Informal Credit Associations in Lucknow, India

Zardozi embroiderers

We are pleased to announce the release of our most recent working paper, authored by IMTFI researcher Syed Aiman Raza, assistant professor of Anthropology at Shia P.G. College in Lucknow, India. Dr. Raza's research focuses on informal credit associations among Zardozi embroidery workers in Lucknow.

Trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, the poor are unable to think much about their future. This creates a situation in which the education of the children, health of the household members is often compromised with. Each day of their life is spent struggling to earn a living for the family. They often work for more than 8 hours a day, earning less than two dollar and even sometimes less. These impacts are invisible, but in the truest sense – are irreversible for the dent they make in the future of their families. Their choices are minimal which makes it impossible for them to plan out expenditure and calculate one’s own capacity to save or repay. 

The present study is an ethnographic account of the Shia population attached to Zardozi (embroidery) in Lucknow, who are reeling under intense poverty and suffering as a result of pittance. This study contributes to the linking of micro levels of analysis of money management through informal financial network of Rotating Services and Credit Association (ROSCA), popularly known as Beesi, among the poor skilled Zardozi (embroidery) workers in Lucknow. The research facilitates verbatim accounts of embroidery workers about what they want ,what they expect of themselves and how they make their choices that they can make. The study is open to a wide spectrum of readers belonging to developmental studies, economics and microfinance who are interested in understanding real life situations confronted by the poor in third world countries.

Click here to read it! 

Gender, Cash, and the Mobile in Papua New Guinea

We are happy to share our most recent working paper, written by Supriya Singh and Yaso Nadarajah: "School Fees, Beer and 'Meri': Gender, Cash, and the Mobile in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea". From the abstract:

We combine the perspectives of the anthropology and sociology of money with user-centred design to explore how the use of cash in rural and remote Papua New Guinea will shape the use of mobile money. Drawing on 13 open-ended interviews, group interviews involving 100 persons, and participant observation over two visits to Morobe province in 2010 and 2011, we found cash is used for school fees, mobile phones, household goods, transport, beer, cards, women and gifting to wantok, that is, people connected by descent or place. Cash is individually controlled and women’s savings are often hidden in pandanus walls or locked cupboards. Women control cash from gardens and the re-selling of betel nuts and cigarettes. Men take the larger share of cash from coffee and control the ‘big money’ from mining. Mobile money, if appropriately designed, can reinforce the privacy and security of cash and savings, facilitate gifting to wantok, and lead to greater financial inclusion of women.

Click here to read our working paper!

Jan Chipchase at CGAP Clients at the Center

by IMTFI External Advisory Board member Jan Chipchase

Getting A Shave: Lagos, Nigeria by Jan Chipchase

What struck me about the recent CGAP Clients at the Center Convening Event in Washington DC on December 1, 2011 was the extent to which its focus  – to better understand customers, to turn customer insights into something that meaningfully changes the products/services being offered – is echoed by the challenges faced by our commercial clients. 

Pretty much every organisation recognises the need to understand their customers – whether it's to better serve their existing needs; deliver new products and services; or slightly less charitably to understand how responsive they are going to be to changes in price. There are many ways to gain a rich and nuanced understanding of the customer – and increasingly people are turning to rich ethnographic studies to compliment more data driven approaches. 

For consumer research to be impactful it needs to: have a clear client in the organisation – someone with a stake in its outcome; it needs to be soluble – in a format fit for consumption; and most importantly needs to inform and inspire the organisation beyond what it knows. Basic I know, but so-often missing when the person commissioning the research or the team that implements it lacks imagination and the willingness to put themselves on the line. Good research will communicate basic drivers, segmentation models, can reframe the value proposition; all the way through to the positioning of the brand. This is only part of the story – the organisation needs to be structured in such a way to take advantage of what they learn – the decision makers need to be in the room to absorb and act on the results.

The IMTFI is funding new projects – looking forward to researchers pushing the boundaries for another year.

CGAP Deputy CEO, Alexia Latortue has a full write-up of the event.

Funny Money Roundup 2

Another roundup of funny money, courtesy of IMTFI research assistant Taylor Nelms:

• I’m currently doing research in Quito, Ecuador, and after being mugged on a previous trip, I started putting a folded $20 or $10 bill in my shoe to have a bit of cash for a taxi if it happens again.

Now I know what to call it. Learn about the history of “mad money.” (h/t Eva)

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Desires and Needs

As Director Bill Maurer wrapped up the annual conference about Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine, he thanked the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and discussed how the donor and aid communities were adapting to collaborations with the investment community. He also said that the profits associated with a "world of fees and commissions" should be understood in relationship to the products and practices of "cultural worlds." Like landlord and tenant relationships, mobile money relationships often do not function with "free agents in an open market," even though ideologies of freedom and openness may be featured in advertising and project reports. Maurer argued that "researching the interface" and developing "different kinds of vocabularies" were important areas for systematic research.

Maurer showed some of the illustrations gathered by Jane Guyer in her project documenting Wikipedia's illustrations of the entry on "Market." Although he showed farmers displaying cabbage and the London corn exchange from Guyer's collection, he argued that conventional representations of a market as a site that sets price through supply and demand was little more than a nostalgic imaginary construction that did little to foster understanding of how mobile money actually operates. As he said, "the world of fees and commissions is coming into contact with a social world with things that look like this but aren't." Instead, he asserted that refugee camps might be the best example of the general concepts discussed at the conference, as the image of a Somali refugee camp replaced the commercial and pastoral images shown earlier. As Maurer put it, "let's pluralize 'the market' into multiple intersecting circuits of finance."

In discussing behavior change around mobile money, Maurer also insisted that it was important not to overlook "the importance of fun and enjoyment," because it was "easy to think of the poor as just having needs and not having desires." He also reminded audience members that "the poor don't aspire to be entrepreneurs necessarily" and encouraged them to think about Melissa Cliver's work on "economies of enoughness."

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Design is More Than Copy and Paste

In the final panel of the annual IMFTI conference on "Mobile Money: Lessons for Microfinance and Design" moderator Paul Dourish emphasized how the shift in thