Emotional Currency: How Money Shapes Human Relationships

IMTFI Director Bill Maurer interviewed on NPR's Hidden Brain, with Shankar Vedantam, Parth Shah, Tara Boyle, Jennifer Schmidt.

There's a story you may have heard before about what the world look like before money was invented. It's a story built on the idea of barter.

"It goes something like this: in the beginning, before there was money, if I had something that you needed, I would approach you with that thing and see if you had anything that I needed," says anthropologist Bill Maurer.

"The problem is that when we look around the world and in the historical and archaeological record for instances of this kind of direct barter, unfortunately we don't find it."

This week on Hidden Brain, we challenge established ideas about the origins of currency, and highlight the connection between money and relationships.

"Society is a thing of ongoing continuous relationships. The settling and unsettling of debts, on and on and on and on and on."

Listen to the interview podcast here: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795246685/emotional-currency-how-money-shapes-human-relationships

Facebook’s Libra: it’s not the ‘crypto’ that’s the issue, it’s the organisation behind it

by Bill Maurer, UCI dean of social sciences and professor of anthropology and Law, and Daniel Tischer, University of Bristol, on regulatory warning signs to watch for with Facebook's new cryptocurrency, courtesy of The Conversation

The founding partners of the Libra Association. Ascannio / Shutterstock.com

In all the hype that has surrounded its Libra currency, Facebook has been able to distract attention away from an important issue. Libra is being hyped as Facebook’s bitcoin but it’s really a proposal for a global payments system. And that system will be controlled by a small and exclusive club of private firms.

Since it was announced in June, politicians and regulators have attacked Libra, citing concerns about its being a cryptocurrency. Libra is not a cryptocurrency – at least, not as they have been put into practice so far, where a distributed, decentralised community participates in transaction verification via a competitive process.

Libra is essentially a prepaid digital token, backed one-to-one with a basket of reserve currencies. It is “minted” when people put up state-issued currencies to buy it.

What’s important here is not the technological innovation. Facebook is proposing, in Libra, a new form of organisation. We already have payment systems controlled by private companies – Visa, MasterCard, Venmo or PayPal, which provide the infrastructure or “rails” for transferring value – and Libra might turn into another such rail. But its promoters have greater ambitions for it.

Based on our research on the history and technology of payment infrastructures, we see similarities between Libra and Visa. But it’s the differences with the Visa network that raise the biggest warning flags.

Learning from Visa
Libra will be controlled and maintained by the Libra Association, a membership-based group. Libra's developers have voiced a commitment to letting anyone become a member of the association, including users like you and me. The Libra white paper trumpets the importance of decentralisation. But it also admits that, "as of today we do not believe that there is a proven solution that can deliver the scale, stability, and security needed to support billions of people and transactions across the globe" through a truly open, decentralized system.

We believe Libra's founders got the idea from the work of Visa's founder, Dee Hock. Hock was heralded as a visionary in his day, like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg today. He realised that the problem facing payments between banks was not technological, but organizational.

When setting up Visa, it was important for Hock that Visa would not be owned by self-interested shareholders. Instead, it was the users, banks and credit unions, who "owned" Visa as a cooperative membership organisation. Ownership here did not entail the right to sell shares, but an irrevocable right of participation – to jointly decide on the rules of the game and Visa's future.

The incentive was to create a malleable but durable payment infrastructure from which all members would benefit in the long term. To work, everyone had to give something up - including their own branding on credit cards, subordinating their marks to Visa. This was a really big deal. But Hock convinced the network's initial members that the payoff would come from the new market in payment services they would create. He was right.

For most of its existence, until it went public in 2016, Visa was an anomalous creature: a for-profit, non-stock corporation based on the principle of self-organization, embodying both chaos and order. Hock even coined a term for it: "chaordic".

Libra envisions a similar collaborative organisation among the founding members of its Libra Association. But it turns Hock's principles upside down. The Libra Association is all about ownership and control by its members as a club.

Big barriers to entry
And the Libra Association is a club with very high barriers to entry. An entity has to invest at least US$10m in Libra or have more than US$1 billion in market value, among other criteria. The initial list of founding members tilts toward groups that have shown strong opposition to government interference and oversight. Tellingly, there are no regulated financial entities - like banks and fund managers - in the mix. The membership represents a self-selecting crème de la crème of global tech and vulture capitalism.

Association membership guarantees a share of future profits proportionate to a member's stake in the system. Unlike Visa, members do not compete with one another for market share. Instead, they will passively collect rent from interest made on investing in the Libra reserve basket. Plus, profits are not shared with users, and no interest is paid on the balance held by individuals.

