House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE

 

 

MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT

 

 

Tuesday 10 February 2004

MR CHUKWU-EMEKA CHIKEZIE, COUNCILLOR MURAD QURESHI

and DR LOLA BANJOKO

Evidence heard in Public Questions 138 - 172

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected and unpublished transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House
2.	The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings. Any public use of, or reference to the contents should make clear that neither Members nor witnesses have had the opportunity to correct the record. If in doubt as to the propriety of using the transcript, please contact the Clerk to the Committee.
3.	Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 10 February 2004

Members present

Tony Baldry, in the Chair

John Barrett

Mr John Battle

Hugh Bayley

Ann Clwyd

Mr Quentin Davies

Chris McCafferty

Mr Andrew Robathan

Tony Worthington

 

________________

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie, African Foundation for Development, Councillor Murad Qureshi, British Bangladeshi International Development Group, and Dr Lola Banjoko, Commonwealth Business Council, Africa Recruit, examined.

Q138 Chairman: Welcome. A few points really. Firstly, the acoustics in these rooms are not brilliant and although these look like microphones they are not really microphones. I am not quite sure what they are, I think they are part of the broadcasting system. Also some of us on this Committee are slightly deaf so if you could be very kind and speak up that would help us all. Secondly, colleagues will be asking questions and if you would like to work out between you how you answer them. It is not necessary for everyone to answer every question but we do not want anyone to feel that they are restrained from answering our questions. This afternoon we are looking at the diaspora and connections between the diaspora here and countries overseas and I think it might be useful for all of us if, starting with Councillor Qureshi, you could tell us a bit about yourselves and your organisations so that it can be put into context, just two or three sentences so we know who you are.

Mr Qureshi: I will get the ball rolling. I am Murad Qureshi, I am a second-generation Bangladeshi living in London. The organisation I am representing is the British Bangladeshi International Development Group. We are a not‑for‑profit association of people interested in promoting education and research on issues related to international development in Bangladesh and the British Bangladesh community in the UK. We were formed by a group of us with existing involvement in these issues who believe that added insight and value may sometimes be gained from our perspective on issues which pertained to DFID.

Dr Banjoko: My name is Dr Lola Banjoko from the Commonwealth Business Council Africa Recruit. Africa Recruit is an organisation that stemmed out of Find a Job in Africa looking at redirecting the Africans in the diaspora towards job opportunities and employment in Africa. Towards that end we launched last year a careers fair here in London which was attended by approximately 3,000 Africans and about 20 organisations and quite a few people have gone back as a result of that. In terms of the outcomes of the event, it has raised the awareness of Africans to potential job opportunities in Africa and also of African employers about what does exist outside there. As a result of the large database of Africans globally Africarecruit/Findajobinafrica.com is able to provide a platform for surveys, research and information management on various Africa Diaspora or related issues.

Mr Chikezie: I work for the African Foundation for Development ‑ AFFORD. AFFORD's mission is to expand and enhance the contribution that the African diaspora makes to Africa's development. We are a London‑based not‑for‑profit organisation formed in 1994. We organise ourselves and work along a number of different lines. One is to build the capacity of smaller home town diaspora-based organisations in their efforts to support development in their regions of origin. We network with a range of different organisations. We are part of a consortium called Africa 21 that puts on an annual event called the African Diaspora and Development Day which brings together the African diaspora, round about 300‑350 people to look around the issues of how we as Africans in the diaspora can maximise our contributions to development. We start from the premise that we as the African diaspora and indeed other diasporas are, in fact, the biggest aid donors, if you want to put it in those terms, and this is particularly on the flows of remittances and the long history dating back in this country to the 18th century to the African diaspora's engagement with some of these important issues.

Q139 Mr Robathan: This is really a question that follows on from some of the written submissions that we have had, to really get on the record what contributions you feel ‑ and you have already mentioned one or two ‑ the diaspora and its members can make to the development of their home countries. I want to explore beyond remittances, if I might say that, and see what contribution diaspora organisations can make specifically to the formulation of UK development policy as distinct from people like Oxfam or NGOs similar to that.

Dr Banjoko: In looking at it from Africa Recruit's perspective, one aspect is around skills. What tends to happen is that a lot of the African diaspora, probably the first generation, leave Africa with minimum work experience, go abroad, gain a lot of work experience and some of it begins to translate in terms of what can they do towards contributing back to Africa. I think the African diaspora has a lot of business networks that are formed, so there are a lot of business links between the Africans in the diaspora and the Africans in Africa. You have people who want to take franchises back to Africa of political organisations or businesses that they see here and models of business that they have seen formed here to form in Africa. In terms of contributing towards development that is actually very important. On the developmental aspect, a lot of it tends to stem around something that you want to do in terms of contributing towards your home town or the schools you have left behind, and that is obviously not for profit. For instance, my background is health, I happen to be a doctor by background, and I have worked within the NHS, and I feel I have a role to play towards developing health care in Nigeria being that there are a lot of doctors who have left the country. We see our role as contributing some of our skills and capacities that we have learned here towards the development of health care, which is in desperate need in some countries in Africa.

Q140 Mr Robathan: You mean particularly taking the recruiting skills back to Nigeria?

Dr Banjoko: We take skills back on a temporary, short-term or long-term basis. It depends on the industry, the individuals and the needs of the organisations. If you look at health care, you would not get a health care person going back permanently in the main. The global workforce is a competitive market and you find that the best way you can tap into the skills of these people is in the short term. So these are the sorts of things we do.

Mr Qureshi: Can I go back to remittances because I think it needs to be reinforced for the simple reason it has been ignored for so long. Globally the flows we are talking about are bigger than all of the flows of foreign aid and sub-finance that you get from the World Bank and the IFC and various other bodies in terms of about $140 billion. In the Bangladeshi context, for example, in the last financial year ending 2002 we had something like £150 million from the UK alone going into the Bangladeshi economy. That is 1.5 times more than the British aid budget through DFID Dhaka. I think the flows do suggest that we have to look at DFID's priorities. Why has the eye been kept off this big phenomenon that seems to be happening and continuing to happen and how do we best make use of it as a vehicle for future international development? Along with that, remittances have helped the ancestral home, the home country in terms of its foreign currency. A third of the foreign currency for Bangladesh is provided by home remittances. It helps reduce unemployment clearly because most of the labour that is exported is essentially unskilled and skilled labour to the Middle East and Far East on short‑term contracts or long term to Western Europe. In total in global terms it has gone from something like $25 million in 1976 to Bangladesh to about $2.6 billion last year, so a lot of developing countries are increasingly dependent. For example, in Bangladesh again, it is actually a more important source of income than the garment industry, which tends to get most of the attention. Looking at one particular case study does help to reinforce the importance of it and the need for DFID to begin to develop policies on this front. On one or two occasions we have engaged with DFID and we have not had the responses we were looking for. To give an example, last year when there was a review of the programme of aid in Bangladesh from the DFID Dhaka office, we had made those points and we were not convinced that they were taken on board that there is a need to engage with the diaspora communities like Bangladeshis to get the most from these flows. Let's face it, the people providing these moneys are your Indian waiters, your cabbies, your mini-cab firms and your cleaners and as a proportion of their income and in total they do a lot more than any of us here.

