For many developing countries, money sent back from the diaspora serves as a vital financial lifeline. Every year, millions of workers and others abroad send hundreds of billions of dollars to support their families, pay for education, help start small businesses, and a range of other purposes. These cash transfers, known as remittances, are well documented, and those sent through formal channels to low- and middle-income countries amounted to an estimated $685 billion in 2024, according to the World Bank. The dominant narrative surrounding remittances is monetary, treating them primarily as flows of cash or goods that supplement household income and stimulate local economies. This framing has shaped global policy discourse, with governments and international organizations designing programs and incentives to increase financial flows.

Nevertheless, the story of remittances is not solely about money. Policymakers and scholars typically categorize remittances into three main types: financial remittances (involving money transfers, either through formal or informal channels), in-kind remittances (involving goods such as clothing or electronics), and social remittances (the transmission of ideas and cultural practices and the expansion of social networks). While this typology has been helpful, it risks reinforcing a rigid divide between what is considered financial and what is considered non-financial. In this view, money is measurable and tangible, while knowledge, time, and expertise belong to a separate and largely intangible category. Such a framing may perpetuate a blind spot in both research and policymaking.

The reality is that financial and non-financial remittances are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are often intertwined. When professionals from the diaspora (migrants as well as later generations who claim ancestral ties to a particular country) devote their time and expertise to their homelands, these contributions may appear non-financial but in fact carry significant economic value.

Consider for instance a doctor in the diaspora who volunteers 40 hours to a medical mission in their homeland. To the recipient community, this is a generous act of service, but in practice it is also a contribution worth a significant sum in consultancy or clinical fees on the open market. A professor who mentors graduate students, supervises dissertations, or delivers a seminar is similarly not only transmitting knowledge but also providing valuable services that a university in the home country might otherwise have to purchase. And an IT specialist advising a government ministry on building a digital platform is, in effect, providing free consulting that could otherwise cost a significant amount.

These examples demonstrate that highly skilled diaspora members’ remitted time has real, measurable economic weight, not just symbolic value. Quantifying this time in monetary terms encourages researchers to rethink how they measure a diaspora’s impact and devote greater focus to what are often considered non-financial transfers. It makes visible the financial savings provided to governments, hospitals, universities, and other institutions that are often overlooked when researchers and international agencies focus solely on money transfers. In effect, these contributions can operate as cost-avoidance for homeland institutions. Aware of these general benefits, many governments have sought to attract the services of diaspora professionals, either in volunteer hours or by recruiting them to return to the homeland; attaching a dollar figure to these services enhances the value of these strategies and could make them more attractive to other governments.

This article discusses the financial worth of the time, skills, and expertise that diaspora members contribute to their homelands, often without pay, which the authors term time-value remittances. This concept challenges the division between economic and non-financial remittances.

Time-Value Remittances

Much of what is now called intangible social remittances can, in fact, be assigned dollar values if standard valuation methods are used. Economists have previously used a technique known as shadow pricing to assign a monetary value to services and goods that are unpaid or otherwise outside of the established market, such as household work, which could be applied to many non-financial remittances. Likewise, professional hourly rates could be used to quantify the value of diaspora members’ contributions of time.

The total global value of these remittances is as yet unknown. But the phenomenon of time-value remittances is not confined to a single diaspora or sector, and instead represents a recurring, global practice. Select examples of non-financial remittance programs across the fields of health, education, and professional mentoring in multiple regions show that, when monetized, the results are striking.

For instance, consider two diaspora medical missions: the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which brings volunteer doctors from the Syrian diaspora to several humanitarian settings to deliver medical and mental health care, and the Association of Nigerian Physicians in the Americas (ANPA), whose U.S.- and Canada-based members provide free specialized surgeries and professional training during annual missions to Nigeria. With each organization, doctors spend one or two weeks providing free care, in contributions equivalent to $15,000 to $20,000 per individual, according to the authors’ calculations. Given that approximately 100 doctors go on ANPA missions each year, their services combined could collectively be worth $2 million annually. In addition to the abstract benefits from these missions, such as the improved social ties and personal connections, this represents the avoided costs that hospitals or humanitarian organizations might have otherwise incurred by hiring foreign specialists.

