According to Migration Data Portal remittances are usually understood as the money or goods that migrants send back to families and friends in origin countries. As such they are the most direct and well-known link between migration and development. Remittances exceed official development aid but are private funds... As Peggy Levitt puts it, remittances can also be of a social nature, such as the ideas, behaviour, identities, social capital and knowledge that migrants acquire during their residence in another part of the country or abroad, that can be transferred to communities of origin.