Business
U.S. bank to stop Hawala remittances to Kenya, Somalia
Sunday, December 11, 2011
At the beginning of every month, Ms Safia Ibrahim anxiously waits for a call that will offer her a lifeline.
Once it comes, she walks to a forex bureau near her home in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighbourhood and comes out a few hundred dollars richer.
Thanks to her brother who works in the United States, Ms Ibrahim is able to pay rent, buy basic necessities and live a decent life.
This informal means of sending and receiving cash is known in Somali as hawala, a mostly unregulated money transfer system that traditionally involved neither physical nor electronic exchange of funds.