Amman – Officials in the exchange and money transfer sector in Qatar said that the value of transfers made by Jordanians working in the country during Eid al Fitr this year amounted to about USD 21 million (14.8 million dinars), according to the Jordan News Agency (Petra), on Thursday.
The value of total transfers has increased this year compared to Eid al Fitr last year (2022) by 14.2%, as exchange shops, exchange companies and banks witnessed a high turnout from Jordanians to transfer money to their families in Jordan.
Moreover, according to Petra, the number of Jordanians working in Qatar has been increasing continuously for years.
The total number of Jordanians in Qatar has increased by some 16% from 60,000 in 2020, according to a statement given by Qatari Ambassador Saud Al Thani to Amman Net, to 70,000 since the beginning of 2023.
Since the launch of the first phase of the Qatari initiative to employ Jordanian youth in 2018, more than 10,000 Jordanians have been employed in Qatar. Next to thousands more since the launch of phase 2 of the initiative in 2020.
Regular remittances from Qatar and other Arab Gulf countries in particular, as well as the rest of the world, are considered a vital tributary of hard currency for Jordan, and an important factor in supporting the Jordanian economy and local development.
According to a statement by the Central Bank of Jordan (CBJ), as reported by Al Mamlaka TV in February, overall remittances of expatriate Jordanians have increased in 2022 by 1.5% to USD 3.4 billion (2.4 billion dinars) compared to 2021, approximately 93% of their pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Approximately 786,000 Jordanians, or about 10.5 per cent of the Jordanian population, are living overseas, as of late 2022, according to Petra.
