’ food rations, and the closure of secondary schools and winding-up of income-generating activities in the refugee camps.

A communiqué issued at the end of the meeting stated that refugee camps in Tanzania had been cut from 11 to five in 2007 - of which three hosted Burundian refugees in the northwest - in line with Tanzania's intention to "close camps by June 2008".

A study of settlements in Katumba, Mishamo and Ulyankulu in Tanzania had, however, found that only a few of the long-term Burundian refugees were willing to return home. The majority wanted Tanzanian citizenship.

"The results [of the study] indicate that 79 percent of refugees living on these settlements expressed their wish to remain in Tanzania and be naturalised; 21 percent indicated their wish to repatriate," ran the communiqué.

The tripartite meeting called for more logistical capacity in Burundi and Tanzania to encourage repatriation, noting that a census of such refugees outside the camps in Kigoma region had already begun.

In addition, it was recommended that an ad hoc integrated committee on voluntary repatriation and reintegration in Burundi be set up, along with university scholarships for returnees and resettlement of landless people in new villages.

Tanzania was requested to extend the deadline for closure of the camps until November 2008, beginning with Lukole followed by Nduta camp.

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Daughters have become a high-priced commodity in Zimbabwe, where a dowry has become a means of escaping poverty in a rapidly declining economy. "When people are mired in such hunger as we have been seeing in this country for over seven years, they will do anything to survive," Innocent Makwiramiti, a Harare-based economist, told IRIN.

Parents have taken to demanding "absurd" amounts of money and other commodities from their in-laws. "It is not surprising that many parents are looking to the bride-price as one way to make ends meet," he said.

The dowry, a cultural practice, "has ceased to be a social problem and now needs to be seen from an economic point of view, with girl children being used to generate income," Makwiramiti said. "Unless the economic meltdown is addressed, we will continue to see parents commodifying their daughters."

Most Zimbabweans are struggling to survive: unemployment is out of control, inflation has topped 4,000 percent, and 80 percent of the population is living below the poverty datum line.

Daughters as a pension fund

Moses Jaison, 54, from the populous suburb of Mabvuku in southeastern Harare, the capital, last year betrothed his daughter Miriam, 15, still a minor in Zimbabwean law, to a polygamous businessman thirty years older than she was.

"The pain of seeing my family go without food and other basic necessities drove me into such a decision," Jaison told IRIN. "At that age, Miriam should have been in school and, being as intelligent as she is, might have ended up as a doctor or pilot, but poverty has rendered that only a pipedream."

Miriam stopped going to school at the age of eleven, after her father was laid off when the company that had employed him for thirty years closed down. Miriam's husband paid Jaison Z$15 million [US$115] and settled the mortgage on the family home, which had almost been repossessed when they fell behind with the monthly instalments.

Jaison barely scrapes a living by selling sculptures along the road linking Harare with Mutare, a city about 280km southeast of the capital, but because tourism has plummeted as a result of Zimbabwe's poor image, sales are slow and he does not earn nearly enough to take care of his wife and five children.

However, Miriam found living with three other wives too demanding and recently sought refuge at a local non-governmental organisation that promotes the welfare of girl children.

"That has worsened my plight, because the businessman who had married her has told me that I should give him back what he paid me as a [dowry]," said Jaison. "That money has run out, and the police have indicated that they want to arrest me for ill-treating my daughter by marrying her off before she attained the legal age for marriage, and her husband could also be taken in for making a minor his wife."

Rich men, who have often generated their wealth illegally by trading in foreign currency or fuel on the informal market, do not have a problem in meeting the demands of in-laws, but those who do not earn much find the wooing tough.

Grooms or cash cows

John Matiza, 29, who works in South Africa as a restaurant waiter, had no choice but to break up with his girlfriend of five years because her parents said they wanted to be paid in foreign currency, a condition he could not afford. "My heart bleeds to realise that I cannot marry the woman of my dreams simply because her parents think I am a cash cow," Matiza told IRIN.
"I earn just over 1,000 South African rand [US$143] a month, and can hardly save money because accommodation and transport are expensive in Johannesburg, yet my would-be in-laws wanted me to pay them R12,000 [US$1,725]." His lover's parents also demanded 15 head of cattle, or an additional R15,000, part of which could be paid as monthly groceries sourced in South Africa.

Basic commodities are in short supply in Zimbabwe, and many people have to rely on items being brought in from neighbouring South Africa or Botswana.

