Virus cuts off billions sent to poor around the world
MIAMI » Until a month ago, Diana Leticia Hernández sold face cream door to door in Miami. Her husband painted houses. The money fed their family and at least six relatives in Honduras.
Hernández has sold nothing since last month due to fear and social-distancing restrictions in South Florida. Her husband hasn’t worked either. This month, for the first time since shortly after their arrival in the United States 16 years ago, they weren’t able to send home about $300 to help their families with food, rent, medicine and school bills.
In the Honduran town of Villa Nueva Cortez, Hernández’s mother Teonila Murillo is running out of money to buy insulin for her diabetes, and Hernández’s brother doesn’t know if he’ll be able to make his $60 rent next month.
“I’m doing really badly,” Murillo told The Associated Press. “There’s no money, and no work. If you get sick here, you die.”
The devastation wrought by COVID-19 across the developed world in cutting into the financial lifelines for people across Latin America, Africa and Asia.
The World Bank estimates that a record $529 billion was transferred to developing countries through official channels in 2018, the latest year for which figures are available. Billions more moved unrecorded in cash. Many of those remittances are sent home by people who work in service jobs or occupations, like day labor, that have no monthly paycheck and are worst affected by the global downtown. Some also comes from illegal immigrants ineligible for part of the massive aid packages uncorked by advanced economies.
With coronavirus shutting down industries, many earners in Miami, Las Vegas, London, and other economic centers can no longer afford to send their monthly $50, $100 or $200 to Honduras, Somalia or India. The shock waves are pushing their relatives to desperation.
“I’m in anguish,” said Hernández, 45. “They’re counting on me. I’m trying to get anything I can send, $30, $50, whatever.”
Across Africa, where remittances have grown to surpass foreign aid and direct foreign investment and some $82 billion flowed in during 2018 alone, untold millions of people are already feeling the pinch. One moneytransfer company in Europe sending funds to Africa saw an 80 percent drop in volume in a single week, the Washingtonbased Center for Financial Inclusion said last month.