Concierge Services For African Migrants
What does it take?
Depending on who you ask, living in a foreign country can to a large extent be somewhat difficult. Whether it’s the different languages or accents, different geography or entirely different cultures. As a migrant, you almost have to unlearn your old life and adopt an entirely new set of social rules.
A Lasting Connection
The connection to one’s home is however never lost. Most people who leave their homes to go live abroad still proudly associate themselves with their countries of origin in different ways. Perhaps through telling the stories of their birthplace to their newfound friends, celebrating athletes and heroes from their country or even through their music and cultural heritage, there is always a desire to connect with one’s home.
However, when one leaves their home country, things don’t remain static and there are many economic, social and political changes that happen over time. Processes change, people change and simply put, few things remain as one left them. As a migrant, the ability to manage one’s needs from abroad gradually becomes complicated especially if they don’t travel back frequently. The direct connection with home is also affected and this can lead to a level of frustration.
In looking into how to tackle the aforementioned challenges, we’ve uncovered several services that Africans abroad find especially difficult to carry out. These include:
- Purchase or sale of physical assets such as land or property;
- Procurement of legal services and legal representation in a migrants home country;
- Event coordination and management;
- Assistance with government services including tax and immigration matters;
- Identification of reliable in-country service providers for specific needs.
The Concierge
One way migrants are tackling this problem is through a concierge — a person who handles errands on behalf of a specific individual client. The people offering concierge services also tend to be former migrants themselves, who’ve faced the problems they are solving for their counterparts abroad. By offering customized solutions, they bridge an essential gap that requires trust and dedication to help those living abroad. Some services include travelling to places on their behalf, acting as a liaison during transactions, receiving & managing funds for different investments, acting as property managers — the list goes on. There’s definitely a need for such solutions, but individual concierges can’t deliver these at scale to everyone who lives and works abroad.
A Growing Pain
We’ve previously talked about the need to improve the connection between Africa and its diaspora. However, Africa is still in the relatively early stages of adopting technology to enhance service delivery. The tools needed to “commoditize” concierge services are yet to exist because current structures in many developing countries involve manual, archaic systems. Furthermore, needs differ widely and as a result, it’s difficult to create a one-size-fits-all solution hence why these are termed “concierge services” — individuals demand a level of personalized care and attention.
Despite such services being perceived as a niche, this is a growing problem, for a growing number of people. The global migrant population currently stands at approximately 272mn people (or 3.5% of the global population). This is a big number. To put it into perspective, if the global migrant community were nationals of a single country, they would rank 5th in size after only China, India, the USA & Indonesia. Africa is estimated to have about 36mn people living outside their home countries (almost as much as the entire population of Canada). Starting with what is unique about Africa, there’s an opportunity to improve the experience for its diaspora as this and other factors could have a large positive impact on fund flows into our continent.
The growing need for concierge services for the diaspora community partly exists due to a few common problems:
- Losses suffered through untrustworthy individuals in home countries;
- Lack of reliable channels to execute certain services without being physically present;
- The need for privacy and discretion in handling certain matters.
Developing New Solutions
Against this backdrop, Tulix plans to play a part in developing such solutions to cater to the African diaspora community. Aside from the direct positive impact, this would have on the continent through increased diaspora flows, solving these challenges will also create employment opportunities and make it possible to offer concierge services at scale to the diaspora community through our app and future platforms.
The elements that any solution provider must consider include establishing trust and clear communication as the core of their product offering. We are encouraged to see the emergence of such service providers in different regions such as InstaKin in Asia.
Perhaps it’s time this also came into focus in Africa. It’s time that we as Africans, gave our diaspora community a helping hand.
