In France, payments sent abroad come largely from the West African and North African diasporas.

According to the World Bank, cash flows to sub-Saharan countries such as Senegal, Mali and Ivory Coast will drop by 23.1 percent from $48 billion in 2019 to $37 billion in 2020 in the wake of the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The International Organization for Migration says 265,000 Senegalese are believed to live in Europe, of whom nearly half are resident in France.

Lockdown policies brought European trade and industry to a near-halt, leaving many families struggling to send money to relatives abroad.

Samie, a 29-year-old man of Algerian descent working as an IT developer in Lyon explained his situation to CGTN Europe.

"We usually do not use wire transfer so we can avoid bank charges and exchange rates.

"What we do is simply give money in cash to someone going back to our city and country and then that person is in charge of delivering it to our relatives."

Sending money home has been severely impacted though by the continuing ban in France on non-essential international travel.

But other restrictions have been loosened, with non-essential shops now open and long queues outside money transfer agencies in major cities.

"We know it's harder for our families and I'm a lucky one because I can still work from home, but other diaspora members have been deprived of work," Samie added.

Casual laborers, people on zero-hours contracts and migrant workers are more exposed to the impacts of the pandemic, explains Flore Gubert, an economist at Paris School of Economics.

"In France, for instance, the diasporas tend to be working in business sectors which were completely stopped during lockdown, such as the construction industry," she tells CGTN Europe.

Low-level jobs in catering, cleaning, and tourism were all hit hard by the lockdown.

Some of these workers here do not have permanent job contracts.

They also suffer from low salaries, but because they are paid at least something it means they cannot receive social allowances from the state through Pôle Emploi, France's national employment agency.

"Some of them might then risk going below the poverty line – that is while already living in a precarious situation," says Gubert.

Check out The Pandemic Playbook, CGTN Europe's major investigation into the lessons learned from COVID-19