Mr Chikezie: The framework we use when we look at the African diaspora, as colleagues have said, is the political capital, the financial capital and skills. Dr Banjoko has talked about the skills and we have talked about remittances. One aspect that is important of course is that the diaspora is also a consumer of products that come from regions of origin. In our case for example, Nigerian videos are a very popular huge industry, as are Nigerian foodstuffs, things like that. That is an important aspect. We should not forget the political dimension because when one looks at some of the developments historically ‑ the anti‑apartheid movement, for example - there was a very strong presence of the African American diaspora. Typically now on an everyday basis there are a number of issues that the so‑called new African diaspora ‑ maybe Nigerian communities, Ugandan communities and so on ‑ engage with. The key thing to understand, particularly as we talk about people who are more recent in their arrival here, is that all these things get mixed in together so you will not necessarily see an organisation which says we are just dealing with the political aspects, it will be a lot of these issues mixed in together. That is one of the problems that I hope we can come back to looking at on the question of engagement because it often tends to be the case that so‑called mainstream agencies are looking for that single focused agency, they are looking for a kind of engagement which is neat and tidy, and that does not always reflect the way that the diaspora is organised.

Q141 Chris McCafferty: Given what you have just said, Councillor Qureshi, about not getting the responses from DFID that you would have liked, does the UK Government help organisations such as yours in terms of developing appropriate development strategies? Can you tell us what they do do to help, if they do anything at all?

Mr Qureshi: I appreciate that DFID is like a huge ocean liner and it is very difficult to move on or change direction, but I do think that they are missing a big picture here and there is a lot of scope to do things. I will give you a few examples. On the back of those streams of money I could envisage DFID in the future helping migrants to pay into bonds which are underwritten by DFID under its new powers from the last Act. I think that would help one of the issues about the flows of moneys going back going to more productive investment. At the moment a lot of it is obviously family investments and other conspicuous spending. I think there is a lot more that could be done. At the moment, for example, each taka, that is the Bangladeshi currency (and there are about 100 takas to a pound) that is sent by remittance contributes about 3.3 takas in the national income, so it has got quite a strong multiplier effect. I think there are ways of making that go even further, for example on basic infrastructure. What it does need is for DFID to review where it is with the migrant communities here and begin to use some of the tools it has at its disposal to meet some of those community needs and also acknowledge that they have got a lot of development experience that can be utilised. It often strikes me that if you hear some of the rates of return that you can get from investment in the developing world ‑ 15 % or 20 % or what have you ‑ you would think a lot of the institutional investors would be in there, but that is not the case. That is another area which I think needs to be developed if DFID was minded. Clare Short did invite us in once to a meeting to encourage investment in Bangladesh and I think she was quite surprised to hear that that level of return was possible, and yet the biggest institutions are not doing it, for whatever reason. An engagement with communities like ours would be very, very useful. Those are the kinds of things we are looking at DFID doing in conjunction with groups like us and other elements of the diaspora.

Q142 Chris McCafferty: How do you see DFID helping you to utilise the skills of the many diaspora that there are in this country? What would you particularly like to see DFID do?

Mr Qureshi: Trying to match up policy with some of the migrants' priorities. One of the issues that comes up time and time again, particularly when they go back, is basic roads and transport infrastructure. For example, when you are passing back through, very often you go to the airport and that journey from the airport back to the home village can be quite an arduous one when they have got accustomed to transport here. I think investment in those areas would be something that a lot of the migrants would welcome and see a long‑term benefit from them in the long run.

Mr Chikezie: In terms of the skills question when we have looked at the question of the so‑called "brain drain" we have tried to understand it through a framework of three Rs, the first R being retention, the second R being return, people permanently returning, and the third R being retrieval, where you tap into the skills in a much more flexible way, recognising, as Dr Banjoko has said, that not everybody will return tomorrow. In all of those ways DFID itself could play a useful role. In terms of looking at its own technical assistance budget, the skilled professionals it puts into development projects and so on, if DFID started from the position that what was important was to build the human and institutional capacity in the countries in the developing regions, then its starting point would be, first, to make sure that skills within the country that are often under-utilised ‑ and this is where retention is important ‑ are used and that there is a thorough search for those skills, and, second, in the absence of those skills in situ then looking at the diaspora. One of the things that we have said to African governments is that they also need to be a little bit more flexible because sometimes they look at this from a national basis and they need to look at it from a more regional basis in terms of facilitating the input of the skills. So I think that DFID could conceivably contribute those three Rs if it makes institutional and human capacity-building a central theme that runs throughout its policy, so it is not another add‑on but it is something that runs centrally through its policy. In terms of DFID I would just say one thing that I do not think was mentioned in either the written or oral evidence to yourselves and that was Connections for Development, which is a new initiative that has a come out of some earlier discussions with DFID around its policy, because in DFID we should not forget it has a policy in its first White Paper to work with ethnic minorities and migrants in this country to support development in their regions of origin. So the Connections for Development initiative, which is a network of black and minority ethnic communities interested in international development, now has a strategic grant agreement with DFID.[1] It is a very limited but important step that we should acknowledge DFID has taken. I was a little alarmed as to why it was not mentioned because I thought it was seen as central, and those of us who were interested in pushing this and encouraging DFID thought it was quite central to moving forward so, as I say, it was a little bit worrying that it was not mentioned. Nonetheless, it is something DFID can no doubt tell you a little bit more about. It is the Information and Civil Society Department that is taking the lead on that. It is one thing that is happening but it is very early days and we would like to see where that goes. We do not want every time you ask DFID what they are doing that they point to CFD but I think it is an important step in the right direction

Chairman: Tony, you wanted to ask a supplementary on that and then go on to your own question.

Q143 Tony Worthington: Can I ask for your advice on which of the diasporas do it well in terms of not just sending back remittances but of contributing to the infrastructure of the countries. I will give an example. We have just come back from Somaliland and I have never been so conscious of the diaspora in my life; that may be to do with the marginal status and the exclusion of Somaliland. In this country which of the diasporas could we learn from?

Mr Qureshi: Can I highlight one example and it is the Indian community. They get something like $10 billion-odd from remittances from all over the world going back but there is also another interesting development in that the software engineers who went from Bangalore to Silicon Valley are the main players behind the Bangalore software industry. That is an interesting example. The remittances have been going and now we have trade and investment the other way. Whereas most people see it as a brain drain, it is actually working towards helping India have a second major source of income. It is not quite in the same league as remittances in terms of income - it is about $6 billion - but nevertheless it is something that has come out of that movement of migrant skilled labour from India to the USA. They are seen as one of the successful communities here in the UK. I do not think we have had the flow of software engineers coming here but I think that is a good example in South India. I certainly think that that is worth studying and looking into. I think that is a dynamic process. Once it begins one is not sure where it will go and I see similar things happening in the Bangladeshi community. There are many second-generation Bangladeshis who are interested in investing in Bangladesh and they are looking for the vehicle and the means to do that, and London could be central to that.

Dr Banjoko: Just to follow up on what Chukwu said earlier on, the reality is that most of the diaspora ‑ and this is from the African perspective ‑ gather around a certain region or resource so as a result of that if you take it from that perspective you will find that they are very well‑organised so you can have a diaspora community and their focus is really on business and they are very well-organised. I know some Nigerian businesses, for instance, and their focus is really on business. At the end of the day they engage with the Nigerian Government at that level. You also have, on the other hand, those whose focus is on the development of some social project within their community and therefore they are very focused at that level. It depends how you want to look at them and also the needs that they are addressing.

