Remittances from the millions of Zimbabweans abroad are on a vast scale, and they provide funds to buy food and other necessities, pay school fees, meet medical needs, provide agricultural inputs, tools and other means to enhance livelihoods – just the support that humanitarian aid and social protection seek to offer. Yet government bodies, donors and NGOs that seek to meet these needs design their programmes and procedures without regard to this reality. They need to shape what they do both in existing humanitarian aid and in plans to support future recovery to fit in with the facts of remittances.

1. Scale & Significance of Remittances

   The scale of remittances by Zimbabweans abroad is such that it dwarfs all other transfers – export earnings, foreign direct investment, and certainly all donor and NGO aid. It also makes a massive contribution to livelihoods, although only of some households – again far in excess of public social welfare provision, humanitarian aid and social protection measures. A recent study in UK¹, for instance, estimated that on average Zimbabweans surveyed sent home £300 per month. If this were typical of the behaviour of the, say, 200,000 adult Zimbabweans in UK (a conservative estimate) the aggregate for 2007 would have been £700million, which in turn would have yielded at the going exchange rate roughly US$1.4billion (the currency now in circulation). The sums available to Zimbabwe recipients may well have gone down since then as a result of declining incomes in UK with the slump, and the relative decline in the £-US$ (and the SARand-US$) exchange rates, crucial following dollarisation of the Zimbabwe economy.

   Even with the effect of the global recession on North America, South Africa, and other countries with a large Zimbabwean population like UK, the total flow of remittances still undoubtedly amounts to billions of US$. The potential impacts on livelihoods of various humanitarian and support programmes pale into insignificance by comparison with the difference remittances make. For instance, the Joint Donor food aid programme provided assistance in the years 2002-06, during which the highest annual total was valued at US$31million. Even if one adds on the other GoZ food distribution programmes, by the World Food Programme and the Government of Zimbabwe (GoZ), or DFID's collection of projects under the Poverty Reduction Programme (PRP) of £31.5m.over 3 years and total aid for "essential support" by DFID in 2008/09 of £49m.– these add up to but a small proportion of remittances. These latter amount in effect to a system of 'privatised, informal social protection' payments (to quote a phrase used by Bracking & Sachikonye). An alternative channel for the delivery of agricultural inputs such as seed, part of current DFID provision, was provided in the run up to the 2008 planting season, by an internet scheme whereby Zimbabweans in UK and in southern Africa could order seed deliveries for relatives on-line.

2. The Reach of Remittances

   One obvious limitation of remittances is that they don’t reach every family, and the most needy might have less chance of receiving them. The Leeds survey calculates that each remitter sends, in varying amounts, to 4.26 persons on average, which would mean the adult Zimbabwean population in UK as a whole might be reaching 850,000 people back home. Significant additional numbers, perhaps of the same orders of magnitude, will be recipients of contributions from people in North America and South Africa. Beyond that there are some limited data that indicate the distribution of remittances to households in Zimbabwe One of the few studies made at the receiving end² concludes that among sample populations in urban suburbs in Harare and Bulawayo, almost exactly 50% of those surveyed were in receipt of them, in 30% of these cases 1 or 2 people benefitted, but in 16% of cases the funds were spread among 5-10 people. This distribution of remittances can be compared with the same survey’s finding that only 17% of responding households had received other forms of assistance, whether food aid, Government subventions or those from NGOs and churches.

   This latter survey gives some indirect indication of how far remittances promote greater inequality. People in low-density suburbs were more likely to receive them than residents in high-density areas, at least in Harare, though not in Bulawayo. No data are available from this or any other studies about recipients in rural areas. One might hypothesise that urban dwellers are more likely to have relatives with education enough to make reasonable salaries, though the relatively recent expansion of education and its high-level and wide spread might result in remittances by professionals reaching some remote rural families. Zimbabweans in South Africa, who include many labourers may similarly ensure some flow to rural populations.

   Overall, one can say that a significant proportion of the resident population, perhaps numbered in millions, is in receipt of relatively sizeable cash payments. That in turn must dictate a complete rethink of humanitarian aid and social protection strategies of donors and public authorities.

3. Making aid complement remittances

   Most of the social protection and humanitarian aid programmes target groups with chronic or temporary 'vulnerability' – orphans, disabled, rural and urban impoverished, sub-subsistence farm families, malnourished school children etc. – and complicated procedures are put in place to ensure particular assistance reaches these defined categories. In comparison to the necessarily sizeable costs of the administration of such targeted programmes³, remittances incur virtually no overheads. But what also needs to be factored in is whether necessarily everyone in these vulnerable categories in fact warrant this kind of provision, or whether remittances remove some of them from the ranks of those ‘in need’. If one key criterion of vulnerability is ‘exclusion’, a major exclusion is that from receipt of remittances.

   This is not to advocate the use of new, additional criteria based on whether or not potential beneficiaries in receipt of remittances. Such targeting criteria would be expensive to operationalise, be open to political and patronage manipulation, and would likely be administratively unfeasible. But that does not preclude other means whereby aid strategies could be planned as essentially complementary to remittance flows, adding to them and filling the gaps. And that will require more detailed information to identify the reach of the remittances.

4. Reorienting current humanitarian aid

   Donors and NGOs have in fact been providing support for various humanitarian assistance and social protection programmes in recent years, even though budgetary support and other long term development aid has been curtailed. It is thus possible for a reshaping of aid to take into account the realities of remittances to be undertaken immediately in these programmes. Such reconfiguring could go along in parallel with similar rethinking that is required to take into account the dollarisation of the economy; for instance, elaborate procedures for issuing food vouchers, which had to be cashed before their Z$ value disappeared are no longer needed. In these and other such programmes cash payments can as readily be substituted, but of course they would have to be in US$.

5. Appropriate forms of aid to revive livelihoods

   Now there is the possibility that the political circumstances will allow implementation of a recovery programme and one which includes resumption of ‘normal’ economic relations with international partners, and thus long term development aid. Planning of aid should be urgently undertaken for that eventuality, indeed, the World Bank is coordinating such an operation. But closer attention needs to be paid to what forms of social protection and income support would be appropriate to such a transitional period. In the draft prepared by UNDP in late 2007 there was only a cursory recognition of the potential role of remittances, under a heading about the diaspora, which focussed more on repatriation of professionals. SP in any transition needs to be geared to provision of rebuilding of productive assets and creation of opportunities for employment and self-employment through credit etc. But at a more macro-level maintaining a high-level of remittances as a source both of income support and of investment must be a core strategic concern, to which other investment plans and repatriation whether of refugees and key professionals should be subordinated in a complementary manner.

1. A School of Geography, University of Leeds survey of patterns of remittances by some 400 Zimbabweans in Yorkshire in 2008.
2. Some indications are offered in two surveys in 2005 and 2006 reported on in S. Bracking & L. Sachikonye (2008), Remittances, Poverty Reduction & Informalisation in Zimbabwe, 2005-06: a political economy of dispossession, Brooks World Poverty Institute Paper 28, February.
3. For instance, an evaluation for DFID of a range of social protection and livelihood support projects in Zimbabwe suggested, while stressing the difficulty of getting cost data during massive inflation, that £3 were typically spent on overheads to deliver £1 of actual resources.