Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

Think back to 2008: the first iPhone had just been released. M-Pesa, Safaricom’s mobile transfer service, was just beginning to hit the Kenyan countryside. The extent of the global financial crisis was becoming known. At the University of California, Irvine, south of Los Angeles, researchers had just begun thinking about the collision between mobiles and money. Founded that same year, the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) was in the process of supporting its first set of research projects, in countries ranging from Nigeria to Indonesia. When it funded its first cohort of 17 researchers from around the world in 2009, only a handful were exploring the expansion of mobile money technology. Three of the projects were in sub-Saharan Africa–in Kenya, Botswana and Nigeria. The other projects focused largely on alternative currencies, informal savings practices, programs. Five years later, in 2014, almost all of IMTFI projects involved research on mobile money, and 50% were being conducted in countries in Africa.

The article is part of the January 2016 issue on "The Poverty of Development Strategy in Africa" and provides a comprehensive look into IMTFI's research findings in Sub-Saharan African from 2009-2104. It traces shifts in the mobile money landscape and also discusses patterns that endure by highlighting the role of deep histories, rank and hierarchy, ritual and religion and the stickiness of trust in understanding user interaction and uptake of new technologies. The article further emphasizes the role of  locally embedded rich qualitative research and offers suggestions for new future directions in mobile money research in the region.