Being a club member also affords the right to vote - again, a lot like Visa. But, unlike Visa, Libra gives voting right power based on investment level, not participation. This is not democratic; it is a plutocracy, where the wealthiest rule. And, as profits are linked solely to interest on the association's reserve funds, those managing it may well become riskier and more speculative over time.

Libra's white paper outlines an organiszation that could become a decentralized, participatory system like Hock envisioned Visa would become. But Libra, if it is successful, will likely become an undemocratic behemoth. Alarm bells ring about a global currency's de facto governance by a private, exclusive club serving the purposes of its investor-owners, not the public good.

Governments have long been suspicious of private currencies for good reasons, and Libra is no exception. We must not be distracted by its proposed technical complexity, and instead, focus on how this technology is organised, put to work, and how its rewards are distributed. The good news is that Facebook's play for money may at last prompt politicians to regulate tech giants to curb their impact on and influence over society.

Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology and Law, University of California, Irvine and Daniel Tischer, Lecturer in Management, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On the Media: Money, Then and Now

The origins of money are in bartering, right? Not so, explains IMTFI Director, Bill Maurer speaking with Bob Garfield at On the Media, "in the beginning was not the coin... in the beginning was the receipt."

Stone money from the island of Yap.
(Bartosz Cieślak/Wikimedia Commons) 

Most schoolchildren learn that money arose when barter proved insufficient for meeting everyday trade needs. People required more complex transactions, so they invented currency: a medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value. It's a compelling story...but a false one. Instead, most evidence suggests that money arose from recordkeeping. In this segment, Bob speaks with Professor and Dean Maurer at UC Irvine and Brown University's Mark Blyth about past and present myths about money, and what the history of money might suggest about its future.

To listen to the interview or read the full transcript, please visit On The Media: Listen | WNYC Studios | Podcasts: bit.ly/2yKLLq2

Negotiating and Converting Money in Zimbabwe’s Multicurrency Environment

 By IMTFI Fellows Mahiya I.T and Gukurume S.

Hyperinflation

In 2009, under the banner of 'dollarization', Zimbabwe adopted a multicurrency system after experiencing protracted socio-economic and political quagmires and a world record hyperinflation exceeding a crescendo of 250 million percent in 2008. Under this multicurrency system, Zimbabwe adopted a 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 using qualitative ethnographic techniques such as participant observation and in-depth interviews with mobile money users and non-users, and key informants. Large and diversified sample from two communities – rural Chivi and urban Harare – allowed us to compare and holistically capture the complexities of mobile money politics as well as the temporalities of foreign currency conversions.

Multi-currency transactions prior to "dollarization" and the advent of mobile money services

In Chivi, a semi-arid rural community located in the southern part of Zimbabwe, most young men and women of working age migrate to close-by South Africa as legal and illegal migrant laborer or cross-border traders. Considerable remittance inflows from these migrants (locally called majonijoni) has led to a high circulation and usage of the South African rand in Chivi that predates the official adoption of the multicurrency system. 

Harare, on the other hand, being the capital, is the hub of economic transactions and where multiple currencies had been circulating illegally much prior to official dollarization. During the hyperinflationary era, the Roadport section of Harare was even referred to as the Zimbabwean “World Bank” due to the high prevalence of illicit transactions in foreign currencies that found their way in through informal remittance channels of the burgeoning Zimbabwean Diaspora. The crippling cash and liquidity crisis in the country, led mobile money transactions to arguably become the lifeblood of business transactions in Harare and Chivi. And several telecommunication companies providing mobile money services such as TextACash and NettCash (now rebranded as GetCash) have infiltrated the market and Econet’s EcoCash is the most widely used service in Zimbabwe. In Harare, where the government was actively encouraging cashless transactions, we found that many participants did not trust services provided by government controlled mobile operators such as Telecash and NetOne. As one of our respondents sarcastically asserted:

“…the government is about to close down due to bankruptcy, why would I buy a line owned by such a government… it will be a waste of money.”

Billboard for NettCash Mobile Money Service 

Social Capital, IDs and Trust in Mobile Money Transactions

Social capital and trust were important factors in transactions involving currency conversions especially for the rural people of Chivi who were using the US dollar for the first time and required social networks to i) confirm the currency was not counterfeit, ii) to circumvent regulations requiring identity verification based on national ID numbers, iii) and for the mobile phone to be physically present at the point of transaction. Due to convivial relations and social solidarity, mobile money agents often transacted without IDs and some clients even shared their secret pin number with the agents. Tino, a mobile money agent in Chivi explained:

…that young boy is my client’s grandson whom she sends to cash out some money here. I don’t ask for the identification document because I know them by name and even the ID number and above all I trust them. I have a number of such clients who always perform their transactions with me without their IDs.

