Accessible and Affordable Remittance Services for Refugees: A Toolkit

This toolkit has been created to guide those performing country assessments of remittance channels for refugees and forcibly displaced people. The guide contains practical tools for collecting data, identifying challenges, field research, and synthesizing data and recommendations. Implementing the toolkit will inform strategy development and approaches that humanitarian and development agencies may adopt to address constraints.

The toolkit aims to identify and address the unique barriers and needs of forcibly displaced people in accessing affordable and regulated remittance channels. It also identifies overlapping barriers that forcibly displaced people and host communities face when interacting with the remittance market. Finally, the toolkit explores how affordable access to remittances can improve the lives of refugees by:

• Providing capital for starting a business.
• Enabling payment for services such as health care.
• Increasing food options beyond rations provided by aid agencies.
• Allowing purchase of assets such as mobile phones, solar panels, goats, etc.