Introduction

While US$ 605 billion worth of remittances were sent by migrant workers to developing and emerging economies in 2021, international financial and development organisations argue that their economic impacts could be harnessed if some of that money was channelled into more ‘productive investment’. One key approach to bringing this about in recent years has been to link remittances to the financial inclusion agenda. In response, the research developed in this book critically investigates efforts to integrate remittances into global finance on the one hand, and the responses by remittance recipients in Senegal and Ghana to such market-led development projects on the other. In the introduction, I introduce the main rationale and arguments of the book. I also justify the use of a geographies of marketisation framework to account for the grounded ways in which remittance markets are constructed, the extent to which remittance flows and households can be (re)configured and incorporated into global financial circuits, and why such processes are always fragile, contested, and in need of constant renegotiation. The chapter ends with a detailed outline of the book.