Georgetown University: School of Foreign Service in Qatar

Doha, Qatar — Almost half of the migrant workers in Qatar are not satisfied with their savings and the money they send home, according to research being conducted at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Qatar).

The Qatar Migrant Families Survey conducted by Ganesh Seshan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at SFS-Qatar, and Dean Yang, a professor from the University of Michigan, along with a group of 20 students of the Education City, was aimed at gathering socio-economic information on migrant workers in Qatar. “One of our motivations was to test the synergy between the demand for telecommunication and remittance services by expatriates,” Seshan said.

The initial survey consisted of interviews with 140 expatriates. Students from SFS-Qatar and Carnegie Mellon in Qatar (CMU-Q) worked together to collect detailed data on the migrant workers’ spending habits and method of communicating with families abroad.

“It was really great being able to help out in a project like this,” said Aakash Jayaprakash (SFS ’11), “It makes us all feel like we are contributing to society by doing our part in trying to make the lives of migrant workers better here."

The data revealed a wealth of information on why families send remittances abroad, as well as their communication preferences. 52% of respondents indicated they were saving to buy a home, while 37% were saving for their children’s education. One third of the migrants cited a goal to buy land in their home country, while 20% were saving to start a business.

Nearly half of the expatriate workers cited dissatisfaction in their savings. “We found that 43% of those interviewed were not happy with their savings and remittances,” Seshan said. He attributed them to rising inflation and the continuation of pegging the local currency to the ever-weakening dollar.

The data revealed that the average yearly income of the migrant worker was QR34,832 ($9,543) which QR7,600 ($2,082) was remitted to families abroad. The survey found that remittances also increase with income, with each additional QR365 ($100) of annual income raising yearly remittances by QR18 ($4.93).

The average age of migrants in the survey was 32 years. Over three-quarters were male and nearly half of the migrants surveyed were married though most did not have their spouses with them in Qatar.

Using empirical methods, the survey found male migrants remitting an extra QR2,693 ($738) annually, compared to female migrants. “This probably reflects the male’s position as the primary breadwinner in the family which demands in turn that he turns over a higher portion of his income,” Seshan said.

The findings also uncovered a positive relationship between remittances and international calling time. “This suggests that encouraging greater communication with the migrant’s household abroad can raise the level of remittances,” Seshan explained. “Greater remittances will also spur greater demand for telecommunication services in order to monitor how that money is utilized abroad.”

The survey showed migrants spent about 24 minutes a week on average communicating with their relatives abroad. Several methods were used to communicate; nonetheless, 60% of the migrants used either a fixed-line or mobile to call home while others resorted to Internet café, text messaging (SMS) or an Internet phone. Participants in the survey spent 8.7 minutes weekly on telephone calls abroad.

Seshan, formerly an economist consultant based at the World Bank, described the goals of the research to explore connections between telecom usage and remittance services. “We hope to carry out a larger study with Q-Tel and financial institutions that will design services that will take advantage of the synergy between telecom and remittance,” he said.