Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution (Culture and Economic Life)

Technology is rapidly changing the way we think about money. Digital payment has been slow to take off in the United States but is displacing cash in countries as diverse as China, Kenya, and Sweden. In __Reimagining Money__, Sibel Kusimba describes the rise of M-Pesa, and offers a rich portrait of how this technology changes the economic and social landscape, allowing users to create webs of relationships as they exchange, pool, borrow, lend, and share digital money in user-built networks. These networks, Kusimba argues, will shape the future of financial technologies and their impact on poverty, inclusion, and empowerment. She describes how urban and transnational migrants maintain a presence in rural areas through money gifts; how families use crowdfunding software to assemble donations for emergency medical care; and how new financial groups invest in real estate and fund weddings. The author presents fascinating accounts that challenge accepted wisdom by examining the notion of money as wealth-in-people—an idea long-cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa and now brought to bear on the digital age with homegrown financial technologies such as digital money transfer, digital microloans, and crowdfunding. The book concludes by proposing a new theory of money that can be applied to designing better financial technologies in the future. "Digital payment technology is rapidly changing the way we think about money. While these services have been slow to take off in the U.S., they are rapidly displacing cash in countries as diverse as China, Kenya, and Sweden. In her book, Reimagining Money, ethnographer Sibel Kusimba offers a rich portrait of how this technology is changing the economic and social landscape of Kenya, which became the first country, in 2007, to use the mobile phone as a payment channel on a broad scale. She argues that these services popularized in Kenya--including M-Pesa and Safaricom--are allowing users to create webs of relationships as they exchange, pool, borrow, lend, and share digital money with user-built networks that will shape the future of financial technologies and their impact on poverty, inclusion, and empowerment"-- Provided by publisher