Humanitarian Exchange: Using participatory tools to assess remittances in disasters

This issue of Humanitarian Exchange, co-edited with Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) Research Fellow Eva Svoboda, focuses on the crisis in Iraq. The article featured here is on "Using participatory tools to assess remittances in disaster". In many low-income countries, remittances help to sustain people’s livelihoods and reduce their vulnerability to disasters. However, most studies on this topic are short-term and rely on econometric methods and analysis.

Research suggests that aid agencies are aware of the importance of remittances in disasters, but rarely consider them within their relief actions and recovery programmes since their understanding of such mechanisms is generally very limited. Drawing on fieldwork in Samoa, this article concludes that participatory methods, despite some limitations and challenges, contribute to a better understanding of the complexity of remittances and their importance in people’s livelihoods following a disaster.