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This is Chapter 7 to Money at the Margins. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, governments and donors have significantly expanded the use of cash transfers to alleviate poverty and address other developmental needs such as education and health (Garcia and Moore 2012). These programs to “just give money to the poor” have been called a “development revolution” for their positive influences and administrative simplicity (Hanlon et al. 2010). Typically, these provide small cash grants at regular intervals to poor or vulnerable populations, most often to directly alleviate poverty but also to boost education or health. In addition to the direct goals of these initiatives, the aid industry has begun to explore ancillary benefi ts and opportunities.Book description: Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more—as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people’s everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality? These questions are at the heart of Money at the Margins, a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

Nuisance variables in medical imaging research are common, complicating association and prediction studies based on image data. Medical image data are typically high dimensional, often consisting of many highly correlated features. As a result, computationally efficient and robust methods to address nuisance variables are difficult to implement. By-region univariate residualization is commonly used to remove the influence of nuisance variables, as are various extensions. However, these methods neglect multivariate properties and may fail to fully remove influence related to the joint distribution of these regions. Some methods, such as functional regression and others, do consider multivariate properties when controlling for nuisance variables. However, the utility of these methods is limited for data with many image regions due to computational and model complexity. We develop a multivariate residualization method to estimate the association between the image and nuisance variable using a machine learning algorithm and then compute the orthogonal projection of each subject’s image data onto this space. We illustrate this method’s performance in a set of simulation studies and apply it to data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI).

Kenya is a frontier market for ‘financial technology’, or FinTech. This industry – which merges mobile telephony and digital data with commercial lending – has grown spec-tacularly, with millions of Kenyans borrowing for household, emergency, and commercial expenses. This industry’s frenzied growth has been fuelled by not merely the pursuit of profit, but also a decidedly more developmental aspiration, namely ‘financial inclusion’. This article analyzes the curious merger of public good and private gain, the technological innovations, and sorts of knowledge work that undergird this field. It particularly examines the novel man-ner in which digital lenders capitalise on intimacy, converting practices of kinship and entrust-ment into frontiers of extraction. Personal and social data are translated into credit scores, extended family networks are mediated by financial services, and interpersonal relations sub-sidise risky lending decisions. In contrast to a view of capitalism as abstracting and alienating, this analysis foregrounds the sorts of personal relations, sentiments and obligations that are incorporated. Through fieldwork with borrowers, industry members and regulators, we show that digital lending relies on a conversion between different registers of wealth – in people, in things and in knowledge – and we track the ethical negotiations and anxious attachments that constitute this curious utopia.

We deliver one month's average profit to a randomly selected group of female microenterprise owners in the Kenyan slum of Dandora, just preceding with the exponential growth of COVID-19 cases. Firm profit, inventory spending, and food expenditures all increase. The transfers simultaneously cause a re-opening of previously closed businesses. PPE spending and precautionary management practices increase to mitigate this effect, but only among those who perceive COVID-19 as a major health risk. Cash transfers can assist in economic stabilization during a pandemic, but the resulting increase in business activity requires policies to inform and encourage mitigation.

We build a dataset of harmonized rotating panel labor force surveys covering 42 countries across a wide range of development and document three new empirical findings on labor market dynamics. First, labor market flows (job-finding rates, employment-exit rates, and job-to-job transition rates) are two to three times higher in the poorest as compared with the richest countries. Second, employment hazards in poorer countries decline more sharply with tenure; much of their high turnover can be attributed to high separation rates among workers with low tenure. Third, wage-tenure profiles are much steeper in poorer countries, despite the fact that wage-experience profiles are flatter. We show that these facts are consistent with theories with endogenous separation, particularly job ladder and learning models. We disaggregate our results and investigate possible driving forces that may explain why separation operates differently in rich and poor countries.

The African experience with mobile telephony has been extolled as a defining moment in the continent’s contemporary economic, social, and political development. Yet SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) registration schemes are threatening to throttle the technology’s developmental potential. These mandates, which require the registration of identity information to activate a mobile SIM card, are fast becoming universal in Africa, with little to no public debate about the wider social or political effects. Whereas some authors have explored the motivations behind these drives, as well as their potential economic impacts, this paper focuses its critique on the broader diversity of implications of this regulatory transformation. Viewing SIM registration through a lens that combines surveillance studies and information & communication technologies for development, it examines elements of resistance across a range of actors, as well as other emerging effects like access barriers, linkages to financialization, and Africa’s budding mobile surveillance society.

African countries are home to dense sociotechnical arrangements of registration, monitoring, and spying that are increasingly transnational as well as digital. Despite decades of work devoted to the politics, histories, and techniques of surveillance and control in Western societies, there is very little work on the local exigencies and manifestations of surveillance in African contexts. This special forum on surveillance in Africa seeks to analyze some of the subtle and diverse political implications of identification and observation across the continent.

In numerous African countries humanitarian and development organizations—as well as governments—are expanding expenditures on social protection schemes as a means of poverty alleviation. These initiatives, which typically provide small cash grants to poor populations, are often considered particularly agreeable for the simplicity of their administration and the feasibility of their implementation. This paper examines the background work required to deploy social protection in one especially remote area: the margins of postcolonial Kenya. Specifically, it documents the often overlooked social and technical construction of the infrastructure necessary so that cash transfers may function with the ease and simplicity for which they are commended. Attention to the practice of ‘infrastructuring’ offers insights into the tensions and politics of what is rapidly become a key form of transnational govermentality in the global South, showing that humanitarian rationalities and subjects cannot be understood independently of the material networks on which they rely.

The work of the French anthropologist-cum-philosopher Bruno Latour has influenced a broad variety of disciplines in the past three decades. Yet, Latour has had little noticeable effect within development studies, including those subfields where it might be reasonable to expect affinity, such as the anthropology of development. The first portion of this article outlines some core commitments of Latour’s oeuvre as they relate to development and anthropology, particularly focusing on the post-development critique. Latour’s approach to constructivism and translation, his analytical commitment to ‘keeping the social flat’, and his distribution of agency offer novel ways of maintaining some of the strengths of post-development without falling prey to some of its weaknesses. The second half of the article explores the potential for a Latour-inspired theory of development that may provide fruitful avenues for scholarship and practice beyond post-development, emphasizing materialism, relationality, and hybridity.

The role of ICTs in development is contested between those who believe they will facilitate human development and those who believe they are, at most, impotent, and at worst, counterproductive. This article uses an examination of M-PESA, a large-scale mobile financial service in Kenya, to argue that the impact of ICTs on development as freedom differs with both the specific conceptualization of freedom used, and the institutional arrangement of the technology in question. The article’s novel conceptual model links the adoption of mobile money to its impact, suggesting that the dominant individualistic and instrumental approaches to ICT4D overlook the ways in which power and domination function alongside freedom when these factors are considered relationally and substantively. I demonstrate that the internal plurality of the concept of freedom leads to both new forms of empowerment, but also to limitations on choice and new forms of dominance. In closing, I suggest institutional and technological arrangements that are most likely to maximize the development potential of mobile money.