Broadening the Remittance Debate: Reverse Flows, Reciprocity and Social Relations Between UK-Based Ghanaian Migrants and Families Back Home

Thomas Yeboah (), Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah () and Thomas Padi Appai ()
Additional contact information
Thomas Yeboah: Coventry University
Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah: Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Community for Global Health Equity, State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo
Thomas Padi Appai: University of Ghana

Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2021, vol. 22, issue 1, No 4, 47-68

Abstract: Abstract Remittance is arguably the most uncontroversial variable within the migration-development nexus. Evidently studies on remittances have focused largely on the developmental outcomes of such transfers in the Global South. Drawing on a survey with a cross-section of Ghanaian migrants living in Cambridge, UK, and phone interviews with migrants' families back home, we highlight that the conceptualisation of remittances as unidirectional flows from the Global North to South inadvertently portray families back home as passive actors in remittance flows. Our findings suggest that remittances are part of broader reciprocal social relations, involving material and non-material, bidirectional flows between migrants and their families back home in Ghana. Thus, while migrants continue to send significant financial resources to their families back home, their families also provide to migrants the needed material and non-material resources (e.g. childcare support, sending haircare and other indigenous food and medicinal products, supervision of migrants’ building or businesses investments). This reverse flow of material and non-material resources to migrants, which involves significant and mostly unpaid time and labour costs, are embedded within social relations, which (re)produce reciprocity and relational ties within and across migrants and their families back home. In effect, remittance and reverse remittances serve as a double-edge sword: they can provide avenues for migrants to build and maintain familial, friendship and co-ethnic ties but can also serve to break such ties through competition and conflicts.

Keywords: Reverse remittance; Social relations; Reciprocity; Migration; Stayers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12134-019-00713-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joimai:v:22:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s12134-019-00713-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... tudies/journal/12134

DOI: 10.1007/s12134-019-00713-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Migration and Integration is currently edited by Lori Wilkinson

More articles in Journal of International Migration and Integration from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().