Recent imtfi items

Tokens, Writing and (Ac)counting: A Conversation with Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Bill Maurer

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In her foundational study of Neolithic clay tokens, the renowned archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat identified that different token shapes represented different goods and were used in accounting and distribution. When these tokens came to be stored in sealed clay envelopes (likely representing a debt), each token was impressed on the outside of the envelope before being placed inside (thus allowing people to see quickly what was within). Three-dimensional objects were thus reduced to two-dimensional representations, the first form of writing (and contributing to cuneiform script). These clay envelopes in turn developed into pictographic tablets; here each token did not have to be impressed into the clay in a 'one, one, one' system, but instead quantity was indicated by a numerical symbol - abstract number was born. Much of Schmandt-Besserat’s work can be found online at https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/. Her book ‘How Writing Came About’ was listed by American Scientist magazine...

Some pig! Exchanging NFTs for the perspective of regeneration

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are a thousand more silly ideas for every utopian blockchain project to heal the planet, foster financial justice, transform cultural production or democratize practically anything and everything. Non‐fungible tokens (NFTs) are one of them. The funny thing is that the more you pick at them, the more they harmonize with certain longstanding anthropological arguments. Non‐fungibility lurks in the anthropological imagination of non‐capitalist economies. This article uses the common law of fungibility to explore the elevation of the very idea of non‐fungibility presumed in many NFTs. This idea might have more in common with saints’ incorruptible flesh or the Crown Jewels than the standard fictions of capitalist finance. They cut social ties by insisting on their singularity and immutability. In doing so, they crowd out other blockchain conversations about regeneration and ways to reckon the debts we owe any number of possible futures.

Payments are Getting Political Again

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Payments are political in that they are a function of state sovereignty, and also an extension of it. This is old news, of course: money itself emanates from state sovereignty. But digital payments, obviating the anonymity of cash transactions and generating vast quantities of data in their wake, provide new opportunities for states to extend their reach. These politics of payments are not, of course, limited to authoritarian regimes. Payment providers have been enlisted into government service almost since their inception, whether in the tracking of cash to hamper criminal activities or in the regulations around customer due diligence and identification for cross‐boundary payments of all kinds. With more attention to payments, and payment data, people can also hear the rumblings of another politics. Data activism has emerged as a potential social movement and political force.

Blockchain

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Blockchain

Introduction: Curating Transactional Things

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Consider this book a catalog for an exhibition that never happened. Each contribution takes up an ephemeral object connected to the act of payment, a transactional thing that unlike metal coins or paper banknotes would rarely make it into a display case-or, in some cases, even be impossible to curate. Money is the most obvious transactional thing. It is used for billions of transactions every minute, the sum total of which we call an “economy.” Museums have money galleries, displaying coins, notes, and some of the other objects that people have used historically to conduct transactions—pretty things like beads, shells, stones, and metal ingots. Such items have been displaced by coins and cash, and commentators today predict the imminent demise of those transactional things, too, heralding a cashless future in the face of digital technologies of payment. Supposedly, the pretty things will get replaced by pure data. Increasingly, however, monetary transactions have begun to require...

Primitive and Nonmetallic Money

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Feathers, beads, shells, copper bracelets, and giant stones – objects that Western observers have assumed serve the functions of money in so-called simple societies and other non-Western contexts – come in all shapes and sizes. This chapter reviews the literature on “primitive” currencies, from early ethnology to contemporary anthropology and archeology. Showing how analysts frequently misunderstood the use of such objects in context, it hones in on the social relationships and political systems those objects operated within and reflects back on the limitations of the Western imagination of currency revealed by what collectors call “odd and curious money.” It also takes up the question of whether and how standards determine value and expands the social scientific vocabulary for the diversity of forms of political authority that constitute money.

Series Preface

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Series Preface

Money, Rank and the Frailty of Authority: Schurtz’s World and Ours. An Outline of the Origins of Money By Heinrich Schurtz. Translated and Annotated and With an Introduction by Enrique Martino and Mario Schmidt (eds.), HAU Books, London. 2024. 274 pp. ISBN: 9781914363078 [paperback]; ISBN: 9781914363276 [PDF]; ISBN: 9781914363283 [e‐book].

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Money, Rank and the Frailty of Authority: Schurtz’s World and Ours. An Outline of the Origins of Money By Heinrich Schurtz. Translated and Annotated and With an Introduction by Enrique Martino and Mario Schmidt (eds.), HAU Books, London. 2024. 274 pp. ISBN: 9781914363078 [paperback]; ISBN: 9781914363276 [PDF]; ISBN: 9781914363283 [e‐book].

Bill Maurer

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Professor Bill Maurer is a renowned cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. Professor Maurer graduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a PhD in Anthropology. He moved to UC Irvine in 1996 as Assistant Professor, going on to become Chair of UC Irvine’s Department of Anthropology (2005-2011) and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences (2011-2013). In July 2013 he assumed his current role as Dean of UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences. Professor Maurer has published on topics ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, and the future of money. He is founding director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was the founding co-director of the Intel Science...

Channels and Codes, Rails and Freight: Can You Hear Me Now?

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Channels and Codes, Rails and Freight: Can You Hear Me Now?

A promise is a promise: A love letter from the ACH to the world of 2050†

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ABSTRACT Experiments in money often recapitulate long‐standing human concerns over finality and fixity, despite money's reference points in political authority, trust, and the memorialization of relationships of credit and debt. From the point of view of the primary set of infrastructures facilitating the movement of money in 2050, those concerns are misplaced. Recounting the history of those infrastructures, this love letter from a future intelligence is addressed to those humans who would reimagine money so that they will recognize the human and technical infrastructures on which it has always depended.

Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy

Interview with Bill Maurer

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interview with Bill Maurer

Money: Anthropological Aspects

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From its traditional concern with ‘primitive’ moneys and definitional quandaries over the nature of money in small-scale and nonmarket societies, anthropology more recently has considered money’s meanings in multiple, overlapping spatial, cultural, and temporal milieu, as well as the pragmatics of money – what it does and how it signifies, rather than what it is or what it signifies. Early twenty-first century business interests in divesting the state of its monopoly over the legitimate means of exchange open new frontiers for the anthropology of money and value.

Signatures

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Signatures

Blow that Mausoleum Down

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract Drawing on anthropological perspectives, this paper argues that the fungibility of objects and the ability to exchange them for money is a defining characteristic of capitalist markets. In contrast, other systems of reckoning value emphasize the unique relationships within which objects are embedded and their inability to stand for just any other thing. This paper further highlights the role of slavery in the origins and continued dominance of capitalism and the existence of alternative systems such as cooperativism and sharing that are often overlooked. This paper then examines the Saussurean and Peircean semiotics underlying the concept of money as an abstract sign and argues that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in blockchain technology contradict these theories by emphasizing pure uniqueness and rendering objects non-transformable or inconvertible. This paper concludes by warning against the dangers of a future where fungibility is absent, as it is necessary for life and...

Money, Ritual, and Religion: Reason, Race, and the Re-Enchantment of the World

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Money, Ritual, and Religion: Reason, Race, and the Re-Enchantment of the World

Money's ends and epistemic burdens

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Money's ends and epistemic burdens

The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization, and Money’s Pedigree

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Partant de la démonétisation en 2016 des grosses coupures en roupies indiennes, cet essai reconsidère la position chartaliste sur le « don » d’argent de l’État et s’inspire de Marilyn Strathern sur les distinctions entre partage, emprunt et vol. Keynes a fait valoir que l’argent devait avoir un pédigrée, une lignée continue. La démonétisation semble interrompre cette lignée. Dans le contexte plus large de la numérisation et de la dématérialisation de l’argent, la dématérialisation n’est pas simplement une redénomination des billets matériels, mais une affirmation de l’autorité de l’État à « écrire le dictionnaire » de l’argent, alors que de nouveaux débats politiques et des lobbies se forment autour des infrastructures monétaires, tant publiques que privées. La démonétisation peut couper la lignée et affirmer le contrôle de l’État, mais, après Mauss, la lignée brisée offre aux gens l’occasion de ressentir la possibilité de renouer des relations à travers d’autres...

