Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

Remittances from overseas migrant workers make up more than a fifth of GDP in some economies. This type of finance is usually very resilient to natural disasters, and financial slumps as those sending money home are unlikely to follow the behavior of financial markets. However COVID-19 has meant people cannot send money as they normally would due to social distancing and bank/post office closures. This impacts the capacity to send hard cash which made up 80-85% of transaction pre-pandemic. Consider:

• Promoting the digitisation of cash transfers in local communities to support the sending and receiving of remittances as moving cash has become harder
• Giving "mobile-money" agents the status of being an essential service. These small traders serve many times more people than bank branches but struggled to stay open as governments did not deem their services "essential"