In Harare, however, it was almost impossible to cash-out money or transact without ID and agents tended to be very strict. This may be because cases of fraud, fake money and theft were not uncommon in the big city. However, we noted that even though social solidarity and social capital were more pronounced in Chivi, villagers sometimes complained of being tricked and cheated due to their mobile money and foreign currency illiteracy.

Accepting and Rejecting Currencies

We observed that, while in Chivi the South African rand was widely accepted for everyday transactions, in Harare almost all retail shops and transport operators were reluctant to accept the rand. During our fieldwork, the value of the rand was unstable and volatile against the widely used US dollar, making it very precarious for businesses in Harare to transact in the rand. One of our participants in Harare, Evans, whose parents worked in South Africa, said:

My parents send me my school fees in rands through ‘EcoCash Diaspora’ but I have to convert it into dollars because no one is accepting rands these days even if you want to pay a taxi, buy tomatoes, groceries let alone paying school fees. I don’t know it just started recently there is nothing I can do.

EcoCash Client in Chivi

In sharp contrast, most businesses in Chivi including mobile money agents accepted the rand. This could be attributed to the large volume of cross border trade with South Africa. Most business operators in Chivi bought their products in South Africa and a large number of traders from Chivi commuted to South Africa on a weekly basis to buy goods for resale back in the community. In fact, Chivi closely mirrored its South African diaspora - most goods and clothes sold in the area were bought in Musina, a small border town in South Africa. One of our participants Mr Jonasi, a prominent businessman at Chivi’s growth point business centre who owns a grocery shop and a clothing shop, is also an EcoCash mobile money agent. We asked him which currency he prefers:

Of course the US dollar is more valuable compared to the rand but here we are not rigid. In all my businesses I accept both the rand and US dollar. You will go out of business if you reject the rand like they do in Harare. People here get most of their money in rands so say if you receive rands from South Africa and you want dollars to pay fees then I will convert it for you on the exchange rate of that day. I convert rands to dollars here everyday and the good thing is I buy my products in Musina in rands so I don’t make any loss by transacting in rands. 

Exchange Rate Fluidity, Conflicts and Calculative Risks

Exchange Rates in Chivi

Interestingly, we also observed informality and fluidity in the exchange rates especially in Chivi where people relied on information obtained from Zimbabwe-South Africa border. The exchange rate was not static but changed over time, varied from place to place and was often negotiated, which at times led to conflict and serious quarrels. We observed long and protracted discussions lasting ten to twenty minutes before currency conversions were decided upon and completed. For instance, Keresina, a female mobile money agent at Chivi turn-off along the Masvingo-Beit bridge highway got most of her clients from commuters and villagers. She said:

I had a nasty experience with one woman in the village, she thought I had cheated her because her husband had send her some US dollars through EcoCash but she wanted to buy grocery in Musina South Africa so I converted her dollars into rands. When she got to the border she was told a different exchange rate but you know these rates differ from place to place. So when she came back she confronted me and demanded more money - we ended up at the police station. From that day I just accept dollars only and I don’t convert unless it’s a person I know and we have agreed.

In Harare, the few people who accepted the rand and the Botswana Pula had to take calculative risks. First thing every morning, they gathered information on the current value of the rand from their social networks, which determined whether they would accept the rand on that particular day. We also observed that the prevailing cash shortages in the country almost paralyzed cash-out mobile money transactions as agents struggled to provide clients with cash. Driven by the crippling cash crisis, mobile money operators and foreign currency dealers also traded the dollar against itself. One dollar in cash from black market dealers and mobile money agents could be charged a premium and cost $1.07. Moreover, getting cash from a mobile operator was now being regarded as a favor and ‘appreciative’ clients would give small amounts of money (one or two dollars) to the agent for giving them cash. It became the norm for agents to ‘reserve’ cash for these clients. Some clients would even leave their phones and access pin codes with agents so that once cash was available, the agent could cash out on their behalf. This was in part fueled by banks imposing a maximum withdrawal of $500 per week due to the biting liquidity crunch. Other financial practices such as MMM Global have emerged where participants invest and donat money, particularly through EcoCash, and earned 30% interest, that some have framed as Ponzi schemes.

