Recently, Rwandans living and working overseas met in Kigali. It was an early Christmas party, but a grand meeting to share ideas on how to invest their hard-earned dollars back home.

Around the same time in Nairobi, Diaspora Kenyans also held a similar meeting with government officials, whose sole aim was to remove barriers that hinder them from investing their dollars back home.

I was never one of those people who would ever be excited about the glowing statistics about millions of dollars remitted home by Africans working outside their home countries.

I considered it private affairs of those individuals and their families; after all who ever gets bothered about how we, who work at home, spend or invest our money. Not anymore.

My change of attitude was prompted by World Bank figures showing that Africans working overseas sent home close to $60 billion in remittances in 2012. This is in addition to the staggering cost of sending that money, amounting to $4 billion. The figure could be conservative considering the fact that it captures only the money remitted through official money transfer channels.

And that is not the whole story about migrant African workers and their money. The real story is that the amount of money Africans remitted home in 2012 is higher than what the continent received in form of foreign direct investment (FDI) that amounted to $50 billion.

In Rwanda, remittances have been on the rise since 2005 as more Rwandans find jobs outside the country and as their confidence in the national economy grows. By 2005, Diaspora Rwandans were remitting home just about $42.85 million annually. The government now projects remittances at $120m at the end of 2013 and $130m next year.

Kenya, the region’s biggest economy and perhaps with the biggest number of skilled and well paid workers overseas, received $1billion in remittances in 2012, according to figures from the central bank of Kenya. Reports say this constitutes about 5 per cent of Kenya’s GDP! This has inevitably tickled the Kenyan government that is now looking at Diaspora Kenyans as a major source of investment capital.

Next door in Uganda, citizens living abroad have been sending home more than $700 million for the past two years and projections for 2014 are seen in the range of $1 billion.

This is a glaring fact that the African continent has better prospects from the export of labour as a source of investment capital than from foreign investors.

The reality is that the field seems to be getting crowded with foreign investors with a big appetite for cash-minting sectors such as telecommunication, energy, construction, beverage and petroleum. Yet these areas are not the ones to generate the jobs for millions of younger people graduating from universities and colleges every year.

Developing countries, the East African region inclusive, need small investments spread throughout the country-side in sectors with potential to employ more people such as agriculture, tourism and agro-processing.

That is where nationals working abroad, with knowledge of untapped potential back home, become vital in this unending search for investors.

It is easier for a Rwandan born and bred near Lake Kivu to appreciate the tourism potential of the shores of that beautiful lake and the viability of investing in a fast-class safari lodge, than a foreigner would.

Now that we know that our people have the money we need to invest in productive ventures and generate wealth and employment, the challenge is how to pool these resources to achieve the desired goal.

As some people working abroad may have experienced, sending money to family and friends to invest even in as simple ventures as real estate has not worked.

It is time to think about collective investment funds – managed by qualified fund managers – to be invested in professionally managed projects.  

Alternatively, Diaspora Rwandans can engage Rwanda Social Security Board to develop a suitable saving scheme to pool together those resources. Once the money is in the competent hands of RSSB, it can be borrowed by the central government, local administrations and municipal authorities through bonds to be invested in infrastructure projects that benefit the people.

The writer is an editor with The New Times