On recentring women’s grassroots struggles to decolonise FinTech narratives – Developing Economics

Drawing realised by artist Pawel Kuczyński for Serena Natile’s book The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls

I came to the study of fintech as a feminist socio-legal scholar researching the gender dynamics of South-South migration. While doing fieldwork in Kenya for my PhD in 2012, I came across M-Pesa, a mobile money service used by locals as an instrument for transferring money from urban to rural areas. From the start of my research in 2011 to the completion of my PhD in 2016, ongoing studies on M-Pesa were mainly celebratory. It was acclaimed as an innovative instrument for poverty reduction, development, and gender equality and was enthusiastically supported by donors and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as by tech entrepreneurs and corporate philanthropy. Its success story was so uncontested that I decided to change my research question to focus on the gender dynamics of digital financial inclusion, rather than on my initial interest, migration.

The key narrative of M-Pesa’s success in terms of gender equality was, and still is, that it facilitates women’s access to financial services, providing them with a variety of opportunities to improve their own livelihoods and those of their families, their communities, and ultimately their countries. In the specific case of M-Pesa, a basic-mobile-phone-enabled money transfer service is considered more accessible and available than transferring money via mainstream financial institutions such as banks, and more reliable and secure than informal finance channels such as moneylenders or the handling of cash via rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs). This claim is based on three assumptions: first, that women have less access to financial services than men have; second, that women would use their access to finance to support not only themselves but also their families and communities; and third, that digital financial services are better than informal financial channels because they overcome the limits of cash, ensuring traceability and security. These assumptions motivated advocacy and investment in digital financial inclusion projects and the creation of ad hoc programmes and institutions, all strongly focused on the question of how digital technology can be used to facilitate women’s access to financial services.

During the time of my fieldwork in Kenya, empirical research on M-Pesa was very common. Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Kenya, an institution funded by Western donors and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to contribute to Kenya’s financial development and address constraints to financial inclusion, was actively collaborating with local and international researchers and producing numerous studies on the uses and potential of mobile money for women. As I discuss in my research on digital finance, M-Pesa, unlike some development projects, was characterised by not a lack but an overproduction of data. However, none of the studies contextualised the story of M-Pesa within the broader historical and contemporary gendered structures and power relations that define and regulate the global economy and the international development project.

The individual and groups (chamas) of women using M-Pesa that I interviewed were all accustomed to being asked questions about how they benefited from mobile money. A general answer that was always reported in M-Pesa success stories was that mobile money allowed them to manage money more efficiently and to juggle different tasks such as housework and micro-entrepreneurship. For this reason, the increasing number of women using M-Pesa as a more accessible financial service was presented as a success story in terms of gender equality. However, on asking the same women different questions about their everyday lives it became clear that the equation of access to M-Pesa with gender equality was a lot more complex than it appeared. To use any financial service such as M-Pesa requires money in the first place, and women’s main concern was about not managing money but having money to manage. They wanted a regular and stable source of income, for instance via secure employment, to be able to pay for food and water, school fees, housing, healthcare, electricity and all other basic services, particularly in the absence of public social infrastructure and state support. This is the main reason why informal financial institutions such as ROSCAs remained essential in women’s everyday lives, even as the use of M-Pesa spread. In ROSCAs women put together resources to support their livelihoods based on a system of trust, solidarity and reciprocal accountability. Women’s strong awareness of global and local structural injustices urges them to create grassroots mechanisms to satisfy their immediate needs while continuing to protest and strike for their rights.

Beatrice Karore is the founder of Wanawake Mashinani (Grassroots Women) Initiative, and a community mobiliser and human rights defender in Mathare, Nairobi, Kenya. 

While M-Pesa did not replace ROSCAs, it was integrated into grassroots practices; for instance mobile money is used to facilitate small payments and store money in the M-Pesa e-wallet, despite the fact that mobile money is not designed or regulated for use as a savings account. The integration of a digital financial service such as M-Pesa into informal practices can be seen as a doorway to expanding capitalist logics into spaces previously outside the purview of capitalist markets, making such spaces vulnerable to value-extraction via fees and data. The women in my focus groups were well aware of these dynamics but had no power to change them, and often have no choice but to accept them or attempt to play the market’s game. Various products and services built on the M-Pesa platform target fundamental needs such as access to water, healthcare, electricity and education, providing credit-based flexible arrangements that allow small, irregular repayments. These products and services are funded via complex institutional and financial arrangements that involve public and private institutions including governments, donors, international institutions, the private sector, and corporate philanthropy. The arrangements are grounded in market logics and claim to create incentives for the private sector while contributing to social development. However, such initiatives do not improve access to increasingly privatised and marketised resources and services, and they make access to key services conditional on financial inclusion, creating further gendered problems such as indebtedness and generational vulnerability.