2019-2020 NSF-REU on Community Organizations, Data Justice, and Law: Findings, Experiences, and Reflections of Undergraduates

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Encouraging critical multidisciplinary collaboration, learning, and mentorship duly grounded in community engagement, this National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Experience (NSF-REU) brought together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers in anthropology, computer science, and informatics to understand how organizations that serve minoritized communities conceptualize and utilize data in pursuing justice across various domains. The research aimed to uncover assumptions built into data infrastructures and how they shape the relationships between community organizations, the communities they serve, and the issues they engage with.

Five undergraduate students participated in this 25-week learning, mentorship, and research experience aimed to critically expose them to methods and issues surrounding data and computing practices. They read and discussed literature across disciplines, designed and populated a database of case studies, interviewed...

Why Should We [ALL] Care about Cash? Reflections after MIASA’s “Cash in Crisis in Africa” conference, University of Ghana (MIASA Blog)

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When you have a money emergency, WHO or WHAT do you turn to, or trust? Do you turn to family? Your community? Savings groups? Banks? Gods? Livestock? How do people pay when there’s an earthquake, a flood, a power outage, or bad actors? What do people do when the government decides to dollarize, redesign, redenominate or even abolish the local currency? People take off their clothes, people queue up for hours, they die in line – for cash.

I asked these crucial questions May 2025 at the MIASA “Cash in Crisis in Africa: Navigating Financial Realities in Times of Disruption” conference at the University of Ghana where I shared findings derived from 17+ years of research conducted by the fellows of the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine.

MIASA’s Interdisciplinary Fellow...

Financial Inclusion: Integrating the Poor into the World Economy – A Look at Migrant Laborers in a Karachi Marketplace and How They Move Money (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My interest in money stems from the incidents of 9/11 in the United States. After theattacks in the US, all major governments and international organizations passed stringent laws against informal money transfer channels labeled as funding terrorism allover the world. In Pakistan, the state curtailed the illegal funds transfer channel knownas hawala by arresting prominent currency dealers and passing the Anti-Hawala Act. Ahawala channel is a monetary network/practice that relies on centuries-old kinshipbonds for transferring value without moving physical cash from one place to another. Inplace of these informal and embedded monetary channels, the state opened up a marketfor multinational corporations such as Western Union and the branchless banking sectorto integrate hitherto unbanked people into the gambit of modern finance under thenational strategy called “financial inclusion.”

2019-2020 NSF-REU on Community Organizations, Data Justice, and Law: Findings, Experiences, and Reflections of Undergraduate Researchers (Video Presentation)

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Drama in the Payments Infrastructure and Saturation in Financial Education: Discussing New Avenues of Research around Financial Inclusion in Colombia (IMTFI Blog - Conference Report)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In IMTFI's PERSPECTIVES blog series, IMTFI’s International Board members and affiliated researchers take on the definition of financial inclusion. This series aims to foster an open dialogue on issues around money, technology, and financial inclusion for the world’s poor. Individual contributions reflect contributors' own reflections on recent events based on their research and areas of expertise. The topic of financial inclusion will conclude with a capstone white paper by IMTFI titled "Mobile Money: The First Decade."

This is post 1 of 6 of the PERSPECTIVES blog series on Financial Inclusion: 1. Can Financial Inclusion Be Synonymous with Financial Justice and Equity; 2. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part One): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 3. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part Two): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 4. Drama in the Payments Infrastructure and Saturation...

Continuing the Conversation about “Financial Inclusions” in Latin America – onto Mexico (IMTFI Blog - Conference Report)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is post 5 of 6 of the PERSPECTIVES blog series on Financial Inclusion: 1. Can Financial Inclusion Be Synonymous with Financial Justice and Equity; 2. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part One): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 3. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part Two): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 4. Drama in the Payments Infrastructure and Saturation...

Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part Two): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion (IMTFI Blog - Conference Report)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is post 3 of 6 of the PERSPECTIVES blog series on Financial Inclusion: 1. Can Financial Inclusion Be Synonymous with Financial Justice and Equity; 2. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part One): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 3. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part Two): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 4. Drama in the Payments Infrastructure and Saturation...

Can Financial Inclusion Be Synonymous with Financial Justice and Equity? (IMTFI Blog - Conference Report)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part One): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion (IMTFI Blog - Conference Report)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is post 2 of 6 of the PERSPECTIVES blog series on Financial Inclusion: 1. Can Financial Inclusion Be Synonymous with Financial Justice and Equity; 2. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part One): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 3. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part Two): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 4. Drama in the Payments Infrastructure and Saturation...

4th Annual Conference of IMTFI Researchers December 5-6, 2012 Summary (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This conference write-up synthesizes two days of IMTFI researcher presentations through a series of 7 blogposts (titles listed in bold within conference program below) on the IMTFI Blog authored by Liz Losh. View IMTFI's fourth cohort of awarded research projects 2012. Go to the Supplemental Material tab to download the conference program December 5-6, 2012 4th Annual Conference of IMTFI Researchers Program.

#1 - Longing and Belonging: Money, Mobility, and Practices of the Self (12/5/2012)

Session 1: Money, Mobility, and Practices of the Self- “Mobile Kin and Mobile Money: The Anthropology of International Remittances in Kenya” (Kenya) by Sibel Kusimba; “Generating, Storing and Exchanging Value: Comparing Financial Practices in Mexican and Indian Rural Communities” (Mexico and India) by Magdalena Villareal & Isabelle Guerin; “Mobiles, Migrants and Money: A Study...

IMTFI’s Fifth Annual Conference for Funded Researchers Summary, December 4-5, 2013 (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This conference write-up synthesizes two days of IMTFI researcher presentations through a series of 7 blogposts (titles listed in bold within conference program below) on the IMTFI Blog authored by Liz Losh. View IMTFI's fifth cohort of awarded research projects 2013 and complete IMTFI Conference Schedule 2013.

#1 - Burning a Hole in Your Pocket: Cash and Cashlessness (12/4/2013)

Session 1: Cash/Cashlessness - "Cashless or Cashlite? Mobile Money Use and Currency Redenomination in Zambia" (Zambia) by Vivian Dzokoto and Mwiya Imasiku; "Exploring the Nature, Scope and Feasibility of Existing Technological Infrastructure of India's National e-Governance Plan's Customer Service Scheme Towards Converting In-cash Transactions into Cashless Transactions"...

IMTFI Sixth Annual Conference 2014 for Researchers Summary (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This conference write-up synthesizes two days of IMTFI researcher presentations through a series of 8 blogposts (titles listed in bold within conference program below) on the IMTFI Blog authored by Liz Losh. View IMTFI's sixth cohort of awarded research projects 2014 and complete IMTFI Conference Schedule 2014.

#1 - Valuing Connection: The Interface between Tradition and Technology (12/10/2014)

Session 1: The Interface between Tradition and Technology - “Storing and Transferring Money in a Cash-Strapped Fishing Municipality in the Bicol Region” (Philippines) by Bernadette M. Gavino-Gumba, Ateneo de Naga University; “When the Dead Decide: An Investigation into the Influence of the Ancestors in the Decision to Use Mobile Technology in a Rural Community in Northern Ghana”...

The Bottom of the Pyramid Conference Summary, June 1-2, 2009 (Virtualpolitik Blog)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This conference write-up synthesizes two days of research presentations that took place at UC Irvine for the June 1-2, 2009 The Bottom of the Pyramid in Practice Conference on the Virtualpolitik Blog authored by Liz Losh.

Go to the Supplemental Material tab to download The Bottom of the Pyramid in Practice Conference Flyer

Insight and Impact: IMTFI’s 7^th Annual Conference for Funded Researchers Summary, April 20-21, 2016 (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This conference write-up synthesizes two days of IMTFI researcher presentations through a series of 8 blogposts (titles listed in bold within conference program below) on the IMTFI Blog authored by Liz Losh. View IMTFI's awarded research projects 2015-2016. Download the full program in the supplemental tab.