Q144 Tony Worthington: Okay. Can I go on to look in more detail than we have done so far at why professionals leave countries. What are their motivations? Do they go intending to permanently leave or temporarily leave? I was told once "Don't send them to America, they will not come back; send them to Britain, they will come back." Can you take us into that in some detail.

Dr Banjoko: From the point of view of Africa Recruit we have run surveys[2] and we have asked a lot of questions as to why people left Africa and it is a very fluid perspective, but in the main a lot of people, probably about 60 %, left for career and professional development reasons. In other words, they do intend to return. That is their initial reason although obviously when they get there they might not leave. Political insecurity does not account for as large a percentage as people would assume. Most people leave for career and professional development reasons and then when they go abroad some of them stay but, on the other hand, it also depends on the opportunities they become aware of back in their country of origin. One of the things we are trying to address is this question of access because at the end of the day if people are not aware of the opportunities that are available to them in their country of origin, then they do not consider it as an option. So what we are trying to do is present these options to them and the more we do that the more we realise the take‑up is increasing. There are a lot of people who see beneath that their skills will be of greater value in their country of origin as opposed to where they are now. There are multiple reasons but the main one is career and professional development reasons. There are other reasons like political insecurity and then some of it is due to things like marriage, people got married to somebody else and so they left the country. Then there is international transfer. We work in a world where there are a lot of multi‑nationals who do rotations, and people come out and work here and then probably decide, "I want to stay here," but the reason they left was for work reasons. So you have multiple reasons.

Q145 Tony Worthington: In terms of policy it is crudely characterised as a "brain drain" and looks like bad news for a developing country in that it trains people up and then the majority leave. In policy terms what would you do?

Dr Banjoko: In policy terms I think there are two issues. There is the question of strengthening the infrastructure in Africa itself to retain, otherwise there is this revolving door syndrome where people will get the skills in Africa, after a while they become very skilled and they are poached out of Africa either by the lure of economic reasons or whatever reasons. One of the things we are trying to do through Africa Recruit is strengthen the infrastructure within Africa. We have a lot of networking forums with human resource personnel within Africa trying to identify what issues they themselves are facing, what are the problems and the challenges. The aim of the forums is to identify, share and disseminate best practices thereby enhancing the capacity to retain skills in Africa. Also there is this issue around recruitment agencies who go into Africa and take the skills, so, South Africa is very classic in terms of you can open up an newspaper or go to web sites and it is talking about jobs in Africa but actually it is jobs in the UK and jobs in the US. People are free and people will be enticed by that sort of thing. It is about strengthening and presenting alternatives. In terms of policy it is looking at, as Chukwu said, how you can strengthen the infrastructure within Africa itself so they do retain some of the skills they have got. That is one of the issues. Also there is an issue about access - access on both sides of the fence ‑ to the African Diaspora to jobs in Africa. Is it being made readily available to them? Also are the employers aware of the potential opportunities in terms of talents in the African Diaspora? I think politicians should address infrastructure in the main. There needs to be a lot of training and development around human resource development in Africa. I am not talking about the conventional human Resource Developmental Index; I am talking about HR in itself.

Mr Chikezie: To add to that, I would just say that as we move now from the "brain drain" to talking about "brain circulation" any policy initiative that enables flexibility of movement would be helpful. If you look at the diaspora here in this country you will find a great deal of skills which are often under‑utilised. We cannot make use of those skills a) because often times there is not the right to work and all these sorts of things, and there are things that can be done in that regard, and b) we have to enable fluidity because much of the research has demonstrated that when people know that they have the ability to move back and fro they are more willing and more flexible and more able to adjust and to move to travel to work and so on because there is that option to return if things do not work out. I think that is another aspect in terms of policy. We need to remember that there is a very vast human resource. You probably have more PhD holders driving taxis in London than anywhere else except maybe New York. So this is something that we need to think about.

Q146 John Barrett: Can I continue with this theme of what ought to be happening with developed nations where on the one hand we are looking to expand health and education services in the developing world but at the same time, as you have mentioned, we have agencies recruiting doctors and nurses to bring them over here. What I am trying to get a handle on is is this general brain circulation a good thing ‑ people coming over, expanding their skills and maybe going back ‑ or ought there to be a discussion about some form of compensation for the skills that we are taking over because what you have is a net outflow of resources and we may be sending over aid but at the same time we have got a net inflow of skills. How do you think this ought to be tackled from the British end of the system so that we are adding to the solution, not to the problem?

Mr Qureshi: You are quite right, we are getting them at nil cost education‑wise. I think it would be useful, for example, for DFID to look at that human capital and start giving them opportunities within our aid programmes so where we have got health programmes to ask them to go along and deliver those programmes. I think very often, certainly amongst medics, a lot of them aspire to health projects back in the ancestral homes. I have seen that amongst quite a lot of Bangladeshi doctors. Things that facilitate that are certainly useful and are a useful measure to give back something that we got for nil whilst they were serving here. I think processes like that are very dynamic. In the long-term perspective they are probably pretty neutral but at the point when we are taking them it does seem quite clear that we are getting it for little input into education, apart from the adaptations they often have to make when they get here initially. I think we should help them to go back and identify projects in sectors like health. I think that is happening anyway. I think there is probably quite a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest many of them do that of their own volition.

Q147 John Barrett: Is the general feeling that it is not one‑way traffic, it is circulation rather than a one‑way direction flow?

Mr Qureshi: I would certainly suggest that but I am not sure my colleagues would concur here. I think that is happening in the Bangladesh context. I have seen enough projects being done by Bengali doctors here to suggest that a lot of them aspire to do that and do go out of their way to do that, whatever the barriers. There are quite a lot of specialist services. One that impressed me very much in my home region was an eye specialist going out there regularly to deal with cataracts. It is a very simple thing to do yet there is no provision for that and I cannot see why that cannot be incorporated within a DFID aid project within the health sector.

Dr Banjoko: It depends on who you talk to. If you talk to some African governments they will tell you that it is one‑way traffic, but it boils down to the industry you are talking about and the need at that point in time. A lot of it is highlighted obviously around health and that is because when we are talking globally skills in health and education are in short supply, so people will be trying to poach here and there. In terms of giving back, I would advocate that more needs to be done by the developed countries because if you look at it in terms of people educated at no expense, they come here, they develop their skills and they are contributing not only in terms of the health care system or the educational system but also in tax so given there is a debate as to the remittances that go back, it is not compensatory for the taxes that are paid here. Looking at how you can sponsor some of the countries where you are taking the skills from in terms of contributing towards the health care system or the educational system where there is a need would be something that would be beneficial to the countries and probably would reduce the noise bytes that are coming from Africa. There are a lot of noise bytes that are coming. I think it is South Africa who have tried to get the UK Government to sign an agreement in terms of the recruitment agencies. However, there is a limit to what the Government can do because they are private organisations and they are free to trade their business wherever they want to. That would reduce the impact and probably soften the blow in some respects. I think that is something that should be looked at.

