Decolonising for Whom? Recentring grassroots struggles and voices in the ‘decolonising fintech’ narrative – Developing Economics

By Serena Natile and Joy Malala

Over the last few years ‘decolonisation’ has become an increasingly popular subject in Western academia. Broadly considered the process of recognising and undoing the intellectual and institutional structures that enabled and maintain the reproduction of imperial power, calls for decolonisation have opened uncomfortable debates about epistemological privilege, forcing us to confront biases and injustices and to revisit hidden histories and visions for the future. While these debates remain essential, particularly at a time of political authoritarianism, racism, and violence, they also highlight the contradictions in Western academia between decolonisation as a fashionable conceptual trend and its real commitment to justice.

In formerly colonised communities, generational consciousness of colonial oppression and struggles to recover land, property, wealth, and political institutions have created a lived experience of the long-term consequences of colonialism, usually conceptualised as ‘coloniality’, that is not a concept but a reality. This experience has shaped movements and protests in the Global South, including within universities. An example is the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa, which followed the significant decline of government subsidisation of universities with discriminatory consequences for the disadvantaged Black population without historical wealth and economic privilege. Similar protests concern the recognition of and fight against pillars of colonial power including philanthropists such as British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who accumulated wealth by appropriating land, enslaving people and extracting resources, and used that wealth to shape knowledge production.

Other significant protests involve resistance against neocolonial powers such as Western financial infrastructures, corporations and international institutions i.e. the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. A  recent example is the ongoing youth-led (Gen Z) round of protests in Kenya #rejectfinancebill2024, motivated by demands to reject the IMF-supported Finance Bill that, if approved, would have imposed a fresh round of government cuts to basic services and austerity measures on Kenyans. The young people protesting in the streets of Nairobi showed awareness of the colonial legacy and long-term impact of the 1980s structural adjustment policies (SAPs) on the lives of people – particularly those at the lower end of the income distribution, and demanded economic sovereignty as the only way to achieve social justice. The protests were successful in impeding the adoption of the Bill, but many young people paid with their lives, as the government deployed a deadly military response to the protests. 

The demands for decolonisation are based on ending economic and epistemological oppression, two interrelated aims, each grounded in colonialism. Reclaiming knowledge and the economic means that allow its production and dissemination has always been at the centre of decolonisation as an opportunity to remake societies, nations, and the world itself for the better. In its fight for justice, decolonisation is a grassroots struggle against colonial and neo-colonial rulers and rules, as well as against all global and local actors and structures that enable and reinforce those rules. For this reason, grassroots voices need to be at the centre of any decolonisation project.

This series of blog posts reflects on the turn to decolonisation in a particular area: fintech. Defined as the application of digital technologies in retail finance, fintech has become increasingly popular in developing countries following the success of M-Pesa in Kenya. M-Pesa, a mobile money service launched in 2007 via a public-private partnership between the UK-based multinational corporation Vodafone and the UK Department for International Development (DFID, now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), was rapidly adopted by the vast majority of the Kenyan population. Fintech initiatives such as mobile money have been created at the intersection of finance, technology, and development, allowing them to develop without stringent regulatory requirements. Fintech is promoted by international organisations, philanthropic foundations, companies, governments, and various non-governmental institutions as a quick fix for underdevelopment, exclusion, and inequality.

While it started as a field embedded in business logics, development interventions and corporate philanthropy, fintech has become a centre of academic inquiry and is increasingly scrutinised by scholars, who have pointed out how its colonial and neo-colonial structures define patterns of uneven development and value extraction. While such critique makes an important contribution to understanding the asymmetries of power embedded in fintech and its extractive practices, many of its critics, although claiming to be aiming to recentre the voice of people at the margins, are disconnected from contextual details and accuracy of how digital finance interacts with local practices, activism and resistance that inform grassroots demands for decolonisation. This raises the fundamental question of the purpose of a decolonial approach, and in whose interest, decolonisation is being pursued.

To address these questions, we trace the ‘decolonising fintech’ argument back to grassroots struggles and people’s voices through two stand-alone blog posts. As two scholars working on fintech from different perspectives and with different positionalities but sharing the same concerns, we offer some reflections on the need to recognise that critiques of the coloniality of fintech come first of all from grassroots struggles, activism and resistance and not from Western academia, and this should be the starting point of any claim or attempt to ‘decolonise fintech’.  The aim is to encourage a self-reflexive approach to making decolonisation part of the ongoing anticolonial struggle rather than a cosmetic phrase that is detached from the lived experience of coloniality, inequality, and racism.

The blog posts are as follows:

1. On recentring women’s grassroots struggles to decolonise fintech narratives. By Serena Natile (FORTHCOMING AUGUST 7th 2024)
2. On recentring people’s voices to decolonise fintech narratives. By Joy Malala (FORTHCOMING AUGUST 9th 2024)

Dr Serena Natile is a feminist scholar based at Warwick Law School, University of Warwick. Her research engages with socio-legal inquiry, international political economy analysis, and feminist methodologies to examine issues of coloniality, social reproduction, and maldistribution and, more broadly, the relationship between law and social (in)justice. Serena is the author of The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls (Routledge, 2020) and leads the projects Feminist Recovery Plans for Covid-19 and Beyond: Learning from Grassroots Activism and Transnational Social Security Law in The Digital Age: Towards a Grassroots Politics of Redistribution.

Dr Joy Malala is a legal scholar based at Warwick Law School, University of Warwick. Her scholarship considers financial systems and practices that enable people to flourish despite marginality and global limits. She examines social justice implications for law and policies governing credit and other forms of financial relations by taking seriously the many ways we try to finance the lives we want. Her research poses questions about how our visions of a good life can be imagined when existing financial systems do not support this by thinking through financial crises and systems that create inequalities and looming debt formations. She is the author of  Law and Regulation of Mobile Payment Systems: Issues arising “post” financial inclusion in Kenya ( Routledge, 2018) and leads the project Between Life and Debt: Minding the Dignity Gap in the UK Consumer Credit Market.

This blog post is a part of the Decolonising Economics blog series.