#1 - The Double Gold Standard: Session One of the 2016 Conference (4/20/2016)

Session 1: The Sharing Economy? Women and Girls and their Ties and Tensions"To Send or to Carry? Gendered Evaluations of Formal and Informal Remittance Practices in Migrant-Origin Villages in Central Java, Indonesia" by Carol Chan, University of Pittsburgh“Generational Tensions in the Uptake of Digital Financial Services: Adolescent Girls and Adults in Nigeria" by Jude Kenechi Onyima, Nnamdi Azikiwe University“Group versus Individual Strategies: Dynamic Social Networks of Mobile Money among Unbanked...

IMTFI Third Annual Conference for Funded Researchers Summary, December 6-7, 2011 (IMTFI Blog)

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#1 - Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Beyond the 99% (12/6/2011) Welcome and Introductions by Bill Maurer, IMTFI Director

#2 - Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Failed States, Shitting Grounds, and Ethnic Slurs (12/6/2011)

Session 1: Money Cultures: Identity, Wealth & Poverty - “Beyond the Failed State: Capital Mobilization, Investment and Entrepreneurship Among Somali Refugees in Nairobi, Kenya” by Kenneth Omeje and John Mwangi, United States International University (USIU);“Do Tobacco Growers Need Financial Inclusion? An Analysis into the Monetary Problems and Prospects Enshrouding Farmers...

IMTFI Second Annual Conference for Researchers, Summary, September 29-30, 2010 (Virtualpolitik Blog)

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This conference write-up synthesizes two days of IMTFI researcher presentations through a series of 6 blogposts (titles listed in bold within the conference program below) on the Virtualpolitik Blog authored by Liz Losh. View IMTFI's second cohort of awarded research projects 2010. Go to the Supplemental Material tab to download the conference program for the second cohort of IMTFI researchers: September 29-30, 2010 IMTFI Annual Conference for Researchers Program.

#1 – The Middle-Aged Technology (9/29/2010)

Session 1: Money and the Life-Course - “Money, Conflict, and Reciprocity in Rural Families in Zambia: The Case of Female University Students” - Robert Tembo, University of Zambia; “Consumption Smoothening, Financial Literacy and Old Age Vulnerability: Experiences of Success and Failure with a Private Pension System in Chile” - Aldo Madariaga, Nicolas Perez, and...

Monetary Ecologies and Repertoires: Research from the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion. First Annual Report & Design Principles (January 2010).

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine, was founded in 2008. Its mission is to foster a community of inquiry and practice on new forms of money and financial technology among the world’s poorest people. IMTFI awards fellowships to researchers in the developing world to conduct 12-month projects, many with a strongly qualitative component. This report discusses IMTFI’s research in its first year 2008-09 and summarizes IMTFI's First Annual Conference that took place at UC Irvine from November 4-6, 2009.

This report includes Appendix: 11 Design Principles for Financial Services for the Poor: 1) Design for social obligation; 2) Design for social rank; 3) Flexibility with sanctions; 4) Structured illiquidity; 5) Change the iconography; 6) Design with local values; 7) Design for convertibility; 8) Help calculate convertibility, 9) Design for relative volume, not increment; 10) Lucky Numbers,...

Juggling Currencies in Trans-Border Contexts (Intro) (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a 3-part blog series of the "Juggling Currencies in Trans-Border Contexts: Mexico/US" Project: 1. Juggling Currencies in Trans-Border Contexts (Intro); 2. Juggling Currencies in Transborder Contexts: Field Notes from Sabinilla and Calexico (Part 1); 3. Juggling Currencies in Transborder Contexts: Field Notes from Sabinilla and Calexico (Part 2)

Project Description - The project seeks to document the ways in which Mexican or bi-national families residing and/or working (within the same time-frames) on both sides of the Mexican-American border experience and manage different monetary and social currencies. The 12 month ethnographic study will be carried out in two dissimilar localities: One involves commuters between Calexico in the US and Mexicali in Mexico. The other is the rural community of Sabinilla, in Jalisco, Mexico, which is closely linked to its diaspora in Hawaii. (https://www.imtfi.uci.edu/villareal.php)

Mobile Money: The First Decade - NEW white paper (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is post 6 of 6 of the PERSPECTIVES blog series on Financial Inclusion: 1. Can Financial Inclusion Be Synonymous with Financial Justice and Equity; 2. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part One): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 3. Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” Workshop in Karachi (Part Two): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion; 4. Drama in the Payments Infrastructure and Saturation...

Juggling Currencies in Transborder Contexts: FieldNotes from Sabinilla and Calexico (Part 1) (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India - Part Two (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In our previous blog post, we described why we mapped how people borrow and send money around before and/or outside the formal financial sector. Our goal was to understand the value that intermediaries bring to financial transactions in Kerala (India) and Shan state (Myanmar). This led us to unearth a vibrant eco-system of intermediaries, who offer a variety of services and are often in competition with each other – a very different picture from the stereotypical idea that a lack of formal financial services is the same as a lack of financial services. The arrival of mobile money and mobile banking takes place in the context of an already crowded market of competitors. Clients have more choice – and digital financial service providers have to demonstrate their value relative to these existing ways of moving money.

Our second question in our fieldwork was about the different kinds of value that human intermediaries create. We have identified five such areas where the involvement...

Juggling Currencies in Transborder Contexts: Field Notes from Sabinilla and Calexico (Part 2) (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India - Part One (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We set out to explore this question, starting from the viewpoint that if financial intermediaries persist, they must add some kind of value to the transactions they areinvolved with. What is this value, then? To uncover the value that human intermediariesbring to such encounters, we studied the roles they perform in financial transactions. Wethen analyzed which of these roles were amenable to being taken over by mobile moneyand phones, which ones were viewed as strictly linked to humans and why.

To answer these questions, we conducted multi-country field research on financialtransactions in Kerala, southwest India (Srinivasan) and in Shan state, northeastMyanmar (Oreglia). In Kerala, our focus was on fishers and in Shan state, on agriculturalcommunities. In order to understand “who” moves money in these contexts, we took astep back and started from “how” money moves. Separating the “how” from the “who”turned out to be the first step in recognizing that intermediaries...

Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India (Part Three)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Is mobile money changing the way people carry out their financial transactions in rural markets in Myanmar and India? Our comparative qualitative research of an agricultural market town in northern Myanmar and of a fishing market in southern India showed the multitude of ways people move, borrow, and save money in these places, and the value that humans bring to transactions that could easily be made through ICTs yet continue to be done “the old way.” ICTs and specific applications such as mobile money bring a different type of value, and in this final post we reflect on what we learned about human and machine intermediation in financial areas. This is part 3 of 3 blogposts. Original project page: https://www.imtfi.uci.edu/research/2015/srinivasan_oreglia_2015.php#

Money, Mobile Money and Rituals in Western Kenya: The Contingency Fund and the Thirteenth Cow

Wed, 4 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle rituals collect and distribute different forms of money, including land, property, personhood, animals, cash, and digital moneys. It specifically examines a ritual coming of age for adolescent boys. By organizing multiple forms of money relative to the phases of a human life, the past, and the future, these rituals serve to manage and transfer wealth across generations and to give these transfers social and moral dimensions. The study provokes a critique of financial initiatives in the Global South that often assume that the financial goals of the poor are short-term.

Islamic (Micro)Finance: Culture, Context, Promise, Challenges - Financial Services for the Poor, August 2015

Tue, 3 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This report also offers historical and theological contextualization for present-day debates and developments, overviews of commonly used Islamic (micro)finance products, and descriptions of key countries and institutions in the global Islamic (micro)finance industries. Examinations of the Islamic (micro)finance landscapes in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan along with case studies of Islamic microfinance programs in Bangladesh and Pakistan illustrate the variation in relevant legal, political, economic, and geographic considerations. Ethnographic attention is given to the unique challenges faced by female clients and female-headed households, implications of client relationships with IMFI field officers, and the absence of tools for clients to address personal accounting and calculation challenges.

