Bangladeshi migrants call home more frequently: Survey

Bangladeshi overseas migrants have called home more frequently than Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan and Filipino counterparts, according to a survey released in Dhaka yesterday.
In line with findings, 87 percent of Bangladeshi overseas migrants, covered in the survey, called home at least once a week and 34 percent called home daily.
LIRNEasia, a regional ICT policy think-tank, has recently conducted a survey, Teleuse@BOP3, of over 1,500 overseas and domestic migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Thailand from the “bottom of the pyramid".
On average, Bangladeshi overseas migrants paid the most for communication with their families and friends back home, spending $48 per month to keep in touch, as against $15 by Indian overseas migrants, according to the survey.
Overseas migrants mostly work in the Middle East and East/Southeast Asia. On average, they earned approximately $485 and sent $203 home a month.
The most popular way of communicating home was by telephone. The other nationalities, 28 percent, made calls through the internet.
Bangladeshi domestic migrants appeared to be making the most use of mobiles to send money home, the survey reveals.
While hand-carrying of cash was the most popular way of remitting money, a small but significant number of domestic migrants surveyed in Bangladesh were found to be sending money home through mobiles, despite the lack of a formal mobile payment system in the country, according to the survey.
It appears that many are making use of systems like the “flexi-load” system to transfer money home. Often migrants keep good relations with the village flexi-load seller who encashes load transfers from the migrant to his family, the survey shows.
Ironically, in the Philippines, the only country in the study where mobile remittance services currently exist, fewer migrants surveyed used such systems.