On recentring people’s voices to decolonise FinTech narratives – Developing Economics

In 2009, I was interested in studying the phenomenon of M-Pesa as a legal scholar—just a year after its launch and intense rollout. My standpoint enabled me to see the initial regulatory paradoxes that M-Pesa presented. In 2010, I began my PhD, exploring what a regulatory framework should look like. My analysis focused on the complexities presented by the storage and transfer of customer funds within mobile money systems. Central to my analysis were themes of financial regulation, consumer rights, financial stability, conceptualising ‘financial inclusion’, and the meaning of ‘banking the unbanked’. At the time, the study was significant, in understanding the contractual tensions between mobile money users and Safaricom, a non-bank entity, which provided services akin to a traditional bank’s deposit system—yet did not appear to be subject to the same regulatory restraints as conventional banks. Crucially, banks and financial institutions had historically dominated much of the financial system, through exclusionary practices due to colonialism. Therefore, M-Pesa caused much upheaval to established banks, but simultaneously provided hope for the excluded. Various actors extended this new hope, in the ‘success’ narrative of M-Pesa. Its beneficial use as a storage and transfer system was extolled as alleviating poverty, and the restatement of its trajectory was and continues to be modelled across the developing world. The global development and digitalisation agenda have subsumed M-Pesa’s pervasive influence, both valorising the pathways to ‘development’ and ‘innovation’ through FinTech with a singular aim of ‘financial inclusion.’

As a result, Kenya has become the site of contestation for overwhelming empirical research, interest, and knowledge production, particularly by Western scholars and institutions. A ‘gold rush’ has emerged, and the scramble for knowledge extraction has intensified across academic disciplines and across methodologies. Studies from Ghana, Senegal and Kenya dominate. The study of ‘development’ in all its iterations has gained a new development. However, much of the ways in which mobile money (M-Pesa) and FinTech are discussed and framed demonstrates a Western understanding of the everyday lives of the Kenyans who use it. Scholars, activists, and proponents often situate the premise of its use as being between two paradigms: advancing financial inclusion through the enhancement of global development aims, and its function as a tool that includes Kenyans in extractive cycles of financialisation. Both of these are true.

Despite this, I proffer that Kenyans have built M-Pesa into the bespoke mobile money platform it is today. By built, I mean the socio-technical relations created through its use—the ingenious ways in which Kenyans have consumed, negotiated, and adapted to it, weaving between and within the formal and informal. They have combined the analogue and digital, representing the ways in which people on the financial frontier live.  However, the voices of the people within the platforms are often excluded in the discourse in research and industry: the collective agency, advocacy for rights, and the grassroots struggle in challenging existing exploitive capitalist conditions and mutually co-constitutive structures, amidst the subjectification from ‘above’ through foreign actors and ‘within’ through the state in the digital age. Therefore, this piece asks how might the voices of the people be centred as decolonising Fintech narratives?

How the people experience digitalisation

Much of the intellectual inquiry into Africa begins from a presumption that the only exciting research is that of failing structures, markets, governments, and systems. The only versions of Africa worth reading about are poor, violent, sickly, and hungry—and often these versions are seen through the altruism of international organisations and governments. The persistent assumption that Africa needs Western perspectives to understand itself is deeply problematic. The narrative is that, in Africa, nothing succeeds out of its own merit without centring epicolonial dynamics. This framing is true in many ways, as the emergence of the Kenyan colony alongside the construction of the railway destined for Uganda dispossessed Africans of their ancestral lands, propelling them into commercial farming and wage labour, while sowing divisions among ethnic groups. This dispossession introduced shifts in cultural identities through the diffusion of Christianity and the English language. The digital line embodies a new dimension of this transformation into a new digital coloniality (Coleman 2019). As the railway was a tangible emblem of imperial domination, the digital line serves as a symbol of its legacy. It exerts a gravitational pull on the past, compelling it to align with a singular (imperial) vision of the future. This digital paradigm shift, like the railway’s historical impact, is not uniform in its effects: it has complex consequences for Kenyans.