The Zimbabwean monetary ecosystem continues to transform on a daily basis. The government intends to introduce a surrogate local currency called ‘Bond Notes’ allegedly equivalent to the US dollar. This will undoubtedly influence and add new dimensions to mobile money adoption and currency conversions and in effect provide fertile ground for future investigation and research.

Read more in Mahiya and Gukurume's Final Report

Cashlite or Cashless? It Depends on the Financial Ecosystem

By IMTFI Researchers Vivian Dzokoto & Mwiya Imasiku

Cashlessness

Advertisement for a Mobile Money brand

Some say that the end of cash is in sight because we’re all going digital. Conducting financial transactions with cash has some perks like ease of use. However, it is also associated with problems and handling costs (see for example David Wolman's The End of Money). Therefore, going cashless – or cashlite - makes sense. In this blog on our research in Zambia, we focus on the form of cashlite-ness in which there is a transition to a more portable form of cash. Going cash-lite by introducing new cash denominations made sense in Zambia, which experienced inflation rates as high as 188% during the 1900s and early 2000s.

Introducing more portable cash
Going cashlite can alleviate some of the problems associated with cash. This is especially true in countries (especially in developing economies) burdened with large volumes of low-value currency notes because of high rates of inflation. 

Low Value Currency notes

Transitions to a lower volume of cash can occur when people favor other forms of payment over cash. But another way to reduce the volume (and costliness) of cash transactions is when states introduce a new, higher value legal tender (currency), here referred to as “Cash2.0.” When higher value denomination notes are introduced, the volume of cash being handled decreases, while the value remains unchanged. This improves efficiency, and reduces costs and hassles. Switching to Cash2.0 means switching to a lighter (less bulky) form of cash.

Source: https://pencilandpipette.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/africa-map1.png

In Zambia, high rates of inflation led to a number of difficulties with accounting and bookkeeping, keeping statistical records, and data processing software. The need for consumers to carry large amounts of cash created higher risks and inconvenience. It also increased the costs for technology and maintenance of banking and payment systems. 

However, a 5-year period of much lower inflation combined with a more optimistic economic outlook and favorable macroeconomic conditions convinced Zambia’s Central Bank to implement a rebasement of the national currency in 2013. The process of going cash-lite in Zambia involved changes to the national legal tender summarized below:

Simultaneous Cashlite and Cashless Options: New Currency vs Mobile Money

Since going cashless and cashlite (via a currency change) both make sense, what happens when both of these are introduced to citizens of a country around the same time? Would the introduction of a more convenient form of cash make people less interested in cashlessness? Or, could the transition to cash-lite spur an interest in going even lighter, eliminating interest in the use of notes and coins altogether? To explore this idea, we examined people’s preferences for and experiences with the new currency and mobile money in Lusaka, Zambia shortly after the new Kwacha was introduced.

Data
Our main sources of data were: 

• A sample of 687 survey respondents from Lusaka
• A subset of 34 participants who provided additional information via interviews 
• Vendor surveys in malls and markets in Lusaka 
• Representatives of Mobile Network operators and the Bank of Zambia who provided us with additional information

Fieldwork was conducted for five to seven months following the rebasement. We asked individuals about their experiences, knowledge and use of the new currency and mobile money. Vendors were asked whether they accepted Mobile Money as a form of payment.

Three Major Findings

The new currency notes were generally favored over the old currency due to increased portability and ease of use

“One Pin” Old currency

The new notes were perceived as easier to use than their predecessors. Unlike in other countries (e.g. Ghana’s redenomination in 2008, people experienced minimal confusion when encountering the new notes. Some interviewees suggested this had to do with the font and form of the cash value printed on the old Kwacha note. Instead of 10,000, the value was represented as “10000” with the last three zeros in smaller font than the rest of the value of the note. As such, our interviewees argued they were already used to ignoring the three zeros at the end of the currency, which were dropped in the rebasement. Similarly, the three zeros at the end of the currency were ignored in the local nickname for the old currency. In local parlance, 1000 old kwacha was referred to as 1 “pin,” 10,000 as 10 pin, etc. presumably because a bundle of low value notes were kept and “pinned” in sets of a 1,000 to keep track of large volumes of Kwacha notes. In this sense, there had already been a culturally driven rebasement of sorts in local representations of the old currency preceding the actual rebasement. In essence, the three zeros of the old Kwacha were being discounted long before the rebasement made this official. An additional factor leading to the ease of transition which one bank official noted was the fact that it was three zeros that were dropped during the rebasement, which differed from all other previous old to new currency conversion rates. 

