Sending money is not the same as looking after someone
A transfer confirms that money moved. It says nothing about blood pressure. On the gap between what we send and what we mean.
By Tobi Lawal · 19 September 2026 · 4 min read
Nigerians abroad sent home something over twenty billion dollars last year. A good part of it was sent with a specific sentence in mind: for the hospital, for Dad's medicine, for the check-up Mum keeps putting off. I have sent that transfer myself, and I know the feeling that comes after it, which is not relief. It is the feeling of having done the only thing available.
The transfer works. It lands in minutes, it costs a couple of per cent, and the person receives it. What it cannot do is any of the things the sentence in your head was about. It cannot make an appointment. It cannot sit in the consultation and ask the question your father will not ask. It cannot notice that his ankles are swollen, or that the tablets on the side are the same tablets from last month. It cannot tell you anything at all, except that money moved.
Cash goes to the most urgent thing that week
This is not a criticism of anyone. Money sent for a check-up arrives as money, and in a house with rent, school fees and a generator, a check-up that can wait usually waits. Surveys of recipients say a large share of what is sent goes to emergencies, medical bills among them; nobody can say how much goes to the quiet, boring, preventive things that stop the emergencies. My guess is: not much. That is how I would spend it too.
What we actually want
When I am honest about what I want for the people I love at home, it is three things. That when they need a doctor, they see one, and the bill is not a crisis. That somebody qualified goes to the house and looks, on a rhythm, whether or not anyone is ill. And that I hear about it from that person, in plain words, not from a cousin's cousin. None of those is a transfer. All of them are a service, held in the person's own name, that the family pays for together.
That is what Kinship is, and it sits alongside the money rather than replacing it. The transfer does what only money can do; the plan does the rest.
Read next: Remittance or a plan? How families use both