From M-Pesa to Uber, how Kenyans live their lives is mediated through platforms and digital infrastructures: financial services, transport systems, public health, and government services. As with the railway lines, digital lines are transposing the same paradigm of where economic and political centres are and continue to be concentrated—and the concentration lies with a few. They are shifting labour, democracy, power, and creativity, as well as leading to socio-spatial inequalities, remaking citizenship, identity and the State.

Similarly, the intertwining of Africa’s neoliberal economic restructuring and China’s demand for African resources is another source of ‘Africa Rising’ narratives. High global commodity prices, particularly for oil, prompted a search for new sources of raw materials, boosting African GDP and investment. However, Africa’s investor-friendly policies—due to privatisation (a product of strictures of Structural Adjustment Programs) and deregulation, as well as China’s economic liberalisation and its pursuit of African resources to fuel its own rapid expansion—have shaped this growth. China has become Africa’s top trading ally, and the export of African raw materials has dramatically increased. In the first decade of the 2000s, Africa’s growth rate outpaced that of East Asia. However, this new scramble has spilled over to militarised competition for resources. Africa has ‘risen’ for but for global capital, yet wealth is still concentrated and not distributed.

In Kenya, the ‘the Silicon Savannah’ moniker obfuscates these complexities. The name is framed towards a Eurocentric understanding, reifying the notion that Kenya can neither exist on its own merit, nor deploy its own agency, and must always be in comparison to an established ‘super’ power. It is often as if Africa must be viewed through the lens of the West to explain itself. It is within this frame, particularly in the digital age, that Nanjala asks, ‘What changes when we start with people rather than the structures? There is agency. There is creativity, there is negotiation’.  I would add that there is also resistance.

Countries in Africa are doing much more than just surviving. Resistance is infused in these narratives. It is represented in our everyday lives: the ethical dilemmas that ensue from art and activism.

Kenyans understand that the development imaginary (Kopf 2021) was and continues to be about creating an infrastructure that primes the capacity of the ‘elite’ class to accumulate and smooth away those inefficiencies that hamper the capacity of global capital to continue exploitation. Sold as public goods, but always private gains—post-colonial nation building involves mega infrastructures intertwined with commercialization. To illustrate, M-Pesa’s founding demonstrates the political capture that allowed its (continued) flourishing. Additionally, the Silicon Savannah serves as an example of where the government inserted itself into the nascent technology scene, leveraging Kenya as a stronghold of global capital. The State has displayed an unwavering commitment to attracting foreign investment, even at the expense of inadequately enforced labour laws that fail to protect workers’ rights. These situations have profound implications for the lives of the new class of gig economy workers, and through this priming, the law remains silent, enabling an environment for abuse.

Furthermore, many business models (such as Sama, Meta/Facebook, OpenAI, and Uber) depend heavily on such an environment: one that sustains precarious work conditions, algorithmic control over workers, and deliberate violations of local labour laws. Kenyans have sought legal actions against such companies over redundancies, working conditions, and unfair terms. Workers in Kenya assert their control by understanding their dual value production, both in the services they provide and data extraction. Similarly, M-Pesa’s initial adoption in 2007 was premised on the Send Money Home proposal, which exploited the norm of making frequent remittances through familial social networks. This layered onto the spatiality occasioned by colonialism, redistributing households blurring the formal and informal. Since then, Safaricom has asserted its dominance, providing a critical digital financial infrastructure relied upon during crises—be they contentious elections, disasters, or emergencies. They have built infrastructural intimacies, difficult to disentangle. Morphing product offerings, consolidating functions beyond telecommunications, Safaricom has further entrenched itself into savings and credit, creating predatory overdraft products, and inviting class action suits for fraud and other criminal opportunities—all the while, enjoying regulatory protection from the State. Kenyans, and Africans more broadly recognise that the prevailing economic landscape is oriented towards commodities rather than technology. The continent is underpinned by existing infrastructural deficits, precluding technology-centric market development. Consequently, the most successful technological innovations in these regions are those that directly enhance the fundamental aspects of trade. This is exemplified by the predominance of FinTech solutions, particularly payment systems, which serve as critical enablers of basic commercial transactions, thereby reflecting the intersection of technology with the primary market dynamics of the region. 