The gendered disadvantage in financial inclusion is perpetrated by the uncontested assumption that access to financial services leads to gender equality. This results in policies and institutions focusing on how to include the excluded rather than addressing the more important and complex question of why financial inclusion is gendered as well as racialised and based on class, socioeconomic and migration status, coloniality, and geopolitical location. In my research I consider this an essential question if we are to understand whether and to what extent new digital financial inclusion services such as M-Pesa can contribute to gender equality. Interrogating how unequal gender relations are embedded in processes of financial exclusion and narratives of inclusion involves using gender as an analytical and methodological tool to understand where inequalities lie in the global economic and legal order. Examining coloniality in this context, as the long-standing patterns of power that emerge in the context of colonialism (Mendoza, 2016), is not just a conceptual choice but is driven by the need to understand the gendered dynamics of financial inclusion and exclusion and why and how women have become the target of financial inclusion policies.

Colonialism created a situation which subjected people of the Global South to Western domination via the occupation of their land, extraction of their natural resources, and exploitation of their labour. Indigenous people found their norms and institutions erased or filtered (e.g. via the non-repugnancy clause: the requirement that colonial law be in keeping with the law of the colonisers’ home country) in the interest of Western economic interests and ideologies, and this is evident if we use gender as an analytical framework. As the Kenyan scholar Achola Pala Okeyo (1977) explains, while men and women under colonialism shared a similar subordinate structural position in relation to the dominant culture, colonial rules had differential impacts on them, shaping gender relations. The colonisers’ commodification of land and introduction of property law undermined more collective forms of ownership in favour of patriarchal relations that saw men as the household heads and holders of land titles (Manji 2006, Maathai 2008). The monetarisation of economic relations and introduction of the wage economy targeted men as paid workers (albeit in discriminatory and exploitative colonial settings) and the family breadwinners, relegating women to the position of secondary unpaid workers (Boserup 1970). This contributed to the framing of women as responsible for unpaid household and community labour, dependent on men for money and hence excluded from financial services. This also explains why women in formerly colonised countries are so predominant in informal employment and informal finance, because while excluded from formal economic institutions they had to be able to survive in a capitalist monetarised system built on that exclusion.

The end of colonialism did not lead to the fair redistribution of resources and opportunities that the women fighting colonial power had hoped for. Nationally, many local elite rulers did not dismantle colonial gendered structures but used them for their own power and purposes. For instance according to Kenyan feminist scholars, the government used ideas related to ‘Africanisation’ (a concept critiqued by Fanon (1961) as distinct from decolonisation) to discriminate against women (Nzomo 1993, Oduol and Kabira 1995, Otieno 1998, Maathai 2010). Despite women having played a key role in the struggle for independence from colonial rule, they were ‘domesticated’ (Rogers 1980, Mies 1986), denied political power and access to wealth. For instance the second Kenyan President, Daniel arap Moi, encouraged women to join the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation (MYWO, ‘Progress for Women’ in Swahili) which was founded during the colonial era by a group of Western administrators and their wives who sought to improve the status of Kenyan women according to dominant Western values with the purpose of educating them to become good mothers and housewives (Oduol and Kabira 1995).

Women in formerly colonised countries found themselves at the lower end of the power distribution both nationally and internationally. The demands of anticolonial campaigns in the 1950s–1970s from the Non-Aligned Movement, the New International Economic Order (NIEO), and particularly of the invisible women’s grassroots movements (Basu, 1995) for a just international system based on reparation and redistribution were dismissed in favour of an order aimed at protecting Western economic interests and ideology. In this international order, and in the development narrative underpinning it, women in formerly colonised countries have been portrayed progressively as victims, as recipients of aid, and as icons of change invested with the responsibility for developing their communities and countries. Following Ester Boserup’s 1970 report on women’s exclusion from economic development, first women’s inclusion (Women in Development) and later gender equality (Gender and Development) became central in international development discourse. Despite this, the voices of women from formerly colonised countries remained excluded from official international fora, a space dominated by white Western men, and were often subordinated to Western women in alternative fora such as the UN Women’s Conferences 1975-1995 (Oyewumi 1997, 2003). This meant that in practice they had no power to resist international policies such as the neoliberal structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) of the 1980s–90s that pushed them to the lower end of the global income distribution.

