Let Hawalas Resume Business, Aid Workers to Kenya

This follows after Kenya shut down at least 13 Somali money transfer agencies in Nairobi over suspected links with terrorism.

They agencies expressed concerns that halting remittances will hurt struggling families and relief operations in Somalia.

Kenya took the initiative in an effort to curb the financing of insurgent groups that have terrorized the country.

This followed the recent massacre of 148 students at Kenya's Garissa University College by Al Shabaab militants.

"Somali families are losing their only formal, transparent and regulated channel through which to send and receive money," said a statement issued by a group of relief agencies including Oxfam, CARE, Mercy Corps, Adeso and World Vision Somalia.

Funds to curb widespread hunger and drought

"Aid agencies working in Somalia also risk losing their only means of transferring money to sustain their daily humanitarian and development operations."

Each year Somalis abroad use money transfer operators to send home an estimated USD 1.3 billion, more than all humanitarian and development aid to the country combined, according to a 2013 report by aid groups Oxfam, Adeso and the Inter-American Dialogue.

The money provides a lifeline to millions of people in a country rebuilding itself despite an insurgency by Islamist militants as well as widespread hunger and recurring drought.

It is not only Somalis in Somalia who are at risk of losing a vital lifeline, but also Kenya's Somali community, which numbers just over one million.

"It's going to hurt Somalis in Kenya more than Somalis in Somalia. The amount of money sent from abroad to Kenya is huge," Somalia's central bank governor Bashir Issa Ali said on Wednesday.

Aid groups said that many of the remittance companies whose licenses were suspended in Kenya were delivering legitimate funds, and urged Kenyan authorities to vet them on an individual basis.

By Musalia Wycliffe

Source: Reuters