Crowdfunding to support personal and medical needs has risen in popularity in recent years. Many sociologists are critical of needy individuals’ turn to online fundraising, seeing it as a response to deficits in health care and social protection, and arguing that it may widen social inequalities. Most of these studies have taken place in the United States, China, and Great Britain. This paper explores crowdfunding in sub-Saharan Africa, offering us an opportunity to rethink the context and value of crowdfunding and its relationship to family and friend networks, philanthropy, and charity. It also examines how online crowdfunding relates to cultural ideas about dependency and care. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork at the Nairobi crowdfunding platform M-Changa conducted from 2016 to 2021, I describe how social entrepreneurs, women, and NGO representatives raise money for philanthropic initiatives, medical and education costs, family rituals, and COVID-19 relief. The paper reveals the diverse financial relationships, identities and goals emerging on the platform. Reflecting on this diversity of caring finance, this paper then explores the ambiguous commercial, social, and political potentials of crowdfunding as peer-based digital finance in the Global South.

Kenyans use mobile money services to transfer money to friends and relatives via mobile phone text messaging. Kenya's M-Pesa is one of the most successful examples of digital money for financial inclusion. This article uses social network analysis and ethnographic information to examine ties to and through women in 12 mobile money transfer networks of kin, drawn from field data collected in 2012, 2013, and 2014. The social networks are based on reciprocal and dense ties among siblings and parents, especially mothers. Men participate equally in social networks, but as brothers and mother's brothers more often than as fathers. The matrilineal ties of mobile money circulate value within the hearthhold (Ekejiuba 2005) of women, their children, and others connected to them. Using remittances, families negotiate investments in household farming or work, education, and migration. Money sending supports the diverse economic strategies, flexible kinship ties, and mobility of hearthholds. Gifts of e-money are said to express a natural love and caring among mothers and siblings and are often private and personal. Consequently, the money circulations of the hearthhold avoid disrupting widely shared ideals of patrilineal solidarity and household autonomy.

With mobile money technologies, people use mobile phones to send money to friends and relatives, connect to bank accounts, and make payments. This research examines the role of mobile money in Kenyans’ social and economic networks. Research reported was conducted in Bungoma and Trans-Nzoia Counties in Kenya, and among Kenyans living in Chicago, Illinois in the summer of 2012.Although mobile money services are often described as a form of “banking,” most users in Western Kenya use mobile money as a social and economic tool through which they create relationships by sending money and airtime gifts. A wide range of mobile money uses includes social gifting, assisting friends and relatives, organizing savings groups, and contributing to ceremonies and rituals.Even though mobile money was designed for person-to-person transfers, its practices are best understood as created by collectivities and groups. In savings groups, groups of siblings and other relatives, and communities who contribute to ceremonies, users “save with others” through the entrustment of value to kin and friends and create new groups and communities based around the “floating world” of mobile technology. Individuals balance their social and economic capital in order to create marginal gains and mediate the conflicts created between social obligations and personal economic betterment. Ties to and through mothers are prominent in social networks of mobile money flows. Matrilineal kinship ties are a means of sharing or circulating money among those marginalized from access to other resources and forms of value.

This research examines the interplay between social networks and mobile money remittances in Western Kenya. Research was conducted in Kenya’s Bungoma and Trans-Nzoia counties in 2012, 2013, and 2014, involving 12 family networks of between 8—70 people. Using small and frequent digital money transfers, relatives provide for household and emergency needs, contribute to ceremonies, and help pay school fees and medical bills. We find that digital money transfers follow and reinforce preexisting forms of emotional support and social relationships. In these families, the transfers strengthen maternal kinship ties as well relationships among siblings and cousins. Money networks are reciprocal, such that senders are also receivers, and individuals have many connections through which to access resources. Some individuals are “central” in networks, having more connections; others broker flows of e-value from one group of relatives to another. Mobile money strengthens social bonds but can also disrupt social relationships as when hiding digital value and remittances from in-laws or spouses.

We are a group of archaeologists, anthropologists, curators and geneticists representing diverse global communities and 31 countries. All of us met in a virtual workshop dedicated to ethics in ancient DNA research held in November 2020. There was widespread agreement that globally applicable ethical guidelines are needed, but that recent recommendations grounded in discussion about research on human remains from North America are not always generalizable worldwide. Here we propose the following globally applicable guidelines, taking into consideration diverse contexts. These hold that: (1) researchers must ensure that all regulations were followed in the places where they work and from which the human remains derived; (2) researchers must prepare a detailed plan prior to beginning any study; (3) researchers must minimize damage to human remains; (4) researchers must ensure that data are made available following publication to allow critical re-examination of scientific findings; and (5) researchers must engage with other stakeholders from the beginning of a study and ensure respect and sensitivity to stakeholder perspectives. We commit to adhering to these guidelines and expect they will promote a high ethical standard in DNA research on human remains going forward.