Mr Chikezie: I think it does very much depend on a range of different factors. I think the key thing is for the drive, the pull to come from institutions and organisations on the continent, if you are talking about Africa. I think it is important that we hear from governments because it does vary so much and it is also important that we talk to institutions, as we talk to them, like higher education institutions because they often have very innovative solutions to these problems, perhaps looking on a regional basis. I think it is a danger for all of us to sit here and think, "Let's pack up our bags and go home and do a little project here and there." They are important and they contribute but I think the pull from this particular aspect needs to come from African governments sitting down and thinking very clearly about these issues and coming up with innovative solutions, including the bi‑lateral agreement between the South African Government and the British Government. There could be pairing, twinning, all sorts of schemes are possible and feasible. I do not think we can make generalisations about the benefits of circulation vis-à-vis development because it very much depends on the particular time, the particular sector and so on and so forth.

Q148 Hugh Bayley: Whenever I go abroad and meet DFID people in the field I am surprised how white and English and Scottish or Welsh the non‑local staff are. Just picking up a point you made, Councillor Qureshi, do you have any information about what proportion of DFID's career staff come from diaspora communities in the UK? You seem to be saying that it would be a good idea if DFID made more use of the skills and people that the diaspora could bring. What should it do by training and encouragement to recruit such people to join the Civil Service?

Mr Qureshi: In some ways the question needs to be directed to the personnel officers at DFID. To my mind it is clearly not enough and I am not sure how it has come about. Clearly a government ministry like DFID has responsibilities now under the Race Relations Act and I am not sure how it is performing against those commitments. It seems extraordinary that this whole arena is dominated by certain types of individuals and is not drawing from the experiences of the various minority communities in this area. There is quite a lot of evidence certainly in the South Asian community amongst Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis, that a lot of second-generation diaspora are doing academic qualifications in those areas and still do not seem to be making their way through. At the same time this is the only ministry that has also got a Permanent Secretary that is Asian, if I remember rightly. So there are different ways you can look at it. I am not sure how you go about it but I think certainly you have got to begin by acknowledging the contributions and looking out for it and tapping into it, and getting the various diasporas in and conversing with them would be very useful. It strikes me that what has happened with a lot of the interactions that politicians have with many of these communities is that most of the communities' politics are affected by the politics back home rather than here, so in part they have got to begin engaging and making those points, and I think we are part of that process. I do think that DFID have to look out and see the realities of not doing as well as they could do. Maybe they are missing something here altogether which does explain why they have missed on the big issue, which I think is the remittance and flows of it. If they had enough minority members in DFID I am sure they would have made those points internally.

Dr Banjoko: From our perspective there has been an issue where people initially did not recognise the African diaspora as a pool of talent that you can tap into. Once you recognise them as a pool of talent, the question is how do you access these people? It is well‑documented that there is no one medium and there is a wide variety out there so the next thing is the issue of dealing with access. You have got to gain access to these communities, advertise and, if the jobs are there, make the jobs known to them. I did point out earlier that one of the issues is access, that is access on both sides of the fence, both the job‑seekers, the African diaspora, and organisations like DFID. The times I have heard people say that they are looking for somebody and they cannot find them and the question is where were you looking? You could put it somewhere in a newspaper where, most likely, the people you are targeting would not look at. At the end of the day you are not accessing the community. I think DFID needs to build inroads into the various diaspora organisations and they do need to be known. We are here but I do know of some people who have never heard of DFID or are not aware that they have job opportunities that are available to them. I could use a commercial term and say the "branding" of DFID as an employer is important so people do know that they employ people and then they can consider working for them. These are some of the issues Africarecruit is addressing.

Mr Chikezie: On this very important issue one point is the question of the image of development. The image of development is still of the white, benevolent, middle-class person from the south of England going and saving the black, poor, hungry, starving masses. So the important thing is to challenge that because it links into where we started, which is the question that diasporas and migration are very central to development strategies overall. This is still not reflected in the media. Most times when we tell people that there is $1.3 billion going into Ghana every year they are amazed[3]. It is something they never expected to hear. DFID has done some quite interesting work around this issue of media images and images of development. Perhaps one step further is to see how we can begin to have diasporas tell our own stories about this. I think a number of schemes and projects and initiatives along those lines would go a long way. There is another aspect to this which is much deeper and darker and that is the whole question of institutional racism within the development industry itself. It is the unspoken sin because the idea is that in development everybody is on the moral high ground. You are, after all, saving people and saving souls so how could there be institutional racism within the sector. I think it is an area where there is a great deal of complacency but not so much in DFID because I think that DFID is probably a little bit more diverse than many of the NGOs we see on our screens on the TV most evenings. I know for a fact that when the umbrella body, British NGOs for Development, organised a workshop to look at the implications of the McPherson Report they had to cancel it because there was no take‑up of interest. So I think if DIFD is able to take a lead, because the industry is not regulated but DFID is a very influential player, and if it can climb on to that moral high ground by demonstrating its diversity, then I think that will bring about a change because most people do not imagine or see themselves as playing a role in development because of the image of it that they see. There is a wider issue and that is one where even when you do work for DFID or anybody else, we call for joined‑up coherence in the policy but there can be limits to that because on the one hand you have parts of the British Government, in effect, re-colonising parts of the developing world and that does cause some discomfort, particularly to those of us who have long memories, and you have advisers to the Prime Minister actually saying that imperialism was not such a bad thing. There are some difficulties in terms of saying we want you all to come in here because there are challenges and discomforts with some aspects of government policy that not everybody necessarily identifies with. So there are limits to how much we can expect people to sign up to some of these things.

Q149 Mr Battle: I was reminded by some youngsters in my own constituency that I ought to be very careful that I was not signing up to a caricature of the "male, pale and stale" brigade but perhaps one of my redeeming features is that I am from the north of England and not from the south! In my constituency of Leeds there are huge numbers of people from Africa, the Asian sub‑continent. In fact, one of the largest Bangladeshi communities is in Leeds. How welcome they are and what a contribution they have made. You are right that in some sense that the conversations are about the Asian sub‑Continent sometimes but what a contribution they have made to the growth and dynamism of my city, including in public service in the civic hall, and maybe we need to take the inspiration from what is happening in local authorities more seriously in government. I simply say that knowing some of the figures on jobs in the Foreign Office and in DFID and elsewhere in public service as a whole. If I can perhaps add a political point as well; the largest number of Bangladeshis in Leeds live in the constituency of the Secretary of State so I do think there is an opportunity for a conversation. I do not know whether they are members of the British Bangladesh Development Group but there is an opportunity for a local conversation to join the global conversation. I simply make that political aside if you like. I wanted to point to a very helpful quotation you drew our attention to in Newsweek International, from 19 January 2004 in your submission. It says: "The migrant worker is many things to many people. For conservative politicians (it says with a small 'c') and Trade Union organisers in industrial countries, he (perhaps she) is the illegal migrant ‑ who deserves a one way ticket back to whatever country he came from. For immigration advocates and business groups, he is a vital pillar of today's globalized economic order, whether a legal resident of his new country or not. For the political leaders of developing countries, he is a modern day 'hero' who sends home a hefty portion of his paycheque to help support his family members and keep his old community afloat." I thought that was a little bit of a caricature but not an unhelpful breaking down of the situation. I want to drive towards a very practical question in a sense to see what we could do and where we can go with our inquiry and our report because you have all made very helpful points. A lovely expression "brain circulation" crept in and encouraging flexibility of movement, moving backwards and forwards, but what about opening up options and space to move between? I want to ask you the very practical question, which will be a question for the Home Office as well as the Foreign Office in a way, would temporary work schemes which allowed re-entry into Britain at a later date encourage migration back to the home based countries so they could go back there for a while and know that they could return later? Would that practical proposal open up the agenda?

