The Diaspora, Resources and Development in West Africa: A Case Study of Nigerian and Ghanaian Diasporas in Ghana and Nigeria.

African diasporas within the sub-region of West Africa, are often overlooked actors in the area of remittances, development and integration. This issue becomes manifest as very little attention is paid to diasporas in the policy making and expanding literature on African Migration. Attention has always been paid to the African diasporas in the Western countries of the US and Europe. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the concept of “diaspora” has acquired a new and challenging position in public discourse as well as in Social and Cultural Sciences, where its range of meaning has been extended from traumatic histories of Jewish, Armenian or Black communities to various groups of migrant origin and “new diasporas”. There are increasingly new transnational people with the status of diasporas in West Africa. In the context of global cultural politics, the very concept of diaspora seems to have become a symbolic resource. Drawing on the data collected from the Nigerian and Ghanaian diasporas in Ghana and Nigeria respectively, this paper discuses its findings from their social, economic and cultural involvements.. The effects of these contributions to bilateral and multilateral relations in West Africa , thereby enhancing the sub-regional integration will be discussed.

Keywords: Migration, Diaspora, Remittances