Second session of the Conference on the Law of Treaties, Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria, 1969

The negative impact of SAPs on women has been widely documented by feminist scholars (see for instance Elson 1989, 1991). Compulsory privatisation and reduced government spending on social services increased the burden of women’s unpaid labour. In the context of the SAPs the internationalisation of microcredit – small collateral-free loans to collectively-liable groups of women to start income-generating activities – became a common gender equality policy that replaced state funding and was perfectly compatible with neoliberal ideas of marketisation and entrepreneurship. However, in reality microcredit rarely allowed women to start a remunerative business that could change their socioeconomic status, as the micro loans only allowed micro-entrepreneurship, with which local markets were already saturated and for which there was limited demand. Very often microcredit loans were used to pay for essential resources and services that became inaccessible for many women at the lower end of the income distribution following the adoption of neoliberal policies. In other words, microcredit was offered as a market-based solution for exclusions caused first by colonialism and later by development, while taking advantage of established colonial infrastructure and power relations.

Private-sector-enabled digital financial services such as M-Pesa are no different. Fintech is presented as a solution to exclusions created by colonialism and development interventions, but is itself a product of coloniality. Fintech adds an additional layer of inequality to financial exclusion: technology. Technology is embedded in unequal relations of power and wealth, with Western states and corporations having the resources to define the trajectory and purpose of technological development. In addition to issues created by microcredit such as over-indebtedness and gendered stigma and abuse (Goetz 1996, Rahman 1999, Kabeer 2001, Mayoux 2002), digital finance creates new possibilities for exploitation and extraction, (e.g. via fees and data), expanding the number of actors from digital providers to various private-sector actors who profit from creating new little-regulated mobile money products and services. For these reasons the argument I develop in my work is that fintech does not contribute to gender equality because it does not address any of the causes of gendered financial exclusion but rather enhances unequal power relations. Promoting the narrative that digital financial inclusion contributes to gender equality, creates problems that need highlighting.

First, this narrative does not recognise digital financial services as a product of global asymmetries of wealth and power that are embedded in and reproduce gendered inequalities. These asymmetries are evident at different levels of the system: M-Pesa was institutionalised via a public-private partnership between the aid branch of a former colonial government (the UK Department for International Development, now assimilated into the Foreign Office) and the UK-based multinational corporation Vodafone, which was enabled to expand and acquire African telecoms by the SAP’s requirement for privatisation of national industries; the intellectual property of M-Pesa was registered in the names of Vodafone and the UK-based tech company Sagentia, rather than that of the local provider Safaricom; the development of the M-Pesa platform has been left unregulated for years in order not to hinder technological innovation, resulting in the proliferation of extractive products and services built on its platform; and the M-Pesa platform is privately owned, with profits made by Safaricom, Vodafone and international shareholders. Specific gender-equality projects are funded via corporate philanthropy rather than investing the profits created by M-Pesa in public social infrastructure and support to address gendered disadvantage.

Second, the claim that digital finance contributes to gender equality removes attention from the actual causes of gendered financial exclusion and the need for serious local and international redistributive interventions. These would include regulating international trade, investments and finance in the interest of people rather than profit; establishing an international and national taxation system that funds universal social security; ensuring workers’ rights and living wages and salaries; and cancelling the external debt imposed on countries of the Global South with SAPs, allowing them public resources for welfare rather than forcing them to rely on conditional aid, philanthropy and exploitative investments. Such measures should prevent Western countries and corporations taking advantage of the global economy (e.g. through the use of cheap labour, materials and markets) with no contribution to the wellbeing of the global population.

Third, the logic of opportunity created by fintech results in an unequal distribution of benefits and risks between digital financial providers and users, with important implications for gender equality. The digital financial inclusion-gender equality nexus is based on the idea that women need to take advantage of the opportunities created by digital finance to improve their and others’ livelihoods; however, as feminist political economy and the concept of social reproduction teach us, this generates a further layer of responsibility for women: the responsibility for transforming opportunity into success without any support in the form of income, social security or social infrastructure; while for the providers, including all the actors involved in the fintech business, digital finance represents a secure source of profit via fees and data.

This analysis has shown that ‘decolonising fintech’ should be a contextual purposive action rather than a cosmetic claim. It requires historicising the analysis of the fintech infrastructure and its institutional arrangements with a clear commitment to building grassroots power to create anti-colonial futures, aiming to end socioeconomic injustice via a radical redistribution of wealth and power.

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.

This post is part of the mini-blog series Decolonising for Whom? Recentring grassroots struggles and voices in the ‘decolonising fintech’ narrative and the ongoing blog series Decolonizing Economics.

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