Dr Banjoko: Yes. One of the reasons that people do not want to leave is that if you dare step out then you are not going to be able to come back in. Knowing you have a back door, in other words you do have a re‑entry door would therefore enable people to enlarge on their options. There are times when we are trying to speak to Africans and talk about job opportunities in Africa, and the immediate reaction is "No, I do not want to go," but, having said that, there is another scheme that does need to be encouraged, and it is not re‑entry but rather the possibility can I take a sabbatical a year off from work knowing that if I come back I will still be in employment because otherwise what they are saying is, "I am going to take the job back at home and then I am going to come back and am I going to go on the dole or am I going to start looking again? If I know that I can come back (and in some jobs that is possible) to my job and continue then I would willingly take up the opportunity to do something back at home." That is another thing that does need to be considered, not just the re‑entry but going back into employment.

Mr Qureshi: There certainly is scope, I would suggest, because if you look at the Bangladeshi picture once again of three million migrants from abroad most short‑term contracts are in the Middle East and the Far East and the reality is that they tend to save more and send more back than those of us sitting in Western Europe with longer-term residency. There are issues there because those states do not offer them that and they never suggested that, but I think there is scope for that. John, I think what you have suggested is very interesting because the migration does not sit easily in one department, it cuts across a number. What we are trying to say here is that in some ways DFID missed migration as being an important response to poverty, whether it be international, as we are discussing, or whether it be from rural to urban, which you have no doubt discussed in other sessions, and other types of migration. I think a lot of Bangladeshis are victims of environmental circumstances and they find themselves being environmental refugees going into India. That said, I would like to see DFID being an advocate for some of these issues with the Home Office and the Foreign Office, not only advocating but representing these migrants, which I do think if they come in on short-term contracts will do their bit and move on. That has been seen to happen in other parts of the world. I do understand the present political context. Migration seems to be the big news item this week. It is not just here though. I think the quote you quoted from Newsweek shows it is also a very big issue in America. It is interesting that Newsweek led on it at the beginning of this year on the back of President Bush suggesting that he would legalise most illegal Hispanics. So it is certainly a hot issue and in light of the Morecambe Bay tragedy as well as the scare of mass migration from Eastern Europe, I think it needs discussion across several departments and I think DFID could be a useful advocate if it takes on board the issue that we are raising here.

Mr Chikezie: I would be a little bit uncomfortable if you were saying that I could have a temporary work permit and there is a requirement for me to go back. I do not think those two things should necessarily be linked as a compulsion. I think that would be problematic.

Mr Battle: The point would be that you may get a temporary permit now which has got a fixed end point on it, and you take that end point block off and you say after that time when you have done that temporary work if you go back you are not blocked from applying to come again, because there is a block on now, I think.

Q150 Chairman: I was in Freetown the other day in the President's office and there was a very nice lady there who had gone back to help with capacity building. She was a Sierra Leonean but it then struck me all the practical difficulties. She had two children, she had a home in the UK, a mortgage to pay. It meant the salary that she needed to get to pay the mortgage in the UK was distinctly more than the Permanent Secretary or other people in the government department and how did that work. I just wondered what thinking you had given to organising diaspora scholarships or diaspora bursaries, ways to enable people to go to support a country for a year or 18 months. I appreciate your point that it has got to be a pull. The government concerned - Sierra Leone or Nigeria or Ghana - has got to say these are the people we want and so on and so forth. Given all of those, I wondered what thought you had given to the kind of package, apart from DFID encouragement, that would be attractive. Let's just say you said to a GP of Nigerian origin, "Would you go and work in Gongola state for a year and build up some clinics? What would you need and who would pay for it?" I would welcome your thoughts on that.

Dr Banjoko: It is very interesting that you should say that because we had this conversation with an employer in Nigeria who was very much interested in a candidate but the candidate said he had a massive student loan which he could not repay and he was requesting the employer to take on the loan and the employer was a bit worried that if he did take on the loan and if the student did not like it, he would run back here and then that would be it. We were having this discussion and one of the things we were looking at with some of the HRs is whose responsibility is it to take up the loan? I am very happy that you have raised that sort of issue. In terms of short term rather than long term I think it should be something that the UK Government could look at and it is something that can be quantified. You mentioned a doctor. Yes, people have families here and if they have decided they are going to live in this country but they want to contribute towards the development of their home country, I think it is something that the UK Government can get involved in and is something that would therefore be quantifiable because you can quantify what value these people would add in terms of going back and that would release a lot more. In other words, you know that you are not going to remove what I call local currency to pay for the mortgage or even if you rent it out you would be worried as to whether the tenant is paying the mortgage. It would lift off some of the burden and therefore encourage both employers and jobseekers. I went to Oxford last week to talk to the African Students' Union and these were some of the issues, especially with the new things coming in terms of students are going to pay. They were talking about what would happen to their loan, and, if they go back, how would they pay it, particularly when you take the exchange rate into consideration and the fact that they will be paid in local currency. This also applies to mortgages etc. These are real issues that have to be tackled if you want to address some of these inward skills flows.

Q151 Hugh Bayley: Just in passing I think I am right in saying that if you have a student loan from the Government Student Loans Company and you go abroad you can defer payment, which may help in this particular case or it may not, but that is not my question. My question is this: speaking generally, if there is a choice between somebody from the African or the South Asian diaspora returning home, taking their capital and their skills with them, or remaining in the UK and sending remittances, which would you think generally would make a greater contribution to development?

Mr Qureshi: My first response is that it must very much depend on what time in your life cycle you are. One of the issues I am looking into with the Bangladeshi community, which is getting increasingly older and like many people dependent on state benefits, is whether there may be a case that you are better off in Bangladesh with your state benefits coming through there. You can live like a king on £200 there and not certainly here. Those are individual decisions to be made by people. If they have got the citizenship rights, it is up to them to choose which is the best. It is probably easier for the middle class professional Bangladeshis, Indians or Pakistanis to do that. They will find they have more stature and status out there than here, but that is for them to pursue and entertain if they feel they have not got that as far as they would have liked in British society. I think what you will find over the years is that, yes, people will take that option or even take an option where they spend half the year there and half the year there. I think the weather comes into it quite considerably as well in a personal decision. It certainly is an interesting question and it is one that a lot of families do attempt to address. In my family history we attempted in 1970 to go back and settle and we came running back because of the Liberation War. That is an example where my folks had thought they had done as much as they could do in the 1960s but we got caught up in the Liberation War and found ourselves running back on the first available flight out of Calcutta at the time. It is an individual decision for families to make themselves. I am seeing some signs that people as they get older are opting for that and they are the fundamental link. They are the ones who anyway spent most of their lifetime sending money back and probably still do in some ways in a small contribution to the extended family.

Dr Banjoko: I agree with a lot of what he said. It boils down to the individual decision but obviously, as people get older, then there is a question of what am I going to do towards the country where I have come from? On the other hand, you also have people who feel they have got to a glass ceiling in this country, in other words they are not going to go any further in their career, so they then begin to consider going back to Africa. There are multiple reasons but most people who tend to send remittances are not in the situation where they can make that decision. The value of the exchange rate is such that you have to stay here because that is the only way you will positively contribute towards your household income back in your country of origin. There are various reasons but it will always boil down to the individuals, no matter what framework and structures are in place. People will make a decision that is more favourable to them and probably their extended family.

