From the comfort of her living room in Birmingham, one Yemeni woman turned a GoFundMe campaign with a £1,000 target into a platform that raised over £16,000 by 2023. With the funds, she channeled food parcels and water tanks to Taiz and supported medical treatments through community contacts on the ground. Her story is not an outlier. It is a window into how Yemen’s diaspora, long understood mainly through the lens of household remittances, has become something more consequential: a web of transnational political actors shaping conflict dynamics, peacebuilding practices, humanitarian responses, and cultural production, one WhatsApp message at a time.

Digital tools continue to reshape diaspora actors’ ability to transmit capital, narratives, and influence across borders, increasingly integrating them into the economic networks that make up Yemen’s political marketplace. This has increased inclusion and accelerated some humanitarian responses in a country where formal institutions remain fragmented. But it has also intensified power asymmetries, exposed beneficiaries and in-country partners to new risks, and blurred accountability in ways donors, policymakers, and practitioners have yet to fully reckon with. My recent Sana’a Center paper, based on 25 interviews with members of the Yemeni diaspora and digital ethnography conducted across social media and online spaces, sheds light on changing dynamics within Yemen’s diaspora.

The Diaspora at a Glance

The Yemeni diaspora is estimated at 6-7 million people globally, with roughly half of them being Gulf-based migrant laborers. Their remittances – an estimated US$3.8 billion in formally recorded flows for 2023 alone – sustain household economies across the country. A subset of the diaspora is both economically networked and politically mobilized in advocacy, peacebuilding, humanitarian coordination, and cultural production. Access to this kind of engagement is unevenly distributed, shaped by language fluency, educational credentials, digital literacy, and the freedom to organize in host states – meaning mobilization disproportionately reflects the diaspora’s more educated and internationally networked members, even as Gulf-based remittance senders remain the larger economic pillar.

Brokers of Capital, Symbolic and Material

The Yemeni diaspora increasingly functions as an intermediary between local communities and international policy arenas, with digital tools creating new avenues for political influence – from designing online surveys on Yemeni youth attitudes toward extremism for circulation to foreign ministries, to using WhatsApp and Facebook to gather information and evidence from sources inside Yemen for reports and legal cases. “Social media has made everyone a thought leader,” said a member of the Yemeni diaspora. Yet online visibility can also distort international perceptions of Yemen, as platform algorithms amplify “clickbait” over content offering a more realistic view of everyday realities.

Beyond political capital, this visibility can also translate into economic and social currency. Multiple interviewees pointed to ostentatious displays of diaspora wealth on social media, highlighting the weddings of members of the Yemeni diaspora in the United States as an example: “Crazy weddings… helicopters and all these Mercedes GLs.” Another interviewee linked diaspora wealth to capital flows into property markets in Yemen, which in some cities have driven up prices for local residents.

Diaspora capital can also intersect political and factional economic networks. One interviewee described UK-based Yemenis with roots in the South channeling investment into Adeni business networks tied to the Southern Transitional Council (STC) leadership. In Houthi-controlled areas, authorities are widely reported to have extorted diaspora-owned property. In 2021, for example, the US Treasury sanctioned a Houthi “judicial custodian” who oversaw the seizure of assets worth over US$100 million, including diaspora-affiliated companies.

Domains of Mobilization

In the advocacy space, the diaspora’s role took on new importance in 2011, when overseas activists translated the voices of the uprising against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh into English-language content via websites, blogs, and social media platforms such as Facebook for international audiences. Renewed attention following the 2023-2025 Houthi Red Sea attacks brought a similar surge, with one commentator recalling waking up to “78 emails” from media and analysts in a single day. Yet that same visibility exposed activists – particularly women – to targeted harassment. Multiple female interviewees described smear campaigns, including one describing how online critics falsely claimed her peacebuilding network “promote[d] LGBT rights” in order to trigger conservative backlash.

In the fields of peacebuilding, justice, and accountability, digital tools have enabled diaspora actors to deliver conflict-resolution training over WhatsApp voice notes and collect evidence for international legal cases in real time. However, access to global forums remains mediated by diaspora professionals abroad, prompting one interviewee to ask, “Who chooses whose voice to raise and whose to lower?”

In relation to the humanitarian response, informal diaspora fundraising – often perceived by Yemenis abroad as more trustworthy than large NGOs – has filled some gaps left by international agencies, but with limited oversight and accountability. One organizer who fundraises by sharing graphic images of medical patients, including children and unveiled women – a potentially risky practice in the context of Yemen’s conservative social norms – defended the strategy as a “last resort,” while multiple interviewees flagged clear risks around consent and beneficiary protection.

In regard to cultural heritage, platforms like Yemen Used To Be and the diaspora-run platform for female creatives, Al-Yamaniah, have countered war-focused narratives of Yemen, although contributors acknowledge tensions between nostalgia-driven, English-mediated content and in-country representation.

Toward Safer and More Accountable Engagement with Yemen’s Diaspora

Donors should map diaspora networks as marketplace actors embedded in Yemen’s political economy, rather than peripheral civil society actors. Funding should be flexible and include rapid-response mechanisms that leverage the adaptability and trust implicit in informal diaspora-led initiatives, while encouraging transparency and accountability. Digital security training for diaspora activists is essential, particularly for women facing online harassment. Practitioners and NGOs should co-design safeguarding protocols with diaspora partners and establish clear attribution practices that protect in-country contributors, who assume greater physical risk than their diaspora counterparts. Diaspora actors themselves are urged to conduct conflict-sensitivity assessments before mobilizing funds, adopt safeguarding standards around beneficiary imagery and consent, and strengthen transparency around funding sources and delivery mechanisms. Ultimately, effective diaspora engagement must leverage the adaptability and strength of these networks without compromising the safety of those they seek to support.

This commentary is part of a series of publications produced by the Sana’a Center and funded by the government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The series explores issues within economic, political, and environmental themes, aiming to inform discussion and policymaking related to Yemen that foster sustainable peace.