Dr Serena Natile’s book, titled Exclusionary politics of digital financial inclusion: mobile money, gendered walls, draws on gender as an analytical and methodological tool but also incorporates a socio-legal approach to critique digital financial inclusion. The book is based on her fieldwork study on Kenya’s commercially successful mobile money scheme, M-Pesa, which is operated by Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile network operator owned by South African mobile communications company Vodacom, which in turn is majority-owned by the British multinational corporation Vodafone. The author argues that development actors present themselves as external to gendered inequalities that cause financial exclusion, and yet they are implicit in their reproduction. The book provides robust evidence to support this viewpoint, clearly articulating the role of colonisation and international development interventions in the production and reproduction of exclusion and disproportional socio-economic disadvantages endured by women. It highlights the ways that colonialism disrupted egalitarian patterns of social organisation, for instance, through the introduction of property rights, racialised wage economy and commodification of land. This led to the production of patriarchal relations in which women were relegated to unpaid work and were left bearing disproportionate responsibility for social reproduction work, while positioning men as breadwinners. In addition, customary law legitimised the subordination of women through various means, including marriage and property inheritance. Through the above processes, colonisation reshaped social institutions by shifting attention to the nuclear family and in the process reduced women to second-class colonial subjects. To avert some of the above colonial legacies which conceive countries in the global South as both ahistorical and culturally uniform, the author draws on archival material on the colonial history of Kenya, and also engages with Kenyan scholars who are routinely rendered invisible though citation politics.
As other scholars have observed, the author noted that the absence of sophisticated financial products and service is routinely conflated with a need or a demand. This practice is supported by various studies, in particular scholarship such as Portfolios of the poor, by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford and Ruthven, which not only perceives an absence as a need, but also conflates availability and use of financial instruments with developmental impact. The author provides several interesting analytical observations, which include her point that international development gender equality measures fail to account for the heterogeneity of women’s struggle, local context and its unique historical, cultural context. In the process, international development actors tacitly assume that women’s oppression and priorities are homogenous. She adds that the financial inclusion concept shifted the responsibility for underdevelopment from governments and international development agencies to the victims of underdevelopment, while promoting what she denotes as neo-colonial digital extraction, a reference to the fact that profits extracted from people living in poverty largely accrue to multinational mobile network operators and not the poor people themselves.
The author theorises gender and financial inclusion through what she refers to as the logic of opportunity over redistribution. In this logic, ‘opportunity’ refers to the conception of people living in poverty as autonomous consumers and entrepreneurs capable of addressing their own social disadvantages. Support for such ideas is reflected across major international development institutions and programmes, such as the World Bank’s ‘Gender equality as smart economics’ approach, which is intended to contribute towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These ideas are supported by influential theories, such as Amartya Sen’s Development as freedom, and Prahalad and Hart’s win–win notion. What unites these approaches is the belief that poverty can be alleviated by heightening poor people’s and/or women’s autonomy so that they can participate in the economy not only as consumers of goods and services produced by multinational corporations, but also as entrepreneurs. This has led to cases in which corporations profit from the solidarity and survival practices of people living in poverty. A typical example of this is the joint collateral practices whereby a group of predominantly female borrowers are jointly liable for each member’s loan. The process enforces repayment through shaming women, by exerting social pressure from other members. Besides this gendered shaming as a means of social control, the practice also threatens the very same relations that women depend on for their survival needs.
Although negative, the idea of opportunity is perpetuated by the use of what the author aptly refers to as the rhetoric of resilience and empowerment, while making reference to survivalist livelihoods in which hard manual labour, inadequate and irregular income, and dangerous and dehumanising work with limited market opportunities are celebrated as entrepreneurship.
In my view, the author’s theory is relatable to what Elyachar refers to as markets of dispossession, as it analyses the win–lose practices whereby markets expand and in the process profit from the very same people whom they purport to be rescuing out of poverty. Natile’s approach differs in the sense that she not only identifies a complex problem (disguised as an opportunity), but analyses it in tandem with a proposed solution which demonstrates that redistribution is a socio-economic right grossly undermined in developmental interventions.
Although the author does not explicitly make reference to the role of overvalued claims associated with new technologies (in this instance digital money), her book presents several exemplars of inflated claims associated with mobile money. These include ‘the opportunity to use M-Pesa infrastructure to facilitate access to needed resources and services such as water, healthcare, and electricity, in this way contributing to the SDGs’ (100). The result of such overly positive framing is that the ability to simply ‘pay using mobile money’ is presented as a key to access important resources; in other words, ‘payment’ is equated with important developmental outcomes. However, the author explains how this could be misleading, by highlighting the fact that payment can only be made by those who can afford to pay, and also, commercially successful mobile payment companies accrue revenues from fees levied on micropayments made by people living in poverty. Moreover, the financialisaton of basic infrastructure by non-governmental actors excludes those who cannot afford to access them and sidelines global South governments while not taking responsibility for the professed outcomes.
At the end of the book, the author’s findings converge with feminist political economy literature which argues that, to achieve gender equity, finance and production have to serve the needs of social reproduction. Similarly, in the concluding chapters, the author enthuses about the politics of redistribution and how its integration with digital financial platforms can drive the redistribution of power, resources and responsibilities. She summarises the book by reiterating that ‘the book has considered gender inequality as deriving more from the lack of redistributive approaches and measures than from lack of financial services’ (156). These concluding remarks may form the basis of a new research agenda which explores the role of finance, e-money, digital platforms et cetera in facilitating social reproduction and redistribution. My only reservation is that part of her conclusions, in particular where she argues ‘for a politics of redistribution to guide financial inclusion projects, policies and regulations’ (156), inadvertently retains digital money as an important developmental priority that can be redeemed by redistribution. However, the evidence that she provides throughout the book suggests that financial inclusion – or to be more explicit, mobile money – is not a dependent variable of redistribution. Put differently, Natile fittingly defines redistribution as a socio-economic right (the right to food, water, shelter, education, health and employment), and there is very little evidence to suggests that digitisation of money would play a meaningful role in these important redistributive processes. If rent extraction (by international digital payment providers) from the paltry monthly social grant that is paid to South Africans living in poverty is anything to go by, perhaps redistribution might indeed be a top international development priority which does not need to be redeemed by digital inclusion.