RemittancesGateway.org

Remittance investment project launched

Monday, 04 April 2011 08:30

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer

The United National Development Program (UNDP) and the Western Union Foundation will launch this week an overseas remittance investment fund.

The project, called the Overseas Filipinos Remittances for Development: Building a Future Back Home (OFs-RED), hopes to harness remittances for poverty reduction programs.

The Western Union Foundation is investing $250,000 with UNDP to help harness pooled remittances from overseas workers to fund economic opportunity projects in the Philippines.

It forms part of a project that will also extend to Morocco.

It hopes to provide a vehicle for overseas workers to contribute directly to hometown development.

The UNDP is working with the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) and the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) along with the Western Union Foundation, will study and test a model to facilitate pooled or collective remittances.

Two pilot projects, which will be announced later, will be tested in the Philippines with selected local government units.

Last February, UNDP and Western Union announced in New York a $500,000 initiative to assist Filipino and Moroccan migrants living and working abroad to contribute to sustainable local development in their home countries.

This contribution represents a portion of a $1.1 million grant from the Western Union Foundation to support the efforts of three United Nations agencies to advance the Millennium Development Goals—a set of eight internationally–agreed goals designed to reduce poverty, hunger, disease and maternal and child deaths by 2015.

Through this program, migrants abroad will be offered new ways to collectively support development priorities set by the government and local communities in their home countries.

These may include improving access to critical services like health, education and finance, and supporting small business and job creation.

“With just five years left to 2015, the target date to achieve the global antipoverty goals, we must find innovative ways to improve the lives of millions of people living in poverty in the developing world,” said Olav Kjorven, UNDP director for the Bureau of Development Policy.