The new coins were perceived as burdensome to use and cumbersome to carry around

The rebasement included the re-introduction of coins to Zambia, which previously had limited use due to inflation. The general consensus was that while the notes were convenient to use and keep on one’s person, the coins were less so. A typical strategy people adopted to deal with coins was saving them for a rainy day. An alternative was to gradually learn or remember how to incorporate them into daily use.

It’s not a question of cashless versus cashlite - yet

More than half of our sample did not use mobile money (MM) in the initial period following the currency rebasement. Our sample’s MM users – who used the product mostly to send remittances - did not report a change in MM use post-rebasement. 

saving coins for a rainy day

Our data indicated that the initial slow adoption of mobile money was markedly influenced by: 

1. The limited “payment spaces” in which it could be used 
2. Lack of awareness of mobile money companies and their products, and 
3. Unclear distinctions between online banking and mobile money for banked consumers. 

At the time of data collection, most groceries and other consumer items that the average Lusakan purchased on a daily basis could not be paid for using Mobile Money. Apart from bill pay, only 2 of the 50 retailers sampled in malls, and none of the 100 retailers in markets sampled, accepted mobile money as a form of payment. However, some retailers mentioned that they were considering mobile money as a payment option in the future.

Example of Mobile Money-Retailer partnership:
Customers who paid with Mobile Money got a free movie ticket.

Post Fieldwork Developments

In the years since our fieldwork was conducted, mobile money has been marketed aggressively in Zambia. For instance, the company Zoona (http://www.ilovezoona.com/), interestingly a non Mobile Network Operator (MNO), has become a major player in Zambia’s mobile financial service marketplace. The harder Zoona and other Mobile Money providers work to enlarge the Mobile Money ecosystem beyond remittances and bill pay, the more likely it will be for the average Lusakan consumer to find themselves needing to choose between cashless and cashlite payment options. For now, the answer will be more retailer than consumer driven.

Read their final report here

One researcher's thoughts on money and metadata based on fieldwork in Ethiopia

By Mesfin Fikre Woldmariam

Mobile money has become a buzz word since the success of M-PESA in Kenya. But whilst the topic is hot among development and poverty reduction workers; it has so far not gathered enough attention from academics. A simple review of literature in the area of mobile money reveals that there are many articles that associate mobile money with development, poverty reduction, security issues, adoption issues, acceptance and use by customers. But, there are no adequate pieces of work that relate to the issue of system design. 

As a researcher I tried to unpack what cash money really is. I am an information systems expert and my analysis of mobile money is primarily pragmatic and depends on my readings across different domains, particularly sociology and money, anthropology and money, behavioural economics and money.  I get knowledge and information from these domains and combined with my own areas of expertise I am able to reflect on what mobile money or digital money should look like and the nature or elements of the kind of system that can handle mobile money. Here are my reflections: 

First what is money and how it is changing?  Even though there are different categories of money from social and anthropological points of view, in this writing I am interested in looking at cash as money and thinking about how its changed forms affect system design. To me cash money is simply information with some specified metadata, like color, image or icons, numbers, and some other hidden security controlling means (see the figure below). People agree to accept this information as money because they know they can give it to others without concern. What makes this piece of paper (cash money) and or coins is the information (metadata inscribed on them). 

Ethiopian currency.

Metadata

This is to say that if we remove these metadata, the remaining piece of paper cannot be considered as money. And thus, these metadata are making money valuable and make people develop trust and confidence. But with the digitization of money, in its current state of research and development, these metadata are excluded from existing platforms and solutions. In the current platforms or solutions, money is represented as a simple positive rational number of the form say 2.89 USD, 0.89 USD, 247 USD etc, excluding the metadata as well as the different money denominations. For example, in Ethiopia our currencies are denominated as (5 cent, 10 cent, 25 cents, 50 cents, 1 birr, 5 birr, 10 birr, 50 birr, and 100 birr notes). This indicates that we cannot pay (get paid) for example exactly 12 cents, 11 cents, 9 cents, 9.87 etc. However, we know that with the digitization of money, it is possible to accommodate any amounts and thus, unlike in the case of cash based transactions, in digital transactions making changes is not an issue. That is the bonus of current computing and mobile money technologies. But such money representation with positive rational numbers and removal of money’s metadata elements faces challenges when it comes to people that are illiterate. For example, illiterate users know their balance by counting the material money. They do not know what numbers 20, 40, 12 etc mean. Rather, they know these figures when they are physically handed them and able to count them by hand. The following paragraphs outline some of the design implications of my ethnographic research I did in 2012 in Ethiopia among open air market participants. 

