Reimagining money as a web of social relations

This blog post is part of the Finthropology series Digital Human Finance. We present qualitative research to showcase the kind of insights that can come from deeper, human-focused studies and how they can be used to build new sustainable financial solutions. We focus on the story and its potential in each presented publication.

We are used to thinking of money in quantitative terms: numbers in our bank account, numbers on our bank card, and the prices of goods and services. But anthropologists (such as David Graeber) have long argued that money is essentially social: it can only function because we agree that it has value. 

When you bring technology into the mix, the social nature of money is even more apparent. Sibel Kusimba, in her book Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution (2021, Stanford University Press), illustrates this nicely with her description of how Kenya’s mobile money service, M-Pesa, shapes—and is shaped by—social networks in Kenya.

Much has been written on mobile money in Kenya, but Kusimba’s work is different. The majority of studies examine the potential of mobile money to improve people’s livelihoods and incomes by giving them better access to remittances, payments, credit, and so on. Kusimba, in contrast, delves into the complexities of how people use mobile money to manage social relationships, often with mixed results.

To do so, she used a variety of interesting research methods. Ethnography, observations, and interviews form the core of her data collection processes. But she also asked her research participants to draw their remittance networks: who they send money to, and who sends money to them. 

The results are often surprising. The classic story of how mobile money remittances work is demonstrated in an old M-Pesa ad that depicts a businessman in the city sending money to his parents in the countryside. While this is certainly a major use of mobile money, it is also far more complex than this. Rather than one-way flows, people find themselves in dense networks, composed of family, friends and community members living in Kenya and internationally, with money moving in multiple directions.

A good example presented by Kusimba is of a farmer, Dorcas, who was in her seventies and was the central node of her family’s remittance network. She had nine children, two of whom live overseas, and 44 grandchildren. She regularly received remittances from her children, with which she was able to expand her house and buy livestock. But, more interestingly, she also bundled remittances together to send to others in need. Eventually, to prevent Dorcas from passing the money onto others, her children stopped sending her money and instead sent it to a nearby store, which would deliver groceries to her. 

This example is indicative of the complexities of mobile money and the competing interests that surround it. Dorca’s children wanted her to benefit from the money personally; they were not so interested in supporting her neighbours. But Dorca felt both a desire to help others and pressure to do so; indeed, it is likely that she gained ‘social capital’ from helping others, who ‘owed’ her some kind of favour in return. 

Indeed, Kusimba points out that sending money can be a way of avoiding doing ‘care’ work; for example, children living in cities might send money home rather than travelling back to their rural communities to help out with the harvest or with caring for a sick relative. Here we get to the essence of what money is: a web of reciprocity mediated by some kind of token (in this case, a digital token) that is interchangeable with non-monetary exchange.

As much as money can be used to build social relations, it can also result in disappointment. Emmanuel, a young, unmarried man in his twenties, was born when his mother was a teenager and he was raised by his maternal grandmother. He was trying to build a relationship with his father, and things were looking promising when his father offered to build Emmanual a house on his land. Emmanuel sent him money to buy 16 sheets of iron for the walls, but the house was built with only seven. The fact that he had not actually been accepted in the family was hammered home when his stepmother thanked him for building a house for her children.

Both money and technology are implicated in the complex relationships illustrated by these stories. In Dorca’s case, her role as the hub of a remittance network would have been almost impossible without mobile money. Phones allowed this group to both send money and communicate with each other—intermeshed ways of demonstrating their relationship. 

In Emmanual’s case, the mobile phone was a means for him to reach out to his father to connect via both chatting and sending money. But ultimately it was not enough: most of their communication was remote, via mobile phone, and could not make up for the fact that they had never had enough face-to-face contact to establish a strong relationship in the first place. 

Finally, Kusimba points out that neither money, nor the ability to send it via mobile, are helpful for people who do not have relatives with spare cash. Indeed, the history of financial inclusion has shown that the ‘poorest of the poor’ are the least likely to benefit from access to financial services. Kusimba notes that during the Covid-19 pandemic, many Kenyans’ remittance networks dried up, and people could not pay for basic needs. 

What insights can we glean from Kusimba’s discussions of human complexity? Overall, her viewpoint is positive. When money and technology intersect, they allow people to do creative things that enhance social relations and their personal wellbeing. But this positive result is not inevitable, and there will always be people who are left out, and others who are at times worse off by virtue of being digitally financially included. 

As we design more and more interesting features into fintech, and these technologies reach more and more people, we need to be aware that we are both providing the foundations for human creativity and creating new possibilities for risks. Design decisions, and government policies, should reflect this dual possibility.

Kusimba, S. 2021. Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution. Stanford University Press.