Television footage of desperate Africans drowning in the Mediterranean Sea en route to Spain or other European destinations that hold out the promise of a better life has become all too frequent. The International Organisation for Migration puts the cumulative toll since 2000 at 33 000, with about 3 100 of the drownings having occurred in 2017. This was the fourth year in a row that more than 3 000 sons and daughters of the African soil had perished in this manner in a single year.

This sombre picture has fed the narrative that emigration from Africa – especially from the sub-Saharan African region – harms rather than benefits the continent. But there are both pros and cons. One of the pluses is that the African diaspora in high-income Western countries remits huge sums to the continent – and the number is growing. In 2017, remittances topped $37.8-billion, a figure that should increase to $39.2-billion this year and to $39.6-billion in 2019, if World Bank estimates are anything to go by.

Unsurprisingly, Nigeria, which boasts the largest population on the continent, accounts for the lion’s share, raking in $22.3-billion in 2017. Other countries that received sizeable sums included Egypt ($18.1-billion), Morocco ($7.1-billion), Senegal ($2.3-billion), Ghana ($2.2-billion) and Algeria ($2.1-billion). But it was Liberia whose diaspora remittances accounted for the highest percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) – 25.9%.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (Unctad’s) ‘2018 Economic Development in Africa Report’, in 2017, diaspora remittances exceeded export earnings in several African countries, including Carbo Verde, the Comoros, the Gambia and Liberia.

That diaspora flows are on the increase is a welcome development for the continent, in light of dwindling official development assistance, which, Unctad states, declined from 37% of all flows in the three years to 2003 to 28% in the five years to 2016.

The destinations of African migrants, however, are not always beyond the continent’s shores. While 17-million Africans packed their bags in search of a better life in Europe, the Americas and other regions offering better prospects during 2017, an estimated 19-million mostly young men and women chose to move to other countries on the continent. The top five destinations were South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Nigeria and Ethiopia, which, between them, received more than one-million African migrants.

The discourse about African migration within the continent has often focused on the heightened competition for jobs in the host countries (real and perceived), but Unctad secretary-general Mukhisa Kituyi dismisses this as “part of a divisive, misleading and harmful narrative”. He points to the ‘2018 Economic Development in Africa Report’ finding that, far from being a drain on resources, migrants have a positive net effect on the economies of their host countries. For one thing, they contribute to their new countries’ development through income tax. For another, they spend about 85% of their income in their adopted countries. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, migrants’ contribution to GDP totalled 19% in 2008, with the contribution being 13% in Rwanda in 2012 and 9% in South Africa in 2011.

Intra-African migration is also associated with increased productivity in sectors such as agriculture, construction, mining, services, information and communication technology (ICT) and manufacturing. This is because migration enables the host countries to fill critical skills shortages, the report notes, adding that South Africa’s financial services and ICT sectors attract highly skilled African migrants. The construction and mining sectors, on the other hand, are a magnet for the semi-skilled, most of whom hail from neighbouring Lesotho and Mozambique.

The report also states that intra-African migration boosts trade between the country of origin and the host country, as migrants typically demand food products from their home countries. Besides trade in foodstuffs, heritage – or nostalgia – trade is also stimulated, along with tourism.

Clearly, migration is not all bad news for Africa. But what is needed is a set of policies that ensure that the billions that are remitted each year are used effectively to develop the countries of origin.