‘Cash in/Cash out’. Flickr/Scott Mainwaring. All rights reserved.For more than two decades, on the first week of every month, I have found myself scrambling to send money to relatives in various locales across the Horn of Africa. Despite my best intentions, I rarely succeed in reaching my ‘hawala’ (remittance firm) agent on time. But I am always mindful that too much delay might result in a family’s eviction or a student’s suspension. This month, 1 May fell on a Friday and I resolved to discharge my duties after work and enjoy a guilt-free weekend. I had prioritized the month’s beneficiaries: tuition for my nephew, income supplement for my half-sister and the semi-annual payment for my two sponsored boys in an orphanage in Garissa, Kenya.
My plan never materialized. My Kenya-based family will not be receiving their money because of the closure of Somali remittance firms in Kenya – a policy response to Al-Shabaab’s recent massacre at the Garissa University College. I contacted my hawala agent who confirmed the news.
I have been sending remittances since I came to Canada as a teenager and obtained my first job as a cashier in Ottawa. Yet I still marvel at the ease with which I send money to remote villages across Somalia that until recently lacked a telephone service, let alone internet access. This is why western money-transfer companies cannot compete with the services that Somali hawalas provide. Not only are traditional firms’ surcharges too costly, they also lack the trust factor and knowledge of the Somali kinship system that enables the transfer of money to transient peoples with neither government-issued identification nor fixed addresses.