Purposes of money’s metadata: 

• Images or icons: The icons or images on money bills have different purposes like: as national identity (collective national values). For example, Ethiopian money bills have pictures of coffee plants, farmers, a map of Ethiopia, historical buildings, the signature of the governor, and a tractor machine. Some countries also inscribe photos of elite individuals and their sacrifice for the nation, for example photos on USD. In Ethiopia, the icons and images inscribed on money bills enable illiterate users to identify money bills.  

• Security tools: These are features inscribed on money bills to identify real money from forgery. The problem with these tools is that, when the bills get old, these features usually fade away and may not be visible, which makes differentiating forgery from valid money bills difficult. 

• Serial numbers: These have also a very important role. When all or parts of these numbers are lost (faded away), individuals do not accept. Such money bills have to be taken to banks for replacement, as per the respondents from my field study. Otherwise, they become worthless, as people, particularly illiterate users will not accept for change during transaction.

• National identifier: This is written in both English and Amharic and identifies the legal issuer (governor). 

• Color: All Ethiopian money bills are color coded, which enable illiterate users to identify different bills. Color and images on money bills are used for counting and computational purposes. For example, illiterate individuals know the sum of 10 birr and 5 birr will give 15 birr and yet do not know how to spell these numbers. When they are also asked to pickup money bills of say 50 birr from a lump sum of bills with different denominations, they easily identify them through their color. Thus, it could be said that color of money bills is a means to identify them. 

• Economic value: These are numbers written in terms of roman numbers as 1 birr, 5 birr, 10 birr, 50 birr, and 100 birr as well as Ethiopian numbering systems and the Amharic language. Birr has denominations of 1, 5, 10, 50, and 100.

Characteristic features of Ethiopian money bills of five and ten birr.

The material nature of money bills also has an added value for illiterate and visually impaired people. Illiterate people make some simple mathematical computations (additions, subtractions, multiplication, and divisions) by moving money bills here and there as they cannot accomplish these through writing numbers on paper or calculating machines. For example, in order to make payment or receive payments people count money bills and in order to count them, people usually sort and arrange them according to the denominations (from smallest money bills to the largest) and then hold the stack in one hand and count with the other hand. In this context digitization can make illiterate people frustrated, unless there are solutions for this issue. 

One thing we learned is that current mobile money platforms and solutions did not consider these metadata in their design. My reflections and proposed solution for this problem will be presented in two forthcoming papers to be shared on the IMTFI Blog once they are published.

Money organization

From my open air market study I have also observed and understood that illiterate merchants and customers distribute their money among different bags or pockets. They also give different labels or names like bag for sales from coffee, sales from salt, and sales from other materials. When they need a change, they try to look into the respective bag. In fact if there are no changes in the necessary bag, they take from another bag and return the money later. It is kind of a “loan” from the other bag. I call this “distributed cognition”. They remember from which bag they took change and want to replace the amount they took. Thus, it appears that from a technology design perspective, designers need to be aware of such cognitions and practices and its implication for design. 

Problems with cash 

I also observed that even though the material property of cash helped illiterate people count and know their balance as well as the difference between different currency notes, (based on its color), it has some limitations. It can get old and stick together, part of it can be torn and people are not willing to accept for change, some individuals also make forgery money and easily cheat illiterate rural people. It also creates difficulty for making changes, if there are no changes. But, with the upcoming mobile or digital money systems, even though it appears that the issues of forgery, sticking together, and changes can be addressed, the issues of operationalizing technologies for these issues can not be an easy task. Addressing one of the issues will come at the expense of another.  

Final thoughts

Finally, based on the nature of money digitization and money handling experiences of illiterate people in developing counties, I feel that new technologies need to have capability like audio in order to  embed money’s metadata, and enable individuals’ to experience “physicality within digital environment”. I also recommend interested readers to consult the work of (Balen et al 2009) for more reflections about money digitisations as related to ease of usability, security, and auditing.  In this case I want to make a note that the work of Balan et al. (2009), focuses on literate people while my reflection is in the context of illiterate people who have different money practices. 

For further details on the project see here for the final report. You can also read Mesfin's working paper from 2012: "Understanding Social Relationships and Payments Among the Poor in Ethiopia" or email him with any comments and suggestions: mesfinfw@gmail.com.