Talk Title: 'Language, Law and Mapping Success Narratives of Financial Inclusion'

Abstract: There is little doubt, that the mobile money product M-Pesa has led to the digital ‘financialization of everyday life’. This concept provides an essential way of ‘understanding the impact of financial processes on individual identities, subjectivities, and relationships with financial services.’ Our ‘traditional’ understanding of financialization is now shifting around digital infrastructures which have become the tools for (re)payment and a great source for data deemed useful for financial institutions. Additionally, apart from the monetisation of this data, in some cases it has been used for the political surveillance of informal markets. This financialization is being understood as ‘financial inclusion’ and the M-Pesa service’ ‘success’ has been heralded. Many states have tried to replicate this success and its resultant ‘success narrative’ of financial inclusion to varying results. Success in this context, I argue is understood, at least in the public sphere as tremendous economic and societal change through enhancing informal economies at a national scale. The ‘success narrative’ in turn is how the societal changes are interpreted as serving objectives of global development agencies, through individual entrepreneurship, in a free unregulated market. Several international and national stakeholders use this narrative with different policy and business interests. I also argue that, claiming this success, aligns with their agendas and provides stakeholders with legitimacy for their institutional existence and justifies their political influence within Kenya. Secondly, this narrative allows them to gain access to national polities and markets as it has been debatable as to whether financial inclusion has led to tangible gains in poverty reduction.

All stakeholders who use this narrative benefit from it in different ways. Governments for instance, use this narrative to relinquish their responsibilities in providing social protections. The paper makes two contributions, it discusses the extent through which the narrative over emphasises financial inclusion as a national agenda and neglects the negative effects such as over indebtedness, a growing underbelly through digital loans. This is done by mapping which stakeholders benefit from the success narrative using applied linguistic methods and through a critical political economy approach. The second contribution is in assessing to what extent their politico-economic benefit corresponds with the claimed success. The article aims to shed light on the state of financial inclusion, by looking beyond the substance of mobile money success and examining its for. There are fundamental dynamics that manifest themselves and recurrent tensions between the understanding of ‘inclusion’ and stratification which can be powerful political interventions.

*This draft paper is based on findings from a seed funded project provided by the Aston Forensic Linguistics Institute.