GETTING TO KNOW MANUEL OROZCO

Manuel is the Director of the Center for Migration and Economic Stabilization, which aims to provide solutions to the challenges affecting human and labor cross-border mobility. It prioritizes migration risk mitigation and economic crisis, particularly during the current pandemic. 

Beyond your job title, please explain your role at Creative

My role as director of the Center for Migration and Economic Stabilization is to provide guidance, technical support and conduct research about migration patterns and determinants and where they intersect with development. My main focus is to tackle the drivers of irregular migration in the global age.

My role also focuses on economic opportunities that can enhance development, leveraging remittances through financial inclusion, deepening investments in human capital, and digital economies in high-emigration communities.  

Finally, an important component of my work with the Center is to approach solutions to migrant vulnerability in host countries in the developing world, including Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in Central and South America.

Do you have an accomplishment, programmatic result or activity that you are particularly proud of?

I think one of my main accomplishments has been to bring the subject of family remittances to the core of the development agenda in the mid-1990s.

My work on transaction cost in 1999 was pivotal to generate a worldwide policy attention to make remittance transaction costs lower by increasing private sector competition. It also helped to reframe the link between migration and development as interrelated factors that merit policy intervention. As a result, international organizations introduced remittances into the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals.

• EXPERTISE:

  International migration, cross-border remittance transfers, financial inclusion and access, informal economies, democracy and governance in fragile states

• EDUCATION:

  Ph.D. in political science, University of Texas at Austin | M.A. in Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin | M.A. in Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin | B.A. in International Relations, Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica 

• DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE:

  Over 20 years working in development finance, diasporas, transnational economic engagement between migrants and their homeland. Work in more than 100 countries, with development work on West Africa, Somalia, Ethiopia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and Latin America and the Caribbean. 

• LANGUAGES:

  English and Spanish

• PUBLICATIONS:

• • Centro America en la Mira: Migración y Desarrollo: Editorial Teseo, 2016
  • Migrant remittances and development in the global economy, Lynne Rienner, Spring 2013
  • América Latina y el Caribe: migración, remesas y desarrollo, FLACSO, 2012
  • Remittances: Global Opportunities for International Person-to-Person Money Transfers, London: Lafferty Group, 2005
  • International Norms and Mobilization for Democracy, London: Ashgate Publishers, 2002