Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results: The rate of penetration of the mobile phone has exceeded any other technology, particularly in the developing world. This has seen the introduction of mobile based financial services to address financial exclusion. However, there is limited research on the usage of these mobile financial services by the poor. This paper seeks therefore to explore how mobile banking services are beingused by the urban poor in five townships in Johannesburg, South Africa. It seeks to explore the social, technological and economic factors that have enhanced or inhibited use of mobile banking initiatives. In-depth interviews with 15 users of a mobile banking initiative and focus groups of non-users were conducted.

The study applied the Capabilities Approach by Amartya Sen to analyse the contexts that can affect access and use of mobile banking services. Analysis of the data shows that mobile phone uptake does not directly translate to mobile banking uptake and usage. The study finds there are contextual influences of usage specifically the social, technological, economic and banking environment that the usage decision is made in. Usage is therefore shaped by who the users are, their family dynamics and their economic status, who they associate with, the banking alternatives available and perceptions of risk both on an individual and societal level.

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results: This dissertation (link at bottom) is about the epistemic and policy evolution of the environmental financial mechanism of REDD+ (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) in Brazil. Derived from the ecological or environmental economic model of creating economic incentives, REDD+ is rather a grand economic project of financializing the Amazonia, through public funds or markets, to reduce deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. This dissertation examines the mobilization, production and competition of various forms of knowledge(s) in designing and testing this economic invention.

In this study, I propose three research hypotheses. The first and underlying one is that in the cause of developing a global environmental financial mechanism as REDD+, there is not a single universal knowledge producer or justification, but rather there are multiple modes of knowing and thus multiple kinds of "knowers" as local or native to their social cultural contexts of knowing. The second hypothesis is that the multiple modes of knowing are in collaboration and negotiation with each other in a shared project, in this case, of REDD+. The third one is not so much a theoretical hypothesis, but more of an exploratory attempt on the role of anthropological research in collaborative knowledge production as in this case.

This ethnographic study is based on eighteen months of fieldwork among scientists, policymakers, carbon market practitioners, environmentalists as well as forest community residents in Brazil. My fieldwork relied primarily on ethnographic research methods, including participatory observation, in-depth interviews and archival research, but was also complemented by more structural and quantitative methods, such as policy network analysis and survey research.

This dissertation concludes supporting my first two research hypotheses. Ethnographic accounts of REDD+ knowledge production and mobilization reveal that multiple modes of knowing collaborate and negotiate with each other. Moreover, ethnographic research brings forth the productive, but yet informal, culture of cross field collaboration in scientific knowledge production. Beyond that, anthropologists may also help to enable various stakeholders to keep track of their positions in the complex process of carbon market making, especially those unprivileged stakeholders, such as the forest community residents, and the "Third World scientists."

Research synopsis/final report for project: Material Cultures of Financial Literacy Among Rural and Urban Poor in Orissa, India

“Financial literacy” is now a key factor in poverty alleviation and financial inclusion programs in developing countries. Most discussions of financial literacy imply that it is merely a set of skills, but previous research shows that financial literacy is in fact shaped by social and cultural factors. This research project defines financial literacy as the material practices through which all people manage their resources, including those mediating the relationships between individuals and financial institutions. This suggests that the study of financial literacies among the “unbanked” can lead to more effective strategies for their financial inclusion. Our research focuses on India, where nearly 80 percent of the population—about 836 million people—lives on a half dollar a day. We will conduct ethnography in two low-income residential areas in Orissa state, one near financial institutions in the state capital and one far from financial institutions in a rural district. Through long, unstructured interviews with residents in each site, observations of daily life, and a subsequent survey, we will track the material objects through which people manage their resources—bank books, ration cards, purses, folders, boxes, shelves, bags, mobile phones, televisions, newspapers, weights and measures—and the ways people use them.

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results: Roughly 25% of Uruguayan MSMEs and households are bancarized. As opposed to that, the country surpassed the 100% mobile-phone penetration mark in 2008. The above facts seem to describe Uruguay as a highly fertile ground for mobile money. In that context, STRO and the Uruguayan government have launched an initiative to introduce C3 in Uruguay by the end of 2010, being C3U an innovative monetary system that will enable MSMEs to have access to cheap capital by combining the idea of a complementary currency as well as the principles of mobile money. This motivates a study that understands the demand of the Uruguayan unbanked for mobile money and that analyzes to which degree difficulties have to be foreseen and overcome to successfully introduce mobile money in the country and to be able to leverage its effects in terms of MSMEs’ growth.

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results (Working Paper and Executive Summary links at bottom): In 2011, sixty-five percent of India’s population did not have access to a bank account (Global Findex 2011). India has the second largest financially excluded poor in the world with more than half of its population considered as financially underserved At the same time, India is one of the fastest growing markets for mobile phones. Given the rising mobile phone usage in the country, M-Banking has a great potential for enabling financial inclusion of the poor. India has attained near universal telecom access with one of the lowest–cost retail distribution networks. Among the myriad M-banking services currently underway, EKO’s Simplibank offers one of the most promising initiatives in mobile money operating on a low-cost banking platform. Launched in 2007 through a partnership between the start-up company EKO and the State Bank of India (SBI), this mobile money service initially operated as a pilot project in the cities of Delhi, Bihar and Jharkhand. By 2011, EKO had captured a wider consumer base as a business correspondent of SBI through its new product for domestic remittances. EKO partners with a network of agents—chemists, grocers, airtime vendors—to provide banking services to people with no access to formal bank accounts.This project  explores the everyday use and effects of EKO mobile banking. It discusses findings from a recently concluded study of 160 customers, 20 customer service points (CSPs)/agents, and key functionaries of EKO in Delhi. 

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results: The expansion of consumer credits has been one of the most wide-ranging transformations in the last 20 years in Chile. One can argue that Chile has gone through its own process of

‘financialization’ and that this has had a very specific and domestic character: consumer credits. Of course, this is not the only country where consumer credits, and particularly, credit cards, have seen a significant growth. However, recent trends in the Chilean case show an important particularity: the access to credits has neither been driven by banks nor by other traditional financial institutions but mainly by retailers such as supermarkets and department stores. In today’s Chile retail credit cards are not merely used to purchase goods in the issuers’ stores, but also increasingly as revolving credits cards that are usable in an expanding network of places (including airline tickets, private hospitals, pharmacies, and, certainly, other stores). In a developing country, where a large proportion of the population has not traditionally been considered by banks as potential customers, chain retailers are becoming the main access to finance.

This research, using an ethnographic approach and mostly relying on interviews and traces of financial transactions recorded in different objects (such as credit cards bills or notebooks), reconstructed the credit history of 13 different households situated in three areas of the city with low access to other financial services. Two notions were very important in guiding our methodological approach and the analysis of the collected material: “financial ecologies” and “circuits of commerce”.

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results: This paper explores the relationship between the usage of mobile technology for loan repayment and client’s behavior towards mobile value storage, utilizing as a case the experience of micro-borrowers already using the m-banking loan repayment service offered by one rural bank in the Philippines. The hypothesis is that the usage of mobile technology for loan repayment can lead to an increase in client confidence in mobile money and thus bring about wider adoption of other mobile banking services, particularly of a savings mechanism that allows borrowers to save in the bank via the mobile phone. The study seeks to gain insights on how mobile banking fits into the perceptions, values and uses that are attached to money and other forms of wealth among the poor as well as to review how clients tend to move to other uses of mobile money, particularly in storing and saving value. The paper also uses empirical data to suggest how mobile money applications might be designed to better suit the needs and interests of poor savers.

This study is an inquiry into the role of traditional social structures and values in developing, nurturing and growing business enterprises in Africa, even under drastic conditions of a failed state, a fragmented war-torn society and transnational refugeeism. The study focuses on exploring the dominant patterns of capital mobilization, investment and entrepreneurship practiced by the bulk of the Somali refugee community in the Kenyan capital city of Nairobi, including the advantages, limitations, challenges and opportunities of any observed patterns and processes.

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results: This study evaluated the impact of mobile banking products on the financial behaviors of Ghana’s urban poor one year after their introduction into the country. With the use of semi-structured interviews and a document review, we investigated the cultural perceptions of the use of mobile money (MM), identified its successes, as well as any barriers to its adoption and its impact on Ghana’s urban poor with respect to their access to financial resources, attitudetoward saving, storage and wealth transfer.

Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results: Technological advances on mobile technology has made it possible to transfer money faster and cheaper even to distant areas. Philippines-based service providers have turned this technology into a multimillion peso business. Development practioners have drumbeated its potential,particularly in financial services, in serving frontier areas or geographically distant , hard to reach locales with pockets of economically challenged and socially excluded populations. Frontier areas have money ecologies that develop in the context of poverty, coping and distance from centers of power and commerce.