More than three million Zimbabweans are estimated to have left the country in search of employment in other countries since the economy started deteriorating in 2000. The majority do menial jobs and work under harsh conditions, but are consoled by the fact that they can remit money to their families and relatives.

"My lover's parents come from a poor background and they should have been able to appreciate that money is not easy to raise; maybe they thought that I made much money, since I work in South Africa," said Matiza.

The parents also argued that because they had educated their daughter up to college level, and she would have looked after them, they needed to recoup the costs by asking for a high bride price.

Matiza went to pay the dowry, and begged for the demands to be reduced until he and his relatives were eventually forcefully removed from the house. His prospective in-laws insisted that their daughter would wait for a man who could make them live in comfort, and told him they would not accept a marriage "full of love but no money for our daughter and us".

"Over the years I have seen so many couples - over whose marriages I presided - break down because material considerations are now taking precedence over love. People are marrying for money and, no sooner have they started staying together, do more problems emerge," Tim Foroma, a pastor with a Pentecostal church, told IRIN.

He said he was outraged by some of the demands the in-laws made, such as asking to be bought houses, cellphones or even cars. "Some of them are even ordering their sons-in-law to put them on medical aid schemes or funeral policies, just in case they fall sick and don't have the money to cover the expense, or in the event that they die."

The 2007 report on progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is pessimistic on Africa’s chances of achieving the targets overall, but notes that the number of extreme poor has increased only marginally - from 296 million in 1999 to 298 million in 2004, despite a population growth rate of 2.3 percent.

In addition, the proportion of people living on US$1 a day or less has fallen from 45.9 percent to 41.1 percent since 1999; however, achieving the MDG target of halving the extent of extreme poverty on the continent by 2015 means the pace of reduction has to be doubled.

Furthermore, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, gave warning that if the developed countries failed to meet their official aid commitments, the gains made thus far would be eroded. "The world wants no new promises," Ban writes in the forward to the report. "It is imperative that all stakeholders meet, in their entirety, the commitments already made." Only five donor countries have reached or exceeded the long-standing UN target of donating 0.7 percent of gross national income being to development aid – Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Indeed, total official development assistance fell in real terms by 5.1 percent between 2005 and 2006, the first decline since 1997, despite pledges by the G8 industrialised nations at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 to double aid to Africa by 2010.

"The lack of any significant increase in official development assistance makes it impossible, even for well-governed countries, to meet the MDGs," writes Ban. "As this report makes clear, adequate resources need to be made available to countries in a predictable way for them to be able to effectively plan the scaling up of their investments."

Mixed picture

Worldwide, the proportion of people living on $1 a day has dropped from 32 percent (1.25 billion in 1990) to 19 percent (980 million in 2004). According to the report, if that trend continues, the “MDG poverty reduction target will be met for the world as a whole and for most regions”.

Other signs of progress globally are an increase in primary school enrolment – from 80 percent in 1991 to 88 percent in 2005; a greater number of women in politics and government; a decline in child mortality, mainly through interventions against measles, for example; a boost in anti-malaria measures; and progress against tuberculosis, albeit insufficient to achieve the target of halving prevalence and death rates by 2015.

Asia has made dramatic progress in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, halving the proportion of people living on $1 a day, according to the report, and is thus comfortably on track to achieving the first MDG. However, this gain comes with increased income inequality within countries and across regions.

In southern Asia, almost 30 percent of people still live on $1 day while in eastern Asia the share of income of the poorest fifth of the population had fallen from 7.3 percent in 1990 to 4.5 percent in 2004. Improvements in child nutrition rates and gender equality in southern and south-eastern Asia were also poor: southern Asia shared with sub-Saharan Africa the highest number of maternal deaths and the lowest proportion of skilled health attendants at birth.

Furthermore, gains made towards some MDGs in Asia would be limited by challenges in other areas, such as deforestation, unplanned urbanisation, and the fast rate of growth of HIV/AIDS in some regions, stated the report.
On the positive side, northern Africa is on track to achieving most of the eight MDGs, with poverty rates down from 2.6 percent to 1.4 percent between 1990 and 2004; income inequality the lowest among all developing regions; significant gains in universal primary education, with enrolment ratios at 95 percent in 2005; and child mortality down from 88 deaths per 1,000 births in 1990 to 35 in 2005. Only gender equality and empowerment of women let the region down, the report found.