Q152 Hugh Bayley: It is a slightly different question that I am asking and you are answering, and that is interesting in itself. You are looking at it from the point of view of the individual and their family and I was asking in terms of the development impact that somebody's contribution to the economy through remittances might make or their contribution through the economy by repatriating capital and taking their skills back. You both make a really good point that it depends on the individual, how old they are, what skills they have, how transferable those skills are, which I think is a good point.

Dr Banjoko: Can I just answer that then. You have, for instance, the Federal Minister of Finance in Nigeria now who used to work in the World Bank in Washington. She is going to contribute a massive amount, I would say, in terms of what she is going to contribute to Nigeria as a whole. The remittance would never cover it because she is in charge of the budget for Nigeria, and she is in charge of putting policies into place. So if you look at it, it depends at what level the person is coming in. She has got the respect of the government because of the fact that she was working in the World Bank at a very high key level. I know she has come to the UK to look at various policies and her global perspective and insight will be of immense benefit. In that instance you would say remittances would not cover it. Her skills are more valuable to the development of the country as opposed to her sending money home because it would have long‑term effects. So I think it depends on the level of skills of the person and the needs of the industry or sector you are talking about.

Mr Chikezie: I think it does depend on the issues of mobility of people and the flexibility because then you find that there is enough flexibility in the system to maximise the impact at a given time. Remember that if one looks at the pattern of remittances, typically those most on the margins of society here are the ones that remit more. There are logical reasons why. Sometimes it is indeed the pressure of poverty and migration as a strategy to cope with that poverty that causes that, so that person is under pressure to remit. The danger is that because of that pressure that person does not invest in the skills while here, for example, and therefore never gets to the point where although they have contributed and tackled the poverty back home they have been able to invest in their own skills, so I think the policy framework has to be flexible to look at those sorts of issues. How can we recognise that social exclusion here is often linked with social exclusion in the developing world and what kind of policy frameworks can we then begin to evolve that get a win/win situation so somebody who is here is remitting but has this flexibility perhaps to invest in their skills at the same time or to live in more decent housing? I think the regeneration policy framework in the inner cities looks at issues like crime, housing, very local issues, and yet for a lot of people the vulnerability and shocks that they are dealing with and trying to cope with are external. On the flexibility and the mobility of people the framework needs to recognise and create the space so that whether you are here contributing through remittances and other means or whether you are there, that you can maximise your contribution. A lot of times you do go back but in the institutional environment in which you find yourself you cannot maximise your contribution. It is a robust policy framework that understands. It is not an either/or, it is having the fluidity and recognising that these are all strategies that people adopt, depending on needs. I think that is how you maximise the impact on development.

Mr Qureshi: Can I have another stab at the same question, not at the individual level. I think what you are also touching on is the different models there are for remittances and economic development. If I can highlight two that come from the sub‑Continent again. The Mirpur example of Pakistan is quite interesting where they have got a cash rich economy which is coming from all the remittances and under‑developed infrastructure. That is by and large what has happened there and they are completely dependent on those flows coming from Birmingham and other parts of the UK, taking aside the political issues as well. Then you have got rural Punjab where a lot of remittances have been invested to augment the "green revolution" in India, and that seems to have given most of those sending money initially a very good return back and actually makes it feasible for them to switch off the tap and go back there and have a very comfortable lifestyle. That is the case if you go to Southall where there are many instances of Sikh families going back and taking advantage of that earlier investment. I think that is the kind of intervention that would be very, very useful, to move places like Mirpur in Pakistan away from this complete dependency, because it does mean that those families abroad have to continuously send the money and there is also a huge cost of that here. There are different models and I do feel that DFID has a role to play in making those appropriate interventions and leading those flows into key areas of investment for those country economies.

Q153 John Barrett: I am left with a feeling that there has to be a shift from remittances and aid being used for immediate consumer purposes on to more longer term taking back of skills, getting future employers to actually develop long‑term employment opportunities abroad and maybe to facilitate voluntary migration so that the long‑term development can improve. What I am wondering is who should be doing what work to advise DFID as to how this can be pulled together? As I say, I get the feeling there are different circumstances for different individuals depending on at what stage of life they are making their decisions. If we are trying to focus DFID's attention on what could be most effective, what work needs to be done so that this work can be pulled together in the form of recommendations from this Committee or from yourselves?

Dr Banjoko: I will talk now as the Chairman of Nigerians in Diaspora. At the moment we are talking to the Federal Minister of Housing and Urban Development because everybody knows housing is a form of investment and if you build property in Nigeria you will be boosting the construction industry, you will be creating employment for people etc etc but the constraint at the moment is we have not got set up a very good mortgage system. You can take the mortgage out if you are in Nigeria but you cannot have a mortgage here, so what we are talking about is things like having an alliance with public banks here where you can open up an account and therefore send money home on a regular basis in the form of a mortgage. In the Nigerian banks here you have to open an account with a minimum of £3,000-£5,000 in order to have a bank account. We are trying to look at other models in terms of what DFID can do, in terms of opening up and presenting our co-investment options to people. If I have a very good option in terms of alternatives that I can invest in why not invest in one of them. I was talking to some ministers in terms of the Nigerian Government and the private sector about the options can they present to the Nigerian diaspora that would be an attractive investment option so they can channel their money towards that. Obviously they will not be able to do this in isolation, I am sure there will be some constraints in what they can do within the policy framework of the United Kingdom Government because we are here and we are subject to the laws and the regulations of this country. I think there obviously needs to be some discussions in terms of DFID with governments in terms of what framework they can put together that would therefore present investment options to people, it is not a case of just sending money home but doing other things. Those are some of the areas that do need to be looked at. I know that in some countries they do have an agreement where you are in a position where you can look at alternatives rather than just sending money home because there is a need for the long-term in terms of making sure that this remittance does go towards investment rather than consumption.

Q154 Mr Davies: I want to continue with the remittance issue, before I do so can I make absolutely clear what the message was you were trying to give the Committee a few moments ago in the context of talking about DFID's personnel recruitment policies and the rather memorable remark about the image been of well-meaning, middle-class, white people dispensing aid to the starving millions - a phrase of Mr Chikezie - are you suggesting that DFID should deliberately set out to recruit people from the ethnic minorities with a family background in beneficiary countries or third world countries and that would be part of the qualification for joining DFID or for some of the jobs in DFID, is that what you are suggesting?

Mr Qureshi: I was not suggesting that. I was suggesting that clearly the recruitment process is not teasing out what they have to offer. I suspect there are a lot of candidates putting themselves up for many of the DFID posts so it would be interesting to see what happens in that process. I do think that investment per capita, both internally and piecemeal, in projects is a worthwhile approach. The fact that the main interaction that most diasporas have is sending money back home has been missed by DFID is explained by this fact. If you had enough people within the organisation you would have picked this up years ago rather than wait for organisations like us to inform you about this. There are ways of teasing the process out and making sure that is acknowledged but for whatever reason, and I am not sure how that happened, it does not seem to be at the moment.

