The Inter-American Development Bank’s Multilateral Investment Fund will hold May 6-7 in Mexico the conference RemesAmericas – Remittances for the Future, which will bring together government officials, financial executives and delegates from international organizations involved in migration issues.
RemesAmericas, which will take place at Mexico City’s Hotel Presidente Intercontinental, will focus on the outlook for the flows of money sent by migrant workers to their home countries, which last year totaled about $300 billion worldwide.
IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno and Banco de Mexico Governor Agustin Carstens are scheduled to open the event at 9 am on Thursday, May 6. Among the featured speakers is Carlos Garcia de Alba, executive director of the Instituto de Mexicanos en el Exterior.
The conference’s panels will look at issues such as the links between remittances and banking the unbanked, successful cases of harnessing these money flows to promote entrepreneurship, the use of remittances to expand access to housing, insurance, health care and education, and the adoption of new technologies to cut the cost of transferring money, such as mobile banking.
The Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) started to study remittances in the year 2000 to gauge their economic and social impact in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through its studies of these flows and its efforts to promote competition among service providers, the MIF has contributed to a dramatic drop in the costs of wiring money to this region over the past decade.
Participants in RemesAmericas will also analyze the results and the lessons learned from remittances-related projects financed by the MIF, an autonomous fund administered by the IDB that supports private sector development in Latin America and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on microenterprises and small businesses.
Members of the media interested in covering RemesAmericas must register for the event.