Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

What is it like to live without currency in the 21st century? How could communities without legal tender and banking systems accumulate, store, and transfer wealth? Imagine possible mechanisms for managing wealth in a context where the social system is used in place of a financial system! That was our focus in this study. We explored the traditional non-cash modes of saving, storing, and transferring wealth in communities where social contracts have more prominence than cash. We analyzed the financial behaviors of people who live outside the conventional banking system, and how social contracts were used to manage wealth.

We sampled 512 women from 23 rural communities in Southeastern Nigeria who live on less than US$2 per day. Although 99% of them own mobile phones, only 3% of them have bank accounts. We interacted with these women and their community/cooperative society leaders as regards various traditional non-cash mechanisms of managing wealth and the possible effects of mobile money adoption on them. Interestingly, 7 popular non-cash modes of saving and transferring wealth were noted.