...there is a lack of relationships between Islamic microfinance and digital tools that could easily promote product and platform innovation and aid service provision....

Le pouvoir d’achat d’un billet de banque : du marché de Makola à Accra à un quartier de Long Beach en Californie/The purchasing power of a banknote: from Makola Market in Accra to a neighborhood in Long Beach, California

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Translated by Sophie Chevalier and Emmanuelle Lallement

À première vue, la scène du marché de Makola n’a rien de vraiment particulier : des milliers, voire des centaines de milliers de personnes déambulent en plein air, parfois épaule contre épaule, dans les rues d’une zone qui couvre plusieurs pâtés de maisons, passant devant des étals de for-tune composés d’un simple carton sur lequel des marchandises sont exposées, ou devant des stands un peu plus élaborés, protégés par un parapluie portant la marque d’une société de télécommunication probablement disparue. À l’intérieur du « nouveau » marché, on suit un labyrinthe de couloirs sur plusieurs étages, certains ouverts à l’air libre, d’autres non ; ici, des vendeurs de poissons, des marchands d’épices installés près d’un conteneur métallique converti en moulin; là, des femmes présentent des tissus empilés jusqu’au plafond, à côté de couturières qui peuvent vous confectionner...

From externality in economics to leakage in carbon markets: An anthropological approach to market making

Wed, 5 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to demonstrate how anthropological studies may contribute to the economic experimentation toward a “good” market, that is, a market always open to uncertainty and contestation by different stakeholders. Taking up the recent call to study “marketization,” this is an ethnographic study of on-the-ground practices in experimenting with the REDD+ carbon trading scheme and institutionalizing the REDD+ carbon markets. Focusing on a pilot REDD+ project in the Brazilian Amazon, this article engages the formulation of the technical concept of leakage both in the economic theories of externalities and in the challenging practice of monitoring and calculating leakage. In the economic conceptualization of externalities, leakages are but the new externalities generated by the process of making new markets to internalize the externalities of previous markets. Whereas current debates about carbon leakages are predominantly concerned with the limited capacity of existing technologies...

RIDING THE RAILS OF MOBILE PAYMENTS Financial Inclusion, Mobile Phones, and Infrastructure

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area. Features include: a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology; exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations; consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale; in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives.

My Smart Phone is a Love Trophy: On Boyfriend-Girlfriend Negotiations and the Tensions between Adults and Adolescent Girls in Digital Nigeria (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

"…If you do not like him, why did you accept hisfriendship?’’ Chika’s friend asked her as they walked from school homeward.‘‘I accepted because he boughtme a Samsung smart phone," Chika replied.

Exchanges like the oneabove appeared in many ofthe stories we collected during our 12-monthethnographic research inNigeria about the tensionsbetween adults andadolescent girls regardingownership and use of mobile phones. A majority of adults in our study agreed thatfeature phones (cheap phones meant for calls and text messaging) are appropriate forearly adolescents, and that smart phones were acceptable for late adolescents, but with conditions. In contrast, a majority of girls felt that restricted access to mobile phones isan infringement on their autonomy and their quest to join the global community. Especially in Christian neighborhoods, adolescent girls have found allies in their boyfriends who provided girls with smart phones. This has connected adolescent girls, their boyfriends,...

Ceremonial Expenses as Relational Savings (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the moment, in the context of our study, the rural poor don’t use bank saving accounts because it goes against a vision of wealth as something that constantly circulates socially. Mobile money transfers, while still underdeveloped in rural South India, may have a more promising future.

The key question is whether the technology of digital finance could be used to fight specific forms of inequalities. Whether we like it or not, digital finance is most probably going to pervade our daily lives, even in the remotest of areas. Further research is needed to ensure that, rather than being outstripped by such developments, we can think about a variety of ways of using them to support democracy and equality.

Read the final report here: escholarship.org/uc/item/448912gm

Generational Tensions in the Uptake of Digital Financial Services: Adolescent Girls and Adults in Nigeria (Final Report)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article is based on a descriptive and exploratory study conducted in Nigerian Christian and Muslim neighborhoods on the new social space created by digital innovations. It examined the intrigues that characterized adults-‐adolescent girls’ relations as regard to how and when digital innovations like digital financial services should be used. Questionnaires, ethnographic interviews, school debates, observation and focus group discussion methods were used to study the logics, antics and new social behaviors that evolved due to uptake of digital innovations. Mobile phones provided young people the opportunities for exploring and constructing identities but mobile phones have also upset social traditional resources and routes to adulthood. Both adults and adolescent girls play identity politics, and are struggling to (re)construct their roles and identities in the new social space. For this population, smart phones display contextual symbolism that transcends their technological...

Women, Social Capital, and Financial Inclusion: Linking Customer Data with Ethnographic Perspectives (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Financially including women has become a priority among development and finance experts. Women are less likely to be financially included. However, it has been widely observed that when included they are more likely to produce substantial economic gainsfor their households. It follows then that any good financial inclusion strategy must include women (GPFI 2015). Women face barriers to inclusion due to combination of various factors such as lack of literacy, access to mobile phones or banks, and time constraints among others. What does finance mean to unbanked women? For some time now, advisers to the industry have been suggesting flexible bank hours, mobile agents, and phone interfaces in multiple languages to address these realities (GPFI 2015; El-Zoghbi 2016; Murray 2016). In this context, IMTFI’s approach to use an ethnographic perspective to understand practices of money and finance around the world can help build models for women’s finance that connect to their existing...

Ceremonial Expenses as Relational Saving: The limitations of new financial technologies in mobilizing saving (Final Report)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many initiatives aim to help the poor to save cash, in an echo of long‐standing concerns. New technologies, harnessed to the lessons of behavioural economics, offer diverse unmediated tools for depositing savings. These so‐called financial innovations have not always brought about the results expected, however. This paper draws on an ethnography from southern India to highlight the contradictions between unmediated saving and relational saving, defined as saving transactions that are both shaped by and constitutive of social relations.

In the context studied here, ceremonial expenses are major forms of relational saving. Unlike unmediated saving, they operate over the long term, on various scales and serve multiple purposes. They allow for the accumulation of lump sums in order to organise large events. But they also ensure the reproduction of the social group (and set the definitions of its reproduction). And they not only express, but also transform, strengthen or bypass...

The Curious Case of Mobile Micro-insurance in South Africa: A View from Above and Below (Final Report)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Micro-insurance coverage is on the rise in Africa. In 2015, total micro-insurance premiums written on the continent amounted to nearly $647 million USD, which is up from $387 million USD in 2011, a 60% increase over a four-year period (Microinsurance Network). Of the nearly 62 million lives insured by micro-insurance in Africa, South Africa alone accounts for more than half these lives, making it one of the world’s largest micro- insurance markets. Empirically, this has led to an unlikely convergence between the private sector and the traditional development agenda, providing a unique opportunity to explore questions regarding the role of insurance companies in helping the poor address their vulnerabilities through the provision of financial services.

As might be expected, building profitable micro-insurance markets presents a number of challenges, especially the need to achieve scale, since the sustainability of insurance operations relies heavily upon building a sizable...

IMTFI research project on Mobile banking in the context of cross-border transfers between Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso (Final Report)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ivory Coast is one of the countries with the largest long-standing diasporas from the neighboring countries especially the Burkinabè diaspora that amounts for almost 3 millions people. Remittances between the two countries are a major component of the flows between migrants and their family fellows in Burkina Faso (OIM, 2000). Most of the flows go from Ivory Coast to Burkina Faso but recent trends indicate the rising importance of remittances from Burkina Faso to Ivory Coast, driven by young Burkinabè born in Ivory Coast but studying in Burkina Faso (Neya, 2016). This context seems conducive for the launch of mobile money services that would allow tapping these sub-regional remittances flows. Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso are among the few countries where such services have recently been implemented targeting one of the largest diaspora in Sub-Saharan Africa. The interoperability between MM companies in both countries has been implemented since 2014. The former allows populations...