Q155 Mr Davies: You are not suggesting that DFID should have a deliberate policy of recruiting from one particular community or another, what you are saying is that the existing recruitment policies are ineffective or wasteful and they are simply not recruiting rationally or fairly and that is why ex post there appears to be a discrepancy and a shortage of people from the ethnic minorities. Is that what you are suggesting? It is very important you get a clear message. You can give me a one word answer.

Mr Qureshi: You are quite right. All I wanted to add to that was what they have shown in recruitment processes all round the world and you always recruit ---

Q156 Mr Davies: We are under pressure of time. Is it your view that the processes are defective. That is what you are telling us, is it? This is very important for somebody who is responsible for oversight of DFID.

Mr Chikezie: In addition what I was saying is it is not an either/or. In the context of DFID's programmes in-country then it should prioritise institutional human capacity building. If you are putting money into an education programme or a health programme, for example, and that includes hiring people, I am talking in terms of---

Q157 Mr Davies: Hiring locals.

Mr Qureshi: The gentlemen there said that he went over there and saw not just locals. The point is if you are engaged in programmes in Tanzania can you look for Tanzanian skilled people, if you cannot find them in Tanzania you can look at the Tanzanian diaspora. There are some organisations that have begun to do this, working in Somalia they are saying "we would really like to engage with the Somalian diaspora on this because they have something specific to offer".

Q158 Mr Davies: There are two different types of recruitment, recruitment of United Kingdom based people that have typically spent part of their careers in London and part of their careers in the field and recruitment of people locally in the field. For the latter they are likely to find people who are present there and speak the language, it was the former I was concerned about, and I think you have answered my question, and it was quite a significant question, as I am sure you will appreciate. Can I move back to the remittance issue, both of your studies emphasise the importance of this, I am afraid the AFFORD study arrived just before the meeting started, so I just had a look at it very briefly, the other one, the British Bangladeshi International Development Group had some very interesting figures in it on migration. I am quite interested in that and on the importance of remittances. This Committee has discovered already during its inquiry that remittances can be quite expensive, there is quite a large burden of transaction cost in practice borne by the often quite modestly paid or poorly people who are sending this money back, certainly poorly paid or poor by the standards of the host country they are working in and that concerns us quite a lot. We have had evidence that typically transactional costs may be 15% to 20%, which is enormously high, do you have any suggestions from your consideration of this matter as to how that average cost could be effectively reduced?

Mr Qureshi: We have had quite a look at this. In some parts of the world money transfer is quite easily done through the banking system, for example Mexicans send money back from America to Mexico, the system there is geared up for that and the financial markets have responded to that. Money which is coming from the Middle East back to South Asia is predominantly going through unofficial channels, the hundi system.

Q159 Mr Davies: I am interested in your practical proposals.

Mr Qureshi: I am sure you are aware it has been investigated because of recent events since September 11, so there is a need to replicate that system somewhere else. I think the suggestion we had in mind is utilising the indigenous NGOs in Bangladesh, the primary banks, and what have you, which have an extensive set up in local villages and local government, they are local government in a lot of areas.

Q160 Mr Davies: You think they would do it cheaper.

Mr Qureshi: They will have to be tested. The real problem is ---

Q161 Mr Davies: I want very specific answers. If they could do it cheaper, their existence is well known, why is that not happening at the present time?

Mr Qureshi: I heard proposals the last time I was there in November that they are putting up mechanisms for that. The other role they could play, which would be an interesting development, is they could also convince the migrants that investing in projects that they advance would be a useful way of putting their money into projects which they sponsor, so it moves away from the family-centred investment which they tend to have. There clearly is a market there.

Q162 Mr Davies: That is an altogether different function, finding and promoting investment opportunities, if they are good investment opportunities, it is altogether different from transferring money to the targets chosen by the owner's of the money, in this case mostly their families.

Mr Qureshi: I do not know how extensive their networks are in the Middle East, that would be the critical thing.

Q163 Mr Davies: You do not have any other suggestions.

Dr Banjoko: In terms of my suggestion I think when you look at it the remittance market is a dark, uninformed market, in other words if I want to send money home I do not have a lot of information, I am not well-informed, it is all by word of mouth, somebody will come to me and say, "have you tried this money transfer, they are cheaper than this?" It is not a case of picking up a booklet, have a look at the rates. Make it more transparent and then competition becomes much healthier, people will be forced to drive their cost down because there are some cheap ones, but they cannot compete on the same scale as the large organisations. The first thing everyone wants to do is to use the cheaper option, that is why people send money through friends or family. I think creating more transparency and making people more informed so you are an informed consumer of this service would help. I think that is something which should be looked at.

Mr Chikezie: Can I say on this point, let us not forget that where some of these money transfer businesses are located are actually in the communities where there is a high concentration of migrants and diasporas. With trans-national business we do not fully know what their role is in the communities, in areas that are quite marginalised and poor in London and in the United Kingdom. Whilst we are looking at competition as important, the idea that a multi-national bank moves in now and takes that market and puts these smaller operators out of business as the consumer I win but it is the community that has actually been generating some wealth and jobs locally is something that we have to be very careful about.

Q164 Mr Davies: We were already talking about having an effective transfer mechanism, the cheaper the transfer mechanism the less of a drag on the cost of the transfer mechanism and the more people are likely to transfer. On your own evidence both of your organisations have said this is an enormously important flow, far more important than the flow of total aid, we have seen the figures already in our inquiry, then surely the priority is to make sure this mechanism works as efficiently as possible. If it is not a fully understood market, if there are informational problems, as Dr Banjoko was suggesting, you want more transparency and more competition, and so forth. I think we have explored that as far as we can this afternoon. I wanted to come back to what Mr Qureshi said about remittances, the question was, "how do we make better use of them?" He spoke about the need for DFID to develop policies with regard to them. My colleague Chris McCafferty asked what specific policies you had in mind and you said something about encouraging people to buy bonds. Is that right?

Mr Qureshi: I understand from the last act DFID has now these new powers. I feel in conjunctions with the Treasury it is something worth pursuing which would merit a lot of consideration by the diaspora communities. One of the issues that we come across and we have talked round is governance issues back at ancestral homes. This may be one way of avoiding some of those issues, although I do think we can play a role in that. I do think there is scope for that. I suggested the type of investment I think migrants might be interested in, road, airport, infrastructure, the type of thing which is quite straightforward to do.

Q165 Mr Davies: What concerns me is surely there is a potential conflict here because there is a confusion between three different things, one is the transfer function, who is delivering the money most cheaply and putting it in the bank account in Bangladesh or the recipient country, that is one thing and we have agreed that system is not working as adequately as it should be. The second thing is giving people good investment advice, that seems to be exactly the same if you are living in Dhaka or Los Angeles or Tokyo, you have a range of possibilities for putting your money away into investment and maybe you need some professional advice about what to do with it. The third thing is aid policy, there are governments who are determining it is a good idea to invest in one thing rather than another and build infrastructure rather than something else. They are terrible conflicts of interest in mixing up these things. If you are offering people a good investment and saying, this is a good way to invest for your retirement, your future, your children's future that should not be mixed up with some development policy of your own because if so you will find that you are not certain that you are giving genuinely disinterested investment advice, which is a very serious matter. Equally this should not be mixed up with transferring money, you should not feel that because you are transferring money the money is somehow being diverted to some purpose which might not be in your own long-term personal interest. Is it not highly desirable, as in any other good transparent financial market there should be a clear distinction made between these three things and there should not be the kind of muddle or confusion which I am referring to.

