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

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.