The Last Mile or the Informal Ecosystem for Balancing Monies (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This blog builds on a research project that looked at patterns of mobile money (MM)usage for sending money “home” byBurkinabé migrants living in rural settings in Ivory Coast. The study looked at supply characteristics and households' practices in both IvoryCoast and in Burkina Faso and closely focused on conditions around sending andreceiving mobile money. We found that the spatial spread of mobile money retailers inremote areas of both countries helps to overcome the migrant senders’ and remittancereceivers’ lack of knowledge of the mobile phone technology. While mobile phonecompanies show a (very) strong interest in the development of a formal “ecosystem” toenable the usage of mobile money to perform payments and act as a payment deviceinstead of being only a value transfer device, our study highlights an informal ecosystemto overcome the challenge of balancing monies in rural settings. In both the areas social intermediation remains key in helping users overcome the challenges...

Dynamic Networks of Mobile Money among Unbanked Women in Western Kenya (Final Report)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This project set out to examine how 20 unbanked women of diverse backgrounds use different kinds of mobile money social/financial tools over the course of one year. We used ethnographic fieldwork and quantitative social network analysis (SNA) to measure how women in Western Kenya were using digital financial tools and social networks.How are digital financial tools used as a part of women’s’ social /financial networks? Adapting the financial diary method, we visited women every two weeks and recorded how they used digital financial tools such as digital credit and M-Pesa; how they used cash, either for payments, for keeping in a secret place, or for gift-giving; and how women used in-kind value such as food, clothing and plants as gifts and exchanges. The study sought to understand how women’s use of digital financial services fits in to existing social networks and financial networks that include digital finance, cash money, mobile money transfer, and other media of exchange...

Mobile Phones, Insurance and a Funeral: A Closer Look at South Africa’s Mobile Micro-Insurance Market (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This research project studies the impact of mobile payment platforms and other digital technologies that facilitate the design and distribution of microinsurance products in South Africa. While a growing body of research on “m-insurance” has focused on how to leverage technological advances to build efficiency into the micro-insurance value chain for scaling-up operations, relatively little is known about how low-income clients experience these digital mediums as they struggle against a variety of risk factors. This research project takes a case study approach to understand how poor people respond to and experience a funeral insurance scheme offered by a leading South African insurance company through an innovative mobile-based interface.

Gambling, Saving, and Lumpy Expenditures: Sports Betting in Uganda (Final Report)

Fri, 6 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Demand for large and indivisible, or “lumpy”, expenditures creates need for liquid- ity. For people in developing countries, acquiring this liquidity often requires choosing among high-cost strategies. I conduct a study with 1,715 bettors in Kampala, Uganda, to show that sports betting is being used as an alternative to conventional liquidity generation strategies such as saving or credit. First, I document that, despite ex- pected losses of 35-50%, participants view betting as a likely source of liquidity for desired lumpy expenditures and use a natural experiment to show that this is not just cheap talk: winnings increase both the size and likelihood of making such expendi- tures. Second, I use a randomized field experiment to show that provision of a simple commitment-savings technology causes a 26% reduction in a revealed preference mea- sure of betting demand. I then conduct two lab-in-the-field experiments to isolate the role of betting as a mode of liquidity generation....

Branchless Banking: Integrating Pakistan’s Poor into the Global Financial Circuit (Final Report)

Fri, 6 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This research explores the value transfer system of migrants working on daily wages in Karachi’s marketplaces. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper focuses on an informal money transfer system and how such channels overlap with emerging digital finance and branchless banking networks such as Easypaisa, the fastest and most popular service provider in Pakistan.

Preliminary research shows that the rapid rise of Easypaisa, used for sending and receiving money and bill payments, offers an instant method of money transfer to laborers who have historically existed outside of the formal banking system. The integration of the unbanked is carried out under a state-led financial inclusion program aimed at developing the country’s financial sector in order to provide easy access to credit, loans, and savings. While the state offers a legal and security framework, telecommunications and financial industries have formed a nexus offering branchless banking and money transfer...

Micro Insurance Claim Payments through Pre-paid Cards: Technology and Regulation Driven Financial Inclusion in India (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 6 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Influence of Mobile Money on Control of Productive Resources among Women Micro Entrepreneurs Participating in Table Banking in Nakuru, Kenya (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 6 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With mobile money technology being adopted, financial inclusion especially with regard to women and less educated is becoming a reality. In Kenya the high rate of adoption of this technology has resulted in more mobile money accounts than bank accounts. In this study we sought to determine whether mobile money usage influences control of productive resources among women micro entrepreneurs participating in table banking. The Government of the Republic of Kenya has been encouraging female entrepreneurship as one strategy of propelling the nation to the status of a newly industrialized country able to offer comfortable life to her citizens. Success in entrepreneurship is linked to control of productive resources yet this is a genderedaspect that favors men in much of the developing world. It is therefore imperative to document how women control these resources in the business context. A mixed data collection approach was adopted comprising a questionnaire administered to 392 respondents,...

Assessing the Need and Feasibility for Using Pre-Paid Card Technology in Delivering Added Services to Micro Finance Customers in selected Regions of Uttar Pradesh (Final Report)

Fri, 6 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The overarching objective of the present study is to assess the need for using pre-paid card technology for delivering added financial services like insurance claim settlements including death claim benefits in a transparent manner for the customers of Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) in selected regions of the state of Uttar Pradesh of India. We try to elicit the factors determining such need, not met at present, by surveying actual and potential beneficiaries of Micro Finance Institutions and the providers including insurers, pre-paid card providers, and MFIs. The major findings of the study indicate the following. On the supply side this innovation by Bajaj Allianz Insurance India, M2P Solutions and Utkarsh Micro Finance has been successful in including those excluded earlier due to lack of access to formal banking. The cards have facilitated smooth settlement of insurance claims for these micro finance clients meeting the current regulatory requirements by both the Reserve...

Part Two: Up close with informal money lending -Loan Negotiation Practices between Bombay 5-6lenders and Micro-entrepreneurs in Tacloban City, Philippines (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second of a three-part series about the informal loan negotiation practices between ambulant vendors and a group known as "Bombay 5-6 lenders" in Tacloban City, Philippines. Dula and Grego describe the effects of these lending practices on the household and business activities of vendors who live and work on the edge of a precarious existence.

Link to final report: escholarship.org/uc/item/1149s7zx

Part One: In every economic crisis comes business opportunity - Bombay 5-6 lenders and the microentrepreneurs in Tacloban City, Philippines (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first of a three-part series about the informal loan negotiation practices between ambulant vendors and a group known as "Bombay 5-6 lenders" in TaclobanCity, Philippines. Dula and Grego describe the effects of these lending practices on thehousehold and business activities of vendors who live and work on the edge of aprecarious existence.

Link to final report: escholarship.org/uc/item/1149s7zx

Understanding the Spread of Sports Betting inUganda (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A new form of sports betting has exploded over the last decade across Africa.International investors have used new technologies to offer internationally calibratedsoccer odds to participants in previously unreached markets. These companies havebeen pouring into African markets, nowhere more quickly than in Uganda which now has23 competing betting companies and over 1,000 betting branches spread across thecountry. In every commercial center of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, newly painted signsdisplay slogans like “They play. You win.” and “Bet Now. Get Paid Instantly.”

Link to the paper in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, "Gambling, Saving, and Lumpy Liquidity Needs".

Telling Financial Stories through Photovoice (Photovoice Worldwide Blog)

Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Community Credit is a collaborative research project at UC Irvine that seeks to connectminoritized and financially underserved communities with credit unions for the purpose of building trust and developing more equitable financial products that address the specific needs of the community.

