MIGRRA

Five innovative projects were mainly identified through call for proposals pioneering innovative models that have proven to be successful within a limited scope, but require minimum additional capital to become demonstrative models and have a potential to be scaled up. Through activities implemented in Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, India, Guatemala, Kenya, Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan and Uganda, these projects promoted new technologies to enhance access to and use of remittances, broadened networks of pay-out locations and infrastructures in rural areas and contributed to spur competition in the remittance market. The lessons of these successful and innovative models were then used for replication and scaling up, de facto contributing to enhance their development impact on remittance-receiving countries.

Eight scaling-up projects were financed as stand-alone projects as verified and validated models linked to larger projects, including IFAD programmes of loans in several countries. These projects, based on previous lessons learned and implemented in countries such as Eswatini, Indonesia, Mali, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal, the Philippines and Senegal, aimed at expanding, adapting and supporting successful policies, programmes and knowledge, so that they could leverage resources and partners to deliver larger results for a greater number of rural poor in a sustainable way. Moreover, through the scaling-up approach, the Action mainstreamed the topic of remittances and diaspora investment into several IFAD programmes of loans and grants in 16 countries

Research and knowledge management represented a substantial part of the work of the FFR during the implementation of the Action. To highlight project evidence, and the relevance of the Facility’s work in the global remittance agenda, the FFR carried out in-depth research, produced several publications (reports, project fiches, studies), and organized international events and conferences to discuss new trends, challenges and opportunities in both global and regional remittance markets. Knowledge management was thoroughly applied to extract all key messages and share them with internal and external audiences, contributing to the dissemination of the MIGRRA achievements and lessons learned. The FFR series of “Sending Money Home” reports and the RemitSCOPE web portal are just few of the most highly appreciated research products worldwide.

The Action significantly influenced policies at global, regional and national levels, substantially contributing to address the spotlight of the international community on the impact of remittances to on the life and economic development of hundreds of millions of people and their communities relying on these flows, and bringing the topic to an unprecedented high level on international agendas.

A key achievement of the FFR, particularly developed under the MIGRRA initiative, has been its ability to work with the private sector, without which it would have been challenging to meet the goals of the Action. Private sector entities are key in delivering innovation and solutions to remittance senders and receivers, and provide them with dedicated financial services. For this reason, the FFR has successfully incorporated key private sector partners (banks, remittance service providers, mobile operators, microfinance institutions, etc.) into its workflows.