Every month, across kitchen tables and phone screens and Western Union counters from Hyattsville to Silver Spring, a quiet transfer takes place. A nurse in Bowie sends $300 to her mother in Douala. A software engineer in Fairfax wires $500 to help a sibling finish school in Lagos. A restaurant owner in Langley Park covers her cousin’s medical bill in Accra. Multiply those transactions by hundreds of thousands of households across the DMV, and you begin to see the scale of something most Americans have never heard of.
The African diaspora now sends nearly $100 billion home every year. That figure, approaching the symbolic threshold of $100 billion in 2025 according to African Diaspora Network projections, surpasses official development assistance to the continent and rivals foreign direct investment. In 2023, Africa received over $100 billion in remittances amounting to approximately 6% of the continent’s GDP exceeding both overseas development assistance at $42 billion and foreign direct investment at $48 billion.
This community is not asking for help. It is financing a continent.
But this week, a gathering of investors, entrepreneurs, and policy thinkers just wrapped up in Silicon Valley with a harder question on the table: what happens when the people sending that money decide to build something of their own?
The Symposium That Started in Washington
The African Diaspora Network brought the world’s most influential changemakers to Santa Clara University for the 2026 African Diaspora Investment Symposium, known as ADIS26, held March 25 through 27.The theme this year: “Bridging Africa and Silicon Valley Shaping the Future of Innovation, Investment, and Inclusive Growth.”
It is the tenth annual convening of its kind. ADN holds its 10th annual symposium celebrating the conference’s roots in Washington, D.C., its city of origin. That origin matters. The DMV is not a bystander to this conversation. It is one of its founding addresses.
Between its African Diaspora Investment Symposium and Impact and Innovation Forums, ADN has engaged 89 countries and 545-plus speakers and industry leaders. The network’s mission, in plain terms, is to move the diaspora from sending money home to building something that lasts on both sides of the Atlantic.
“African Diaspora Investment Symposium is more than a convening,” said Almaz Negash, founder and CEO of the African Diaspora Network. “It is where ideas turn into commitments, relationships turn into capital, and capital turns into transformational impact across Africa.”
The $100 Billion Problem
The scale of remittances is extraordinary. In 2023, African nations received an estimated $90.2 billion in remittances, roughly double the volume of overseas development assistance. By 2024 that figure had climbed further, with over $96.4 billion flowing into Africa in remittances according to the World Bank approximately twice the level of overseas development assistance.
Those numbers represent real sacrifices. People who came here with little, built something slowly, and then turned around and shared it. That generosity has kept families housed, kids in school, and clinics funded in communities that governments left underfunded for generations.
But the money mostly flows one direction. And the majority of transfers historically covered immediate consumption needs: food, housing, healthcare, and education. There is nothing wrong with that. There is also more possible.
The cost of sending that money remains a separate frustration. Prices for sending remittances to Africa vary significantly by region in the first quarter of 2025, it cost 8.9% to send to Southern Africa and 9.9% to send to East Africa. Every percentage point lost to fees is money that never reaches a family, never seeds a business, never stays in the community.
What ADIS26 Was Actually Asking
The symposium sessions this year went beyond remittances as charity. Between January and August 2025, African startups raised over $2.8 billion in funding, exceeding the amount raised within the same period the previous year, with fintech and cleantech leading the way. The continent is not waiting. The question is whether the diaspora, including the hundreds of thousands of Africans living in the DMV, will show up as investors and not just senders.
Congress has also introduced the African Diaspora and Investment Act, designed to harness the economic power of Africa and Caribbean communities to reduce remittance costs and advance sustainable investment. The policy environment, for the first time in years, is starting to match what the community has been doing on its own.
The ADIS program includes a track called ABLE — Accelerating Business Leadership and Entrepreneurship an accelerator designed to support impact-oriented businesses in the United States that are addressing essential community needs and driving innovative solutions, specifically connecting participants from historically disadvantaged communities with access to capital and investor-readiness training.
For DMV residents, that is not a distant Silicon Valley conversation. That is a door.
What This Means for African Businesses Right Here
Prince George’s County already hosts one of the densest concentrations of African-owned businesses in the United States. Hair salons running 24 hours. Grocery stores stocked with egusi and fufu flour and dried crayfish. Immigration legal services. Catering companies. Tech consultancies. The infrastructure of a community building something permanent.
DC-area startups raised $5.4 billion in 2025, the second-highest annual total in a decade, according to PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. African immigrant founders are part of that ecosystem. They are building companies at a moment when the region’s venture capital scene is growing. The gap between the money flowing abroad and the capital available locally is not fixed. It is a choice.
The argument ADIS26 is making is not that Africans in America should stop sending money home. That would miss the point entirely. It is that the same financial instinct the willingness to sacrifice, to build across long distances, to invest in futures you may not personally see can also be pointed at something closer. A business in Bowie. A tech startup in Silver Spring. A cooperative in PG County that keeps wealth circulating inside the community instead of extracting it.
Gebeya, co-founded by ADIS alumni Amadou Daffe and Hiruy Amanuel, emerged from a connection made at the African Diaspora Investment Symposium and has since grown into a talent platform supporting more than 70,000 African professionals, serving global organizations including the UN Refugee Agency. That company started as a conversation in a conference hallway.
Every conversation like that one begins somewhere. Some of them will begin here, in the DMV, among people who already know what it means to build across oceans.
Where to Start
If you are an African entrepreneur in the DMV looking to connect with this network, the African Diaspora Network’s ABLE program accepts applications from early-stage businesses. Visit africandiasporanetwork.org to learn more.
For businesses already operating in the DMV, the Prince George’s County Economic Development Corporation offers resources specifically for small and minority-owned businesses, including access to capital programs and technical assistance.
The money is already moving. The question is whether more of it starts building things that last.