The UCI photovoice research team included Melissa Wrapp, UCI anthropology Ph.D. ’21 and postdoctoral project manager; Ellen Garnett Kladky, anthropology graduate student; Bryan Truitt, visual studies graduate student; and Jenny Fan, Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion manager. Photovoice is one method being used within this larger project, which also includes: listening sessions, ethnographic interviews, surveying, financial landscaping, decision modeling, deep data marketing analysis, and more. PhotovoiceWorldwide has been a vital partner to Community Credit, offering consulting, training, and facilitation throughout 2021-22.The following report, by Ellen Garnett...

Part Three: Informal Loan Trap - Bombay 5-6 lending's effect on Micro-entrepreneurs in Tacloban City, Philippines (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third and final post in a three-part series about the informal loan negotiation practices between ambulant vendors and a group known as "Bombay 5-6 lenders" in Tacloban City, Philippines. Dula and Grego describe the effects of these lending practices on the household and business activities of vendors who live and work on the edge of a precarious existence.

Link to final report: escholarship.org/uc/item/1149s7zx

Determinants of awareness and adoption of mobile money technologies: Evidence from women micro entrepreneurs in Kenya

Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last decade mobile phone based money services continue to expand in most of the developing countries. The spread of the technology is believed to reduce transaction costs and promote market integration. Even with the introduction of mobile money technologies, financial exclusion remains endemic especially with regard to gender aspect. This paper analyses women entrepreneur's adoption of mobile money services in Kenya. The results suggest that women's membership to table banking groups would easily influence awareness and consequently increase adoption of mobile payments services. Also, we established that women's control of enterprise finances and decision making significantly impact on awareness and usage of mobile money technologies. However, women are less likely to adopt mobile banking technology perceived to be out of reach for their communities and those that have hidden charges irrespective of having knowledge of their existence.

Informal Loan Trap: Bombay 5-6 and its Effect to Tacloban Micro-entrepreneurs (IMTFI Final Report)

Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This study examines the socio-economic and business profile of ambulant vendors, determinants of their loan preferences, and the occurring loan negotiation practices between vendors and the Bombay 5-6 lenders. Likewise, it examines the effects of Bombay 5-6 informal money lending on household and business practices of the ambulant vendors.

A quantitative descriptive research design was used in this study. Identification of qualified respondents was done using a purposive sampling technique. The results show that Bombay 5-6 lending has certain features that attract ambulant vendors. Among the topmost features are the exclusion of collateral and documents as loan requirements. The highest significant effect on the household can be observed in the relations between the purpose of the loan (such as for educational support) and default in payment (leading to depression and anxiety). At the same time, the purpose of the loan has a remarkable impact on both the increase in sales...

Picturing financial security

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

UCI Community Credit partners with non-profit Abrazar and PhotovoiceWorldwide to capture community stories of financial struggle, resilience in photographs at an exhibit featured at a community event.

Project Outcomes Report: NSF Convergence Accelerator Track F: An Algorithmic Observatory to Address Financial Misinformation and Disinformation in Minoritized Communities (Award Abstract # 2137567)

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Smartphones and other mobile platforms are increasingly being used to access financial services. This is especially the case for the underbanked population who rely on prepaid cards and mobile applications to send and receive funds. In this process, financial service platforms are also becoming content platforms, while banks and credit unions continue to lose ground to financial technology (fintech) services and apps, and to other fringe services. Unfortunately, this shift is also contributing to the spread of disinformation about finance. This project seeks to address a particular harm to minoritized communities arising as a result of disinformation, viz, the harm of being excluded from financial services.

Almost all extant research on disinformation has focused on political communications. Most studies have also focused on the white population in particular, younger white men as producers of disinformation and the older white population as consumers and spreaders of...

Project Outcomes Report: Private Digital Currencies and Closed Payment Communities: Law, Regulation and Financial Exclusion After Bitcoin (Award Abstract # 1455859)

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin is the most famous of several new online, cryptographic currency or electronic payment system experiments based on an open-source database protocol referred to as a blockchain. The blockchain permits transactions to take place without a central authority, relying instead on a decentralized network of peers verifying and authorizing them. It permits "trust" without trusted third-parties or mediators. In addition, Bitcoin and systems like it are membership-based means of value transfer and only work if people actively join them. This project examines new forms of private digital currency, exploring shifts in blockchain-based systems, and how innovators and regulators have participated in, advanced, and challenged them. The research examines how a new cadre of corporate and regulatory professionals are creating, understanding, monitoring, and regulating blockchain-based experiments in payment and in legal services. Studying the interface between law and technology, this research...

Talking about Money, Together: An Abrazar-UCI Collaboration (Photovoide Worldwide Blog)

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Photovoice is a community-based participatory research approach in which participants tell stories about their lived experience through photography. UCI’s Community Credit research project is using photovoice as one method to explore people’s financial lives and identify ways for financial institutions to better understand their community’s actual needs. The UCI photovoice research team included Dr. Bill Maurer, Community Credit’s Principal Investigator, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI); Dr. Melissa Wrapp, anthropologist and Community Credit’s postdoctoral project manager; and Jenny Fan, IMTFI manager.

In Spring 2022, Community Credit piloted the use of photovoice as a method for understanding people’s financial stories. This pilot included public listening sessions and discussions of the methodology, which were attended by local nonprofits, credit unions, and community members. Among the...

Project Findings: NSF REU Private Digital Currencies and Closed Payment Communities: Law, Regulation and Financial Exclusion After Bitcoin

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) was an interdisciplinary collaborative research exercise, bringing together the technical expertise in Computer Science withapplication, grounding, and methodologies used in Anthropology. The student researchers were given training in Anthropoloy research framings and techniques, which they utilized in their reserch and cataloguing.

Negotiating and Converting Money in Zimbabwe’s Multicurrency Environment (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2009, under the banner of 'dollarization', Zimbabwe adopted a multicurrency system after socio-economicand political quagmires and a world record hyperinflation exceeding a crescendo of250 million percent in 2008.Under this multicurrency system, Zimbabwe adopted basket of foreign currencies as official currencies. These included the United States Dollar, the South African Rand, the Botswana Pula, the British Pound and the Euro (and later on the Chinese Yuan) – all of which operated simultaneously in the economy. The beginnings of this multicurrency system coincided closely with the adoption and growth of mobile money services. This blog highlights findings from the 12-month long ethnographic research project that examined the socio-economic dynamics of balancing and negotiating the uses of multiple currencies in the wake of mobile money adoption. To gain a nuanced comprehension of the complex rituals involved in these currency conversions, data collection was done...

Strange Intersections: Humans, Technology and Insects in a Himalayan Valley (Final Report)

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This study concentrates on the physical, technological and financial modalities related to everyday life in the remote Himalayan valley of Manang, Nepal. My research investigates several socio-economic systems integral to this life, including: subsistence agriculture, religion, urban migration, regional and international trading, tourism, sponsored development, and finally, medicinal plant harvesting. All of these systems (including agriculture and religion) are characterized by a large degree of mobility that complicates the static, small-scale, ethnographic models traditionally applied to remote regions. But my research also suggests that each of these systems work in parallel to each other, with surprisingly little intersectionality, even amongst a sparse population. A case- study focus on the yartsa gunbu, an inter-species medicinal fungus, acts as a touchstone to re-theorize the transitional nature of life in the high Himalaya and illuminate the interdependence of technology,...

Managing, negotiating, and converting “currency” in daily life in a multicurrency environment of Zimbabwe (IMTFI Final Report)

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The adoption of the multi-currency system in the year 2009 following the budget announcement by the then Minister of Finance was defined as a watershed period in terms of monetary policies not only for the country but the whole of Southern Africa. Multicurrency was defined as an adoption of foreign currencies that included the United States dollar, British pound, South African rand and Botswana Pula as official currencies of Zimbabwe operating in the same economy. The Zimbabwean dollar was abolished through the adoption of this system. In this study, we asked the following questions: What were the new socio- economic dynamics that emerged in balancing and negotiating these currencies? What new configurations were created by people in order to make sense of the prevailing system money ecosystem? What new narratives were formed in the monetary interaction between rural and the urban population in Zimbabwe, and how do mobile money interface and influence traditional perceptions on...

