Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution

Economic Anthropology, 2018

This article examines the role of gender in the use of digital finance in Kenya, including the well-known case of mobile money but also the emerging use of smartphone apps, payment tills, digital credit services, and digital fund-raising computer programs. Development professionals have explicitly feminist goals in bringing digital finance to women in the Global South. In several recent reports, they outline the belief that gender norms are a barrier to women's use of finance. They hope digital finance will bring women agency and control over money and consequently shift restrictive gender norms. This article offers a critique of these assumptions based on ethnographic conversations, a diary exercise, and network self-portraiture conducted in Kenya in 2016 among both rural farmers and urbanites. Adopting a distributed agency perspective, the ethnographic study demonstrates that Kenyan women and men use digital finance not to seek individual control of their money but to produce themselves as connected and trustworthy members of financial groups and collectivities. Gender norms may not hinder women from finance but rather enhance and deepen women's and men's financial relationships and bring women success in amassing funds.

Economic Anthropology 2016

Kenyans use mobile money services to transfer money to friends and relatives via mobile phone text messaging. Kenya's M-Pesa is one of the most successful examples of digital money for financial inclusion. This article uses social network analysis and ethnographic information to examine ties to and through women in 12 mobile money transfer networks of kin, drawn from field data collected in 2012, 2013, and 2014. The social networks are based on reciprocal and dense ties among siblings and parents, especially mothers. Men participate equally in social networks, but as brothers and mother's brothers more often than as fathers. The matrilineal ties of mobile money circulate value within the hearthhold (Ekejiuba 2005) of women, their children, and others connected to them. Using remittances, families negotiate investments in household farming or work, education, and migration. Money sending supports the diverse economic strategies, flexible kinship ties, and mobility of hearthholds. Gifts of e-money are said to express a natural love and caring among mothers and siblings and are often private and personal. Consequently, the money circulations of the hearthhold avoid disrupting widely shared ideals of patrilineal solidarity and household autonomy.

Economic Anthropology, 2016

Kenyans use mobile money services to transfer money to friends and relatives via mobile phone text messaging. Kenya's M-Pesa is one of the most successful examples of digital money for financial inclusion. This article uses social network analysis and ethnographic information to examine ties to and through women in 12 mobile money transfer networks of kin, drawn from field data collected in 2012, 2013, and 2014. The social networks are based on reciprocal and dense ties among siblings and parents, especially mothers. Men participate equally in social networks, but as brothers and mother's brothers more often than as fathers. The matrilineal ties of mobile money circulate value within the hearthhold (Ekejiuba 2005) of women, their children, and others connected to them. Using remittances, families negotiate investments in household farming or work, education, and migration. Money sending supports the diverse economic strategies, flexible kinship ties, and mobility of hearthholds. Gifts of e-money are said to express a natural love and caring among mothers and siblings and are often private and personal. Consequently, the money circulations of the hearthhold avoid disrupting widely shared ideals of patrilineal solidarity and household autonomy.

2013

In recent years, a discussion on how to harness information and communication technologies (ICTs) for ?banking the unbanked? has emerged within the broader field of study and practice on the ICT for development (ICT4D). Framed as a critical technology to ?financially include the poor?, mobile telephony is increasingly used to deliver financial services through mobile money platforms, such as Kenya?s M-Pesa, the most successful experience to date. The purpose of this paper is to examine the usage of M-Pesa among urban Somali refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. In particular, it endeavours to understand how this innovation is integrated within the Somali repertoire of financial institutions, engaging with the way actors navigate across different monetary circuits. Based on an ethnography conducted in the mostly Somali inhabited estate of Eastleigh, Nairobi, it argues that the interplay of M-Pesa and Somali financial arrangements occurs in accordance with culturally oriented ideas of finance a...

2015

The rapid adoption of mobile money transfer (MMT) in East Africa, and Kenya in particular, is facilitating a nexus of inter-­‐personal financial transfers which has hitherto been the least visible dimension of informal finance. At the same time, the success of capturing these flows into a formal service has raised significant enthusiasm that mobile money transactions represent an effective route to inclusion in the formal financial sector. This paper examines this claim through an in-­‐depth qualitative and ethnolinguistic investigation of the everyday concepts and practices of resource exchange. It identifies a focus on relationships rather than resources as at the centre of these informal practices. This suggests a gap between these exchange practices and those of the resource-­‐focussed formal sector. These contrasting perspectives suggest that there is much scope for misunderstanding in developing routes to financial inclusion making it particularly important to appreciate emic ...

With mobile money technologies, people use mobile phones to send money to friends and relatives, connect to bank accounts, and make payments. This research examines the role of mobile money in Kenyans' social and economic networks. Research reported was conducted in Bungoma and Trans-Nzoia Counties in Kenya, and among Kenyans living in Chicago, Illinois in the summer of 2012.

This paper examines the factors that make cash ‘sticky’ in the increasingly digitised Kenyan financial landscapes. On the one hand, it discusses the mismatch between assumptions implicit in the financial inclusion discourse and ideas of saving, accumulation and money enshrined in local financial practices, and provides an overview o f the current digital payment situation in Kenya, in terms o f strategies and data. On the other hand, it draws insights from industry efforts in which industry expectations are tested against a background shaped by the dominance o f cash and traditional financial institutions. The overall goal is to further the understanding of potential drivers and challenges o f ‘cash-lite’ approaches to financial inclusion, as well as the convergence and divergence of theory and evidence. This study uses qualitative methods of data collection to understand the social, cultural and economic drivers o f payment behaviours, and the opportunities and constraints for adoption and acceptance of technology. It argues that the enduring reliance on cash suggests that a rational calculative approach is not adequate to understand people’s decision making when considering different options in a repertoire o f financial alternatives. Most importantly, the materiality of cash affects its pragmatics within a broader repertoire of financial practices revolving around different means of payment and storages o f value. It thus recommends that an approach to the design o f epayment systems should not only be largely ‘open-source’ for ease o f interoperability with other payment systems, but also localised, to converge with local contexts.

Information Technology in International Development 2015

family networks of between 8-70 people. Using small and frequent digital money transfers, relatives provide for household and emergency needs, contribute to ceremonies, and help pay school fees and medical bills. We ªnd that digital money transfers follow and reinforce preexisting forms of emotional support and social relationships. In these families, the transfers strengthen maternal kinship ties as well relationships among siblings and cousins. Money networks are reciprocal, such that senders are also receivers, and individuals have many connections through which to access resources. Some individuals are "central" in networks, having more connections; others broker ºows of e-value from one group of relatives to another. Mobile money strengthens social bonds but can also disrupt social relationships as when hiding digital value and remittances from in-laws or spouses.

Gender, Place & Culture, 2020