Diaspora Remittances, Transaction Costs and Development Finance: Nigeria in Comparative Perspective with Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America

Remittances have overtaken official development assistance and, for many years, foreign direct investment as the largest external flow to low- and middle-income countries. Nigeria remains sub-Saharan Africa’s principal recipient, yet occupies an awkward middle rank: large in absolute dollars, modest as a share of GDP relative to smaller African economies, and still exposed to some of the highest corridor costs in the World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide database. Using only secondary sources, World Bank and KNOMAD series, RPW releases, Migration Policy Institute and IOM estimates, and peer-reviewed studies, this article compares Nigeria with African peers (Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco) and extra-African comparators (India, Mexico, the Philippines, Bangladesh). Four findings stand out. To begin with, Nigerian inflows of about USD 20–21 billion in 2024–2025 ranked second in Africa after Egypt and ninth globally, but remained flat while South Asian and Latin American receipts rose. Also, sending USD 200 to sub-Saharan Africa cost 8.46 per cent on average in Q3 2025, against a global mean of 6.36 per cent and the SDG 10.c target of 3 per cent. Moreover, high-volume extra-African corridors (notably United States–Mexico and Gulf–South Asia) show that costs below 5 per cent, and sometimes below 1 per cent, are feasible. In addition, Nigeria’s National Diaspora Policy (2021) and NiDCOM are stronger than many African peers yet weaker than the labour-export and financial-inclusion machinery of the Philippines or India. Cost reduction, formalisation of informal channels, and conversion of consumption remittances into investable instruments should be treated as a single policy problem linking origin-country regulation, destination payment systems, and ECOWAS regional integration.