Mr Qureshi: I do not think there is the muddle that you are suggesting. I think it is quite acceptable to go to a bank and transfer money or exchange money on the one hand and invest in some product they offer to you. I am not suggesting that is the model we are talking about, I am talking about acting as an honest broker, whether it be an indigenous NGO involved in the transaction of the money if it has the networks, particularly abroad, and governments like the United Kingdom Government offering this. Ultimately people make their own decisions about whether the return is good enough for them or not.

Q166 Mr Davies: One hopes they do.

Mr Chikezie: I want to say that your questions seem to be premised on the idea that people make these separations when in actual fact the same pound is going for a number of different objectives and people understand that this is partly about their interest, it is not just a financial thing because you will support say the family back home not as looking for a return rate on your investment but because that builds up social capital, it builds up your relationship. I am not sure you can use exactly the same models that you are using, which are appropriate in some cases but not all in the way that people look at these things.

Q167 Mr Davies: People should surely be clear about their objectives, their objectives may be to maximise development in their country, it may be a collective objective, it may be a personal objective.

Mr Chikezie: I do not have to ---

Mr Davies: My concern is that Mr Chikezie referred to DFID developing policies on this.

Q168 Chris McCafferty: I would like to pursue that point but from a different angle, you are all well aware of what DFID's poverty reduction strategies are and they are really based on investing in basic health and education, clean water, sanitation and so on. That investment in limited by funds and although members of this Committee are very proud of the fact that that investment is growing year-on-year it is limited. You have all talked about the large volume of transactions, remittances that are going from family to family, clearly there is an enormous opportunity there to invest some of that money by the fact that there is more money going in in remittances than there is through our policy reduction strategy, my question really is, and it does touch a little on what Quentin has been saying, is it possible to persuade private individuals to put their money, their hard earned cash into projects that are for the wider public good, albeit it is back in their home country and albeit their wider families will benefit? Is that realistic? Can it be done? Would it be perceived as interference, almost as nationalisation of somebody's private earnings. Again a point that Quentin made, is it wise and sensible to mix up the idea of investment with improving the quality of life back in the home country? Indeed if the money is channelled in that kind of way should there be a return on it or should it be given freely?

Dr Banjoko: Can I say it is not going to be hard because people are already doing it. There is an issue about how it is going to be presented, what are the structures in place that will ensure that I know I am not putting my money into bottomless pit, after all if I send it to my family I know it is going directly there, if I send it I know that it is going to where it is needed. As the Chairman of Nigerian Diaspora when there was a fire somewhere in Nigeria we were inundated with Nigerians who wanted to send things back to Nigeria. You do not have to plead with people, people will react. The question is, how is it going to be presented? Who is going to come and present this thing? Is there credibility behind whoever is presenting it? The Nigerian Government initiated the Nigerian Diaspora so there was an issue there, people believed that the money was going to be used by the government for their own means rather than what they wanted. It is a question of how it is going to be presented and what is it going to be used for. Generally speaking people are already doing it. I have had people who have got in touch with me in terms of Africa saying, I do not want to go back to Africa but I want to do something for Africa. People are looking for somewhere to put their money towards credible projects.

Q169 Chris McCafferty: They would not be looking for a financial return on that money?

Dr Banjoko: They are not looking for a financial return.

Q170 Chris McCafferty: They need to know the money was going to what was intended. They would want to see there was a return in terms of the investment, a product or a project that was finished.

Mr Qureshi: There is a very good example, the Bank of Brazil launched a bond aimed at ex-patriot Brazilians in Japan and raised £300 million, which the ex-patriots Brazilians were happy to invest in. When you do these things you have to offer them a decent return, I think you can do that, it does not necessarily mean just infrastructural investment. I suggested earlier the example in rural Punjab where quite a few people invested in the green revolution through family allotments and what have you, and there is scope to do that. There is an issue in some countries where the migrant community would be confident about investing in those vehicles, not through the ancestral home country governments financial vehicles but through an honest broker like DFID under the United Kingdom Government's auspices. That is what we are suggesting here. If that sets the trend going that in itself would be very useful.

Q171 Chris McCafferty: Do you think that kind of bond purchase or money for projects, a banking system that had DFID's name on it people would be more comfortable with it or more trusting of it than possibly than the ancestral home countries? Do you think that would be more popular?

Mr Qureshi: I am obviously suggesting that and it is because of some of the governance issues you have in countries, and I suspect that might be an issue in Nigeria, I am not one to comment on Nigeria.

Dr Banjoko: I am sure you know about Somalia and the fact it is the diaspora, which built the university. There was no return from that for them, their return is the joy in seeing the project completed and the value it adds to the life of the students and the country as a whole.

Q172 Chris McCafferty: Goodwill.

Dr Banjoko: Yes. In terms of DFID it goes back to my point earlier, "Who is DFID?" The reality is that some of the diaspora do not know who DFID is. All of a sudden DFID turns up and puts money in. They think, is DFID an extension of what I am running from. It is a question of you have to cross that bridge in terms of making the community aware of who you are, what you are doing, what your success stories are, what you have done and what you intend to do and building those bridges into the community. In terms of raising the funds I can say it is not a problem. I am getting to the point where all I am doing through African communities is redirecting Africans to people, saying to them, "if you want to do this go in that direction". There are people who feel it as an obligation, their contribution towards the development, and some of it is probably them saying, "I am here, I am okay but what am I doing to give it back".

Mr Chikezie: I do not quite see where DFID adds value in the scheme, that would be the question, where does DFID add value? You are presenting it as an either/or, either the Nigerian Government or DFID - that is an easy choice. - I think there are other options that could be explored in that respect. Your first question is an important one, that is whether after I have cleaned this building all day and Gordon Brown has given me a little bit of money left and I spend this money in my country of origin, the tax has already been paid and DFID tells me I should do this with the money I think is problematic. I think conceptually that is flawed. We should twist it on its head, the fact that I am linked in with the household and communities - do not forget some of these transfers are not just household to household but it community to community - the fact that I as an individual or a community are getting an expression of need from people, often very poor, in Africa gives me some insight and that is probably information that could influence DFID's policy. I see that the other way round, because people are remitting money they could work with DFID and advise DFID and maybe it could be a case of matching some of that funding. After all after 50 or 60 years of development - and it is not just the African governments that have failed in development projects - we need to have a much more thorough re-think about some of those issues. I would say one thing, different people want different things, some people do want a return on investments, some people are happy to see their money produce a social return and we need mechanisms that address each and every one of these. Some people will take a lower return on investment, some people like to have a high risk and high return or high loss. There are all of these different types of investors.

Chairman: We are not going to have time for any further questions. Thank you very much for coming and answering our questions. Thank you very much for opening up this whole area of the contribution of the diasporas, which I think is an area which has not been sufficiently touched. Thank you for your submissions. You will have got a sense of some of the issues that are concerning us all. At the end of this process we produce a report with recommendations to our Government, to DFID, and if you feel having heard and taken part in this afternoon's session there are any other practical suggestions you think we should be putting forward in our report please do not hesitate to submit them as a supplementary note. Thank you very much, it has been an extremely interesting afternoon.