Inside Africa: The Country Where the Diaspora Outnumbers the Nation, and Is Starting to Build It

Petr Ganaj

Cabo Verde is one of the few places where it is literally true that more of the nation’s people live abroad than at home. On the islands, the population is just over 520,000 people. The Minister for Communities, Jorge Santos, estimates that the Cabo Verdean diaspora comprises roughly two million people, scattered across Europe, the Americas, and West Africa. For decades, that imbalance has been told as a story of loss. Increasingly, the country is trying to make it a story about turning migration into a development strategy.

A Small State Held Up by Remittances

Remittances are the bridge between Cabo Verde on the islands and Cabo Verde abroad. Central bank and press data show they reached a record of around 284 million euros in 2025, with Portugal alone sending close to 100 million dollars a year. Trading Economics figures, based on the Bank of Cabo Verde, show inflows peaking at 3.35 billion escudos (roughly 30 million euros) in a single month in late 2025. The World Bank estimates that personal remittances amount to over 12% of Cabo Verde’s GDP, one of the highest ratios in Africa.

That volume matters in part because the state’s own budget is small. Government expenditure sits at about 27% of GDP; taken over a year, private transfers from emigrants represent a significant share of what the government itself spends. World Bank monitoring argues that remittances have helped cushion poorer households from price shocks and slowed the rise in poverty, especially after the COVID‑19 tourism collapse and the food and fuel price spikes that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In other words, the diaspora has been underwriting stability.

From Household Lifeline to Development Instrument

Historically, that underwriting has been informal: Money wired to relatives, cash carried home in suitcases, occasional diaspora fundraising for a village project. The government’s newer strategy is to formalize at least part of that process.

A central plank is the blue economy. Cabo Verde’s medium-term economic outlook from the IMF emphasises that the country is trying to diversify away from pure tourism toward a wider maritime economy including fisheries, logistics, maritime services, and coastal infrastructure. The EU’s “Special Partnership” with Cabo Verde points in the same direction, channeling investment and guarantees into port modernization, shipyards, processing for fisheries and renewable energy linked to the maritime sector. The idea is to turn the country’s geographic position, an Atlantic crossroads between West Africa, Europe and Brazil, into more than a stopover.

The diaspora is being written into that plan. Under the “Connecting Blue Economy Actors” program, backed by the UN Joint SDG Fund and led by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Cabo Verde launched a sustainable finance platform called Blue‑X to list green, social and blue bonds on its stock exchange. The program’s own reporting notes that by 2023, it had already helped mobilize over 26 million US dollars for blue and green projects, and that one goal was explicitly to make it easier for diaspora capital to flow into marine and coastal investments through transparent, regulated instruments.

These actions are complemented by the government’s broader investment reforms. In its 2025 investment climate statement, Cabo Verde highlights cuts to corporate income tax and new incentives for sustainable projects, while the IMF underlines that public debt is expected to fall even with higher infrastructure spending, partly because concessional and private flows are being better aligned. Taken together, the message is that diaspora money should increasingly be treated as investment, not charity.

About $17 million UN plan that treats the diaspora as an actor

The most concrete expression of this new approach came in March 2026, when the UN country team and the government signed an annual cooperation plan worth about 17 million dollars. The plan is structured around three accelerators: digital transformation, the blue economy and local development. On the blue side, the plan funds sustainable fishing, stronger value chains, support for maritime-sector entrepreneurs and climate risk mapping in 17 out of 22 municipalities; on the digital side, it backs e‑governance, connectivity and basic digital public services.

Crucially, the plan does not treat the diaspora as a background variable. The UN framework explicitly calls for “innovative mechanisms” to connect Cabo Verdeans abroad with local projects in health, education and entrepreneurship, so that emigrants can channel money and skills into specific initiatives rather than sending generic support. Implementation is meant to be co‑designed with municipalities, civil society and the private sector, moving away from the old model in which the only formal interface between the diaspora and the state was a consulate or a bank transfer.

For a state that brands itself as “stable, open and well‑governed,” this is also a reputational play. If emigrants can see where their contributions go — a coastal protection project, a school, a fisheries co‑op — they are more likely to keep sending money through official channels and less likely to disengage as second and third generations grow up abroad.

A development strategy built on absences

The political implications of building a strategy around absent citizens are not trivial. Jorge Santos, the Minister for Communities, has described the diaspora as “a decisive force” in development and speaks openly about a “thirteenth island” made up of emigrant communities. The country’s Ambition 2030 strategy, which underpins its partnership with the EU, explicitly names the diaspora as a cross‑cutting actor in achieving goals from social protection to green energy. In UN climate forums, Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva positions Cabo Verde as an “active and dynamic small island developing State,” stressing that its people, including those abroad, are part of the solution to climate vulnerability.

That posture has consequences. If emigrants are treated as a permanent, structural part of the nation and as a consistent source of income, domestic politics must also grapple with how they are represented and what happens when their interests diverge from those of residents. Some diaspora advocates have pushed for stronger voting rights and dedicated parliamentary representation; others worry that an economy leaning heavily on external remittances and blue finance could leave local workers exposed to volatility in European and American labor markets.

International partners also see risks. World Bank assessments warn that, while remittances cushion shocks, they expose Cabo Verde to economic cycles in Portugal, the United States and other host countries, and that climate shocks could still hit coastal livelihoods despite blue‑economy investments. The Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI), which admitted Cabo Verde as an implementing country in 2023, notes that the country must still meet transparency standards and complete validation of its fisheries governance by 2027. Turning the sea into a growth engine without depleting it will require more than clever financial instruments.

The test ahead

Cabo Verde’s experiment is more than a technocratic tweak. It is a test of whether a small island state can design institutions that make a globalized population an asset rather than an indictment. The ingredients are visible. A diaspora that sends steady remittances, a government willing to open its books on state‑owned enterprises and fisheries, a blue‑economy strategy backed by the EU, IMF and UN, and a political class that talks about emigrants as partners rather than a problem.

The outcome will be decided in details that seldom make headlines: whether municipalities can manage diaspora‑funded projects transparently; whether Blue‑X listed bonds are regulated well enough to avoid scandal; whether climate governance reforms translate into real constraints on overfishing and unsustainable coastal development. For now, Cabo Verde offers something rare in the global migration debate. A case where a country openly acknowledges that most of its people live elsewhere, and then tries to build a development model around that fact rather than pretend it does not exist.

If it succeeds, the lesson will travel far beyond the mid‑Atlantic. For many African states, the question is no longer whether their citizens will leave, but what kind of political and economic community remains between those who do and those who stay. Cabo Verde is betting that the answer can be institutional, not just sentimental.