The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion Mobile Money, Gendered Walls RIPE Series in Global Political Economy Series

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.

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.

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.

Introduction Chapter 1: A Brief Herstory Of Gender, Development And Financial Inclusion Chapter 2: Theorising Gender and Financial Inclusion: Opportunity v. Redistribution Chapter 3: The Story Of M-Pesa In Kenya: A Gender Reading Chapter 4: The Gendered Narratives of Mobile Money: From Social Entrepreneurship to Philanthrocapitalism Chapter 5: The Gendered Governance of Mobile Money: From Local to Global and Back Conclusions: The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion

Serena Natile is Assistant Professor at Warwick Law School, University of Warwick, UK.