Assessing Unmet Needs of Small Merchants in Adopting Digital Payment Systems in Ghana (Final Report)

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The study investigated the unmet needs of small merchants in rural and urban Ghana regarding adoption and utilisation of digital financial payment systems. The primary research questions were: What are the needs of small merchants in adopting digital payment platforms for businesses? How are various policy makers/regulators and service providers addressing these needs in order to boost adoption and utilisation of digital payment systems for financial transactions? A mixed method research design was adopted for the study. Findings of the study indicate that about 28% of the 200 sampled respondents were adopters of the digital payment system and 25% were currently using it. Major challenges impeding adoption and utilization include poor communication networks, illiteracy and limited knowledge of the usefulness of digital payment systems, lack of trust in the system due to insecurity of wallets, and the sheer intrinsic value of holding physical cash on the person. This study can...

To Send or to Carry? Gendered Evaluations of Formal and Informal Remittance Practices in Migrant-Origin Villages in Central Java, Indonesia (Final Report)

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Migrant remittances have far exceeded foreign aid in many migrant-origin countries, including Indonesia, constituting an important potential poverty alleviating strategy for these countries. Although Indonesia’s migrant workers contribute significantly to the national economy, and are hailed in everyday and public discourse as “foreign exchange heroes” (pahlawan devisa), they are also vulnerable to forms of financial exploitation and extortion during their journeys. Fraud and extortion—mainly involving cash— may occur from the time they are recruited into migration, during pre-departure training and procedures, while they are working overseas, until the time they return to their places of origin. These perpetrators typically include formal and informal recruitment agents, insurance companies, local and foreign police, immigration and customs officers, and bus drivers.

To reduce migrants’ exposure to these financial risks— which arguably keep many migrants in...

“When I make sales, I want to sit and count my money at the end of the day”: Low Adoption of Digital Payment Platforms among SMEs in Ghana (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“I want to count my money…….” There is the feeling among some SME operators that counting cash at the end of a day’s business is an indication of a good day. One is able to determine physically whether or not the day’s transaction has been good or bad. More importantly, holding money andcounting it at the close of the day enhances one’s self-image and gives a positive self-feeling. In the expression of one lady in Makola, Ghana’s busiest market in the capital city of Accra, the power associated with the holding of cash supersedes digital money. The feeling of having cash in hand arouses a greater sense of liquidity, power and feeling.

Valuing Migrants and their Money (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Migrants are often discussedpositively in terms of theireconomic value and laborvalue to countries ofdestination and origin. In thisblog post, I draw on myresearch with migrant-originvillages in Central Java, Indonesia, to challenge this impulse to foregroundmigrants’ “economic”motivations and contributions. I do so by highlighting theimportant ways in whichideas about appropriategendered behavior, familial obligations, and religious piety, shape the value of migrantsand their money. These ideas about gender and morality powerfully shape thetransnational flows of migration. It explains why despite highly publicized risks and coststo migrants and their families in terms of finances, health, and mortality, hundreds ofthousands of Indonesians continue to migrate annually.

In Indonesia, many programs aimed at improving the welfare of migrants and theirfamilies take the form of financial education programs, funded and facilitated by stateinstitutions and foreign-funded NGOs....

Strange Intersections: Humans, Technology andInsects in a Himalayan Valley (IMTFI Blog)

Mon, 5 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I study the complex material, technological, and financial practices surrounding theyartsa market as a case study of human-nature-technology relations in Manang, Nepal."Yartsa gunbu" is an inter-species medicinal fungus. In my work it acts as a touchstonefor understanding the transitional nature of life in the high Himalaya,illuminating theinterdependence of technology, economy and place. In this ethnographic essay drawnfrom my fieldwork, I recount the experience of one day of the harvesting season.

Dimensions of Electronic fraud and Governance of Trust in Nigeria’s cashless Ecosystem (Final Report)

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A major downside of the cashless policy introduced in Nigeria since 2014 has been pervasive electronic frauds (e-frauds). Consequently, there is a growing fear of victimization among bank customers interfacing decision to migrate and utilize electronic banking. This raises the importance of trust governance in electronic banking and its centrality to the transition to a cashless economy in Nigeria. This study investigated e-Banking fraud and the role trust governance plays in the adoption or refusal to migrate and use electronic banking in Nigeria. The study was conducted in Lagos, Ogun and Oyo States. Using mixed qualitative methods (In-depth and Key Informants interviews) of data collection, participants were mainly purposively selected and in some instances reached through the snowball methods. Qualitatively, 30 victims of e-banking fraud were interviewed across the research settings. Further, purposive sampling proportionate to research settings was used to select at least...

Diverse Strategies of Banking Fraud in Nigeria (IMTFI Blog)

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A major snag since the introduction of Nigeria’s cashless policy is pervasive electronicbanking fraud (e-fraud). Although the policy was aimed at encouraging electronictransactions, reducing physical cash in the economy and thereby reducing the risk ofcash related crimes, fostering transparency, curbing corruption/leakages and drivingfinancial inclusion, the perpetration of fraud threatens the cashless ecosystem. Theimplications of rampant e-fraud are enormous, not only for the banked populationadopting e-banking as a secure platform but also for the obstacles it poses to effectivelycapture the unbanked populace. Initial investigations show that with the prevalence offraud and subscriber victimization, there is a growing fear of migrating to and usingelectronic banking, while those defrauded are altogether opting out of e-banking. The Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) annual report stated a total of 3,756 fraudcases in 2013 involving N21.79billion, which represented...

Object-Centered Focus Group Discussions: Stimulating Conversations On Mobile Money Practices and Culture (IMTFI Blog)

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Conversations on personal financial practices are sensitive and many times difficult forresearchers to actualize in the field. As many researchers have documented, personalfinancial practices are private. Getting people to talk about them often times requiresgreat effort. Adding culture to these conversations creates a further challenge that seems almost insurmountable. Yet, even with all of these challenges, it is essential tounderstand how culture influences mobile money practices if appropriate policies andprograms are to be put in place.

To get women micro-entrepreneurs conversing on these matters, we designed two charts: a static one (Fig. 1) which we used to prompt participants to think through their financial practices (without intervention on our part) and an interactive one (Fig. 3) which required participants to perform some activities. Our approach was inspired by the IMTFI Fellows workshop held at the IMTFI Insight and Impact Conference on April 22, 2016 and...

Influence of Mobile Money on Control of Productive Resources Among Women Micro Entrepreneurs Participating Table Banking in Nakuru, Kenya (Final Report)

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With mobile money technology being adopted, financial inclusion especially with regard to women and less educated is becoming a reality. In Kenya the high rate of adoption of this technology has resulted in more mobile money accounts than bank accounts. In this study we sought to determine whether mobile money usage influences control of productive resources among women micro entrepreneurs participating in table banking. The Government of the Republic of Kenya has been encouraging female entrepreneurship as one strategy of propelling the nation to the status of a newly industrialized country able to offer comfortable life to her citizens. Success in entrepreneurship is linked to control of productive resources yet this is a gendered aspect that favors men in much of the developing world. It is therefore imperative to document how women control these resources in the business context. A mixed data collection approach was adopted comprising a questionnaire administered to 392...

Can I try again? Working with research participants as they map their networks (IMTFI Blog)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our larger research work focuses on the deployment of mobile banking in changing practices of social protection for forcibly displaced families in Colombia. Part of our research entailed drawing family maps of our informants’ family practices of social protection. Methodologically, this involved two steps: First, we mapped members of the network and in the second step we mapped the different goods and services circulating within that network. The goods and services included not only money but also care, food, housing, etc. Here, we draw from our fieldwork experience to highlight some of the interactions between research participants and researchers engaged in the process.

Access final report: escholarship.org/uc/item/5c43344x

The Mobile Money Revolution that Has Not Come (Final Report)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This research studies how recent developments in mobile banking are inscribed in and are contributing to the transformation of existing networks, practices and perspectives of social protection (in terms of help in times of need and provision for future scenarios) in two rural areas in Colombia. The question of how have rural families engaged in social protection, what are they doing now and what are their perspectives for the future become important in the context of Colombia where the majority population employed in the informal economy particularly in rural areas rely heavily on family networks. Two processes have particularly affected the dynamics of social protection in the areas (Montes de María and Putumayo) this research focuses on: the armed conflict with its impact on local economies and the displacement of families forced to reconfigure across different territories, and government programs such as conditional cash transfers that have brought these populations into the...

The Mobile Money Revolution That Has Not Come: Report on Displaced Peasant Families in Rural Colombia (IMTFI Blog)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to share the final report of IMTFI funded research "The Mobile Money Revolution That Has Not Come." The research explores the role of mobile money technology in social protection networks among displaced peasant families in Colombia.

Storing and Transferring Money in a Cash-Strapped Fishing Municipality in the Bicol Region (Final Report)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Bicol Region is among the poorest of the 17 regions in the Philippines. It was ranked fourth poorest in the first semesters of 2006 and 2009. With 34.1% of the region’s population living in poverty during the first six months of 2012, the Bicol Region has become the seventh poorest region in the country. Camarines Sur is among the poorest of the six provinces of the Bicol Region. With 33.5% of the population living in poverty in 2012, it ranked third poorest to the Masbate and Albay regions (National Statistical Coordination Board, 2013). It is in the foregoing observations that Garchitorena, one of the poorest municipalities in Camarines Sur, was chosen as the study site. This investigation will examine the variables, conditions and processes of mobile money transfer and storage among the poor fishing households in the poorest town of the Bicol Region in the Philippines. It specifically aims to: (1) describe the socio-economic profile of the selected fishing households;...

Financial Education via Television Comedy: Evidence from a Pilot Study in Cambodia (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Blogpost featuring distillations and photographs for Financial Education via Television Comedy project: https://www.imtfi.uci.edu/research/2014/maitra.php

Abstract: We show that television may be able to deliver rudimentary financial literacy in a cost effective manner. In a controlled experiment, Cambodian garment factory workers were randomly allocated into one of three treatments: no video (baseline), slideshow, and comedy TV show. After the intervention the participants were requested to answer a set of questions on financial knowledge and attitudes to examine whether individuals were able to internalize the information that was provided. Our results show that participants randomly assigned to the comedy show are significantly more likely to report that they are interested in obtaining more information on savings account and are also significantly more likely to open a savings account in the next 6 months. This method of delivery may prove effective particularly...

A PHL strategy on financial inclusion: More on the means than reversing mindsets? (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is Part 1 of 2 blogposts about financial inclusion and savings behaviors in teh Philippines: https://www.imtfi.uci.edu/research/2014/opiniano_ang.php

Project abastract: This mixed methods action research from the Philippines that was supported by the IMTFI sought to determine if financial inclusion is a factor for remitters’ and remittance recipients’ investing in the rural hometown. Overseas remittances are a development resource for the countries where overseas migrants come from —but so are the rural communities where they were born. Overseas migrants even maintain a relationship with their rural communities since their families reside there, and they still receive remittances from breadwinners abroad. Is the rural community’s socio-economic and investment conditions conducive for overseas townmates and their households to invest in? But do these rural folk, with or without overseas remittances, have financial aptitude levels that can empower them to save...

Getting to Cagnipa: Field Notes from the Bicol Region, Philippines (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Field notes blogpost for the project: Storing and Transferring Money in a Cash-Strapped Fishing Municipality in the Bicol Region, PI Bernadette Gavino-Gumba. https://www.imtfi.uci.edu/research/2014/gavinogumba.php.

Abstract - The Bicol Region is among the poorest of the 17 regions in the Philippines. It was ranked fourth poorest in the first semesters of 2006 and 2009. With 34.1% of the region’s population living in poverty during the first six months of 2012, the Bicol Region has become the seventh poorest region in the country. Camarines Sur is among the poorest of the six provinces of the Bicol Region. With 33.5% of the population living in poverty in 2012, it ranked third poorest to the Masbate and Albay regions (National Statistical Coordination Board, 2013). It is in the foregoing observations that Garchitorena, one of the poorest municipalities in Camarines Sur, was chosen as the study site. This investigation will examine the variables, conditions and...

Reimagining Rurality in Mobile Money Times: Life, Identity, and Community in Southern Uganda - Part 1 (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In some parts of rural Uganda, a whole village will use one or two phones to bank, to contact relatives, to share money amongst themselves, to access loans, and simply to check weather reports. Low teledensity does not imply lack of mobile money use and spread. Freed from the expense of ownership and maintenance, an individual of a particular group or community will spend longer periods of time per use on the available gadget(s), hence generating more revenue not just for the individual or group involved, but for the whole village. Such collective use by a community makes the dream for financial inclusion plausible—even a reality—for rural life.

In this 2-part blog post series I present vignettes organized around three themes—life, identity, and community—through which mobile money and rurality is re-imagined. Mobile money inclusion is providing new tools to maintain existing practices and values, reshaping but also reinvigorating rural-urban ties, and along with these,...

Hand Held Wealth? Mobile Money & Food Production in Rural Potosi (Final Report)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Because the knowledge we have about the effects of mobile money platforms in the Andean region of rural Bolivia is still very limited, the purpose of this report is to detail the findings of a study about the effects of the newly introduced mobile money platform Tigo Money on the development of rural areas in the Department of Potosi. We first describe the results of 561 quantitative surveys and 68 qualitative interviews applied to respondents in two municipalities in Northern Potosi. We then analyze these findings as they relate to the research questions presented at the beginning of the study in order to figure out the role that Tigo Money plays in the financial habits of the people in rural Potosi. Finally, we pose questions for the future, and make some recommendations as to the direction that future financial policy in Bolivia should take in order to harness the potential that mobile money technologies have to improve the lives of its poorest and most isolated citizens.

Is the Rural Hometown a Worthwhile Investment? (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is Part 2 of 2 blogposts about financial inclusion and savings behaviors in teh Philippines: https://www.imtfi.uci.edu/research/2014/opiniano_ang.php

Financial Education via Television Comedy (Final Report)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We show that television may be able to deliver rudimentary financial literacy in a cost effective manner. In a controlled experiment, Cambodian garment factory workers were randomly allocated into one of three treatments: no video (baseline), slideshow, and comedy TV show. After the intervention the participants were requested to answer a set of questions on financial knowledge and attitudes to examine whether individuals were able to internalize the information that was provided. Our results show that participants randomly assigned to the comedy show are significantly more likely to report that they are interested in obtaining more information on savings account and are also significantly more likely to open a savings account in the next 6 months. This method of delivery may prove effective particularly for disadvantaged sections of the population.

Hand Held Wealth?: A Case of Tigo Money in Bolivia (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For this research project, we chose to focus on the acceptance of the mobile money service "Tigo Money" by the rural population of Bolivia and the effects of this new technology on the development of rural areas. 40% of the Bolivian rural population lives in extreme poverty on less than US$1.25 per day. However, despite the country's poor infrastructure and dispersed population, an estimated 98% of Bolivians have access to mobile technology. It may be for this reason that, in January of 2013, Tigo--a brand of the international telecommunications and media company Millicom--launched its nationwide mobile money platform Tigo Money in order to allow for further “financial inclusion that will allow overcoming of barriers and distance between people, especially among rural populations.”

Our research area consists of two municipalities--Urmiri and Chayanta--located in the northern area of Potosi, one of Bolivia’s nine departments. The municipalities chosen have two of the highest...

Reimagining Rurality in Mobile Money Times: Life, Identity, and Community in Southern Uganda - Part 2 (IMTFI Blog)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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