Benin

AFFORD Business Centre is a space to connect with entrepreneurs in the UK and on the continent with shared focuses, value-systems, ambitions and experiences as yourself.

The ABC sits within one of the most innovative diaspora social enterprises in Europe, the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD). AFFORD has been working with African diaspora communities, global governments and institutions and the private sector for over 20 years.

The European Union Global Diaspora Facility (EUDiF), through the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), is providing technical support to AFFORD to address SMEs' financing and skills gaps by developing the online fundraising capacity of African diaspora investors. The action is building capacity in crowdfunding for raising philanthropic and investment funds for AFFORD Business Centre (ABC) SMEs in West Africa.

The West Africa Network for the protection of children focuses on ensuring a continuum of services are delivered across the region within and eight-step procedure, ranging from the identification of a vulnerable child and provision of emergency care to their successful social re-integreation.

The project seeks to increase the number of remittance recipients with access to financial services and promote small and medium sized businesses. The project is focused on the extension of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) international electronic remittance service to rural postal offices and on the establishment of a link between remittances and postal account-based services. It also fosters support postal offices to develop partnerships with non-postal financial service providers such as banks and credit unions.

The African Postal Financial Services initiative is a joint regional programme launched by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the European Commission in collaboration with the World Bank, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) – a specialized United Nations agency for the postal sector, the World Savings Banks Institute/European Savings Banks Group (WSBI/ESBG) and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF).

The Migration Dialogue for West Africa or MIDWA was designed as a platform to encourage the Member States of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to discuss, in a regional context, such common migration issues and concerns for which immediate solutions may not be forthcoming at a national level. Its objective is to promote and ensure high quality cooperation among ECOWAS Member States, third countries and other international consultative forums on Free Movement and migration by:

The Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) is a regional group of fifteen countries, founded in 1975. Its mission is to promote economic integration in "all fields of economic activity, particularly industry, transport, telecommunications, energy, agriculture, natural resources, commerce, monetary and financial questions, social and cultural matters .....".

ECOWAS has introduced the ECOWAS Passport and APEC has put in place an APEC-visa for certain categories of people to facilitate their movement in these groupings' member States. 

L'émigration est un fait important de la vie béninoise. Elle est principalement dirigée vers d’autres pays d’Afrique de l’Ouest tels que le Nigéria, la Côte d’Ivoire et le Sénégal. En Europe, la France constitue incontestablement la destination privilégiée. Un nombre important d’émigrants béninois sont hautement qualifiés. Les transferts de fonds de ces travailleurs migrants constituent une source importante des revenus des ménages bénéficiaires et sont généralement destinés à la satisfaction de leur besoin de consommation courante.

Benin (114 763 km2) lies between Togo, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria and has 7.4 million inhabitants, a quarter of whom live on the coast.

The Development Marketplace for the African Diaspora in Europe (D-MADE) is a competitive grant program aimed at funding innovative, small scale development projects which are profit-making, results-oriented and have the potential to be scaled up or replicated.

The program has two components: