Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion

<p>Focusing on Kenya’s path-breaking mobile money project M-Pesa this book examines and critiques the narratives and institutions of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality arguing for a politics of redistribution to guide future digital financial inclusion projects.</p><p>One of the most-discussed digital financial inclusion projects M-Pesa facilitates the transfer of money and access to formal financial services via the mobile phone infrastructure and has grown at a phenomenal rate since its launch in 2007 to reach about 80 per cent of the Kenyan population. Through a socio-legal enquiry drawing on feminist political economy law and development scholarship and postcolonial feminist debate this book unravels the narratives and institutional arrangements that frame M-Pesa’s success while interrogating the relationship between digital financial inclusion and gender equality in development discourse. Natile argues that M-Pesa is premised on and regulated according to a logic of opportunity rather than a politics of redistribution favouring the expansion of the mobile money market in preference to contributing to substantive gender equality via a redistribution of the revenue and funding deriving from its development. </p><p>This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in Global Political Economy Socio-Legal Studies Gender Studies Law & Development Finance and International Relations.</p>