The countries that lean hardest on money from abroad are not the ones you would guess

Ask which African or Caribbean country receives the most money from its diaspora and the answer is Egypt 🇪🇬, at $29.6bn. Ask which one depends on that money most and the answer is Comoros 🇰🇲, where it is worth 23.0% of everything the country produces.

Those are two different questions and they produce almost two different lists. Seven of the ten largest recipients by volume do not appear in the top ten by share of GDP. Egypt itself, first by a distance on volume, ranks nineteenth on dependence.

Both columns sit in our money sent home dataset, which covers 69 African and Caribbean countries and $131.3bn of inflows, using the most recent year available for each.

The ten largest recipients

By volume, in US dollars:

This is the list that makes headlines, and it mostly tracks population and economy size. Big countries with big diasporas receive big totals. It is a ranking of scale, which is a real thing to know, and it answers a question almost nobody is actually asking.

The ten most dependent

By share of GDP:

Only three countries appear in both tables: Haiti 🇭🇹, Jamaica 🇯🇲 and Senegal 🇸🇳. Everything else swaps out. Comoros receives $306m, around a hundredth of Egypt's total, and it matters far more to Comoros than Egypt's does to Egypt.

Nigeria 🇳🇬 is the clearest illustration. Second on the continent by volume, fifteenth by dependence. Morocco 🇲🇦 is third and seventeenth. The countries that dominate the coverage are, by this measure, in the middle of the table.

A fifth of Comorians live somewhere else

The Comoros are three small islands in the Mozambique Channel, with a population under a million. Estimates put the number of people of Comorian origin living outside the country at between 150,000 and 200,000, which is roughly a fifth to a quarter of everyone. A 2003 household census found that 80% of them were in France 🇫🇷 or in Mayotte, the neighbouring island that voted to stay French when the others left in 1975.

So the dependence is not abstract. It is a specific migration, to a specific former coloniser, sustained across five decades. The UN Economic Commission for Africa reported that by 2013 those transfers were worth about 160% of government revenue and 380% of all official development aid.

Read that second figure again. The diaspora sends the Comoros nearly four times what every aid agency in the world sends combined, and it arrives without conditions, reporting requirements or a country office.

Against exports, the picture is starker

Analysis compiled from RemitScope and the International Trade Centre's Trade Map put Gambia's 🇬🇲 2024 remittances at $575.8m against groundnut exports of $15.9m. The diaspora sent more than thirty-six times what the country's signature crop earned.

Comoros 🇰🇲 showed the same shape: cloves brought in $21.4m against $282.4m sent home, roughly thirteen times more. In Somalia 🇸🇴, live sheep and goats earned $269.9m against $1.73bn.

Those figures come from a different compilation than ours and rest on a slightly different basis, so treat them as the right order of magnitude rather than exact. The direction is not in question.

Why the volume table misleads

A total tells you how much money moved. A share of GDP tells you what happens if it stops. Those are different risks and they land on different countries.

• · A large economy can absorb a bad year. Egypt's 7.6% is real money and not existential.
• · A small state above 20% has no such cushion. A recession in France or South Africa arrives as a domestic shock.
• · Dependence concentrates in small economies with old, settled migrations, not in the places with the biggest populations.
• · Nine of the ten most dependent are countries most people could not place on a map.

It also means the cost of sending lands unevenly. A percentage point of transfer fees is a rounding error against Egypt's GDP and a visible loss against Lesotho's 🇱🇸. The same fee, charged on the same transfer, does more damage the more a country needs the money.

What to do with this

If you are deciding where a pound or a dollar does the most work, the dependence column is the more useful one. It points at Comoros 🇰🇲, Gambia 🇬🇲, Liberia 🇱🇷 and Lesotho 🇱🇸 rather than at the countries whose totals dominate the coverage.

Our diaspora populations dataset covers the other end of the same relationship, counting where African and Caribbean communities actually live in the countries they moved to. And if you want a sense of the friction those same people move through, we counted where a Nigerian passport reaches in where a Nigerian passport takes you without a visa.