Africa is not a lab (for ‘research’ extraction)

Further, a significant portion of the existing research on FinTech and digital finance in Africa is predominantly by Global North researchers—supposedly focused on ‘Africa’, but mainly discussing Kenya, Nigeria, or South Africa. Discussions on technology diffusion in Europe or North America normally focus on a single country, as places to be understood on their terms. This is never a consideration when talking about Africa. The dangers of a single oversimplified ‘African’ story persist, essentialising the African experience. The idea of having ‘FinTech in Africa’ editorials, collapsing 54 states into one single volume is peculiar. These clusterings are often devoid of intricacies and understanding; small samples are enough to generate findings and claims of regional expertise, mostly by Global North researchers. Regional variations are ignored, and geopolitics and social / cultural factors that shape socio-economic and political dynamics are overlooked. Africans can spot the flaws: a misspelled local name, a misinterpreted phenomenon. When discussing African countries, states are either often absent, or victims of circumstances beyond their control. When scholars go to Africa, they are looking for very good data into which they can impart their Western theories and ideologies. Such research portrays passive recipients of seemingly benign digital interventions or innovations: fodder for research. Life happens to Africans, who are not shaped or guided by their imaginations. These methodologies often oversimplify and homogenise Africa as a single entity.

There are certainly power differentials in researching FinTech that reify these narratives. For instance, Western expertise is perceived as objective or neutral, as they study and extract for themselves. Drawing epistemic lines, as Pereira (2014) stated, ‘the modern foreign’, Roy (2023) confirms, ‘plays a key role, in strengthening claims and legitimacies locally, even as it reproduces the hegemony of Western theorisations and limits the flourishing of local knowledge against the framework of colonial logics and neoliberal demands’. Kenyans are acutely aware of being researched in this sense—like gig workers, producing dual value by both being the subjects of research and the producers of data for Western scholarship. Kenyans understand that their knowledge and tacit expertise have been expropriated by various stakeholders and ‘experts’—minimised, invisibilised, in support of Global North academics. In addition, the elite capture of FinTech expertise, subsumed by those who want to advance their careers with this ‘new’ development—all while reproducing the power imbalances they seek to research, enabling epistemic injustice.

‘African’ research is relegated, subordinated, precarious—the voices of Kenyans forced to capitulate to becoming research assistants only, never leading the research. Similarly, Angela (2021) traces the rise of a ‘new’ idealised persona within Kenya’s research landscape, by examining how Kenya’s ‘Techpreneur’ has been shaped by imperial logic that persists in seemingly autonomous ventures. Global capital and transnational geopolitics play out within Kenya, where the researchers are also the researched—but this construction of the Kenyan Techpreneur is an extension of the apparatus that drives and crafts the African into an entrepreneur as a form of social security, abdicating the State from its duties (Elyachar 2005) The ways in which Africans are moulded into productive economic agents—in this case constructing the ‘FinTechpreneur’—are barely addressed, despite them being a heuristic device for researchers to gain a deeper understanding.

What space exists for the African scholar ‘trapped in an existential dialectic of correcting misrepresentations of Western scholars on the flawed assumption that this advances the decolonisation agenda’ (Serenkuma 2024)? How can we challenge these narratives, and critically assess the knowledge produced about Africa—and in this case Kenya—while acknowledging its complex and diverse history, rather than solely viewing it as a site of trauma, and recast it in our own terms? What counter-narratives are there of pain and sympathy, as well as things we traditionally understand as the global neo-colonial capitalist encounter? What frameworks exist to shape how we produce knowledge regarding politics, strife and struggles related to ethnicity, gender, and class in digital ‘Africa’, or even Kenya? How do these discussions navigate power dynamics, and manifest forms of resistance, when talking about digital finance in Africa?

As Foluke asks, ‘Why don’t you research Africa with her people? Why don’t you ask them what Africa they want to research?’

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.

Image: By Sara Mehrgut

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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