LONDON: While Bob Geldof gets all the attention in the international development field for joining David Cameron’s big tent, there is a group of people who are more reliable than the celebrities paraded in front of us, the politicians who make the right noises and businesses that invest in the developing world.

They are the migrant workers sending money back to their families many of whom belong to the UK’s minority ethnic communities and are often the cleaners, mini-cab drivers and waiters serving the developed world economies. Many of them New Commonwealth immigrants like my parents, who sent money back home to Bangladesh for two decades. More recently the trend is continued by Eastern European migrants, like my Polish cleaner. This is something that has only recently been acknowledged by the World Bank and the Department for International Development, and not at all acknowledged by the British international development agencies.

Migrants around the world send home $167 billion each year, with at the very least £2.7bn coming from Britain alone. This capital flow has grown so quickly that, according to the World Bank, it is now more than twice the size of the world’s development spending. The World Bank calls this migration ‘a powerful force for poverty reduction’ with the money coming from an estimated 200 million people now living in countries where they were not born. DFID recognizes that these remittances are hugely important for people on low incomes in the developing countries and this money plays a huge role in promoting international development and fighting poverty. This puts into context who is doing what for the developing world.—Dawn/The Observer News Service