Natasha Bajuk sees win-win opportunities through migration

For Natasha Bajuk, migration – hardships notwithstanding – can create opportunities for both the migrants’ destinations and countries of origin.

She should know. She is the child of Slovenian parents who immigrated to Argentina in the 1940s. They later obtained jobs in the development sector and moved her up to Washington. She graduated from Georgetown University, then moved to France to study international development, and back to Washington to help immigrants and their families in Latin America move their money in smarter ways.

Worldwide, 20 million Latin American immigrants are sending $60 billion a year back home.

“So much can happen to harness these simple, low-value transactions, to make those flows go further and have a lasting impact on so many families,” she noted.

Bajuk’s work is multifaceted. She studies the fastest and cheapest ways to get migrants’ money home, comparing and contrasting what has worked in different parts of the world. For example, mobile transfers have taken off in Africa, but traditional wire services still rule in Latin America.

She also found out that cooperatives in Latin America are more efficient than banks at stretching remittances on arrival and can offer an array of financial products without too much concern about risks of un-banked clients. For instance, some cooperatives will use remittance history as a credit report for obtaining a small business loan or a mortgage. Thanks to Bajuk’s research and advocacy on these services, regular banks are becoming aware that un-banked remittance clients are not as high-risk as they once thought.

Bajuk’s expertise is in such high demand that she hardly has a free moment. She has to carefully coordinate with her husband on the care of their two toddlers, but spousal whining has remained minimal. That’s because Bajuk possesses all the qualities of a team player. Among the most important is a passion for how she spends her days.

“I just find this area [on migration and remittances] quite thrilling,” she said. “It’s only been 10 years since people thought about remittances in terms of what the volumes really are. The true [worldwide] volumes are somewhere in the order of $400 billion. There’s so much potential, so much we can do for people who have lived in the shadows for so long. We’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg.”

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