In higher education, diaspora engagement has also taken structured forms. For example, the University of the Witwatersrand’s Alumni Diaspora Program enabled foreign-based South African graduates to contribute to doctoral supervision and mentoring at their alma mater, largely on a voluntary basis. Similarly, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) College of Mentors is a pan-African initiative involving senior academics from the diaspora who mentor African doctoral candidates and strengthen African universities. These sorts of mentoring and training programs involve relatively few hours per participant but nonetheless accumulate substantial financial value by substituting for faculty salaries or consultancy fees. The authors estimate this contribution to be worth approximately $5,000 per PhD student per year.

Even the short-term, structured consultancies under the Transfer of Knowledge Through Expatriate Nationals (TOKTEN) program, which was first launched by the UN Development Program (UNDP) in 1977, amount to several weeks of high-level expertise per assignment. TOKTEN programs have been established in dozens of countries and help experts in the diaspora deploy their skills in ways that homeland governments might otherwise have needed to secure at a significant cost. 

In all the examples above, participants choose to provide unpaid services; host institutions or nongovernmental organizations may sometimes cover travel costs, but professional time itself is donated.

Reassessing Diaspora Contributions

Cases such as these show that diaspora professionals’ missions are not small gestures of goodwill but substantial contributions with real economic weight. Even relatively modest commitments of time translate into significant financial terms. Taken together across diasporas and sectors, this suggests that the overall scale of time-value remittances could be much larger than what is captured by statistics on official remittance transfers.

Moreover, diaspora members’ time often works as a direct substitute for financial expenditures. When professionals perform medical operations, deliver lectures, or provide consulting, they are offering work that local institutions would otherwise either need to pay for or simply not receive.

Failing to capture these contributions in official statistics creates a policy blind spot. Current frameworks track money transfers sent through official channels and, at times, in-kind goods, but they leave out these significant professional contributions. By treating them simply as volunteering or knowledge transfer, analysists and policymakers risk underestimating their importance. This can lead to government strategies that focus almost exclusively on promoting financial flows while overlooking equally valuable forms of engagement.

How to Calculate Diaspora Contributions?

Cases such as these also underscore the difficulties of assigning a monetary value to someone’s professional time. Should the calculation use wage levels in the country in which the diaspora member lives, reflecting the opportunity cost for these professionals working abroad for a period? Or should it consider how much the service would cost in the homeland, reflecting what local institutions might otherwise have paid? The approaches lead to different results.

The absence of a common standard is a challenge and should be seen as a call for broader dialogue and policy development. Valuing diaspora members’ time at host-country rates highlights the global opportunity cost, while home-country rates emphasize local replacement costs. Future research and international discussions could help establish hybrid frameworks to reconcile these perspectives. Even at the most conservative reading, estimates suggest an economic significance too large to ignore.

Moving Beyond the Dichotomy

Research on remittances has long been dominated by a dichotomy that privileges transfers of money while relegating skills, knowledge, and social practices to the subordinate category of non-financial remittances. Even when these remittances are recognized, scholars often describe them as intangible, symbolic, and secondary to money transfers. This need not be the case. By using the concept of time-value remittances, these expenditures of time and energy can in fact be valued in dollar terms and therefore recategorized as financial.

Diaspora professionals’ contributions can substitute directly for financial expenditures made by homeland-country governments, communities, or individuals. Volunteering surgeons, academic mentors, expert consultants, and many more initiatives all represent remittances of time that offset real costs. What appears voluntary is, in effect, a remittance with economic weight.

Recognizing this fluid nature of non-financial remittances not only broadens how researchers categorize remittances but also underscores their policy significance. The implications are potentially substantial. While various countries have long implemented policies and strategies to harness diaspora members’ skills, recognizing time-value remittances could lead to systems that capture them more systematically and quantifiably, using improved reporting, targeted incentives, and policy frameworks that go beyond traditional money transfers. Quantifying time-value remittances may also make these policies easier for policymakers and politicians to sell to the public.

For international organizations, development indicators could integrate time-value contributions to provide a fuller account of diasporas’ impacts. For diaspora networks, this perspective highlights the need to strengthen documentation of hours and projects, making visible the vast stock of contributions currently hidden as volunteering. Future research could refine approaches to estimate the global scale of time-value remittances, sector by sector and profession by profession.

Remittances are not a binary between money transfers and non-financial contributions, but a continuum in which time and expertise can be translated into financial value. Such a change in mindset has the potential to shift academic debates and policy frameworks, expanding the definition of remittances and offering new tools for harnessing diaspora engagement. Doing so would recognize not only the money that members of the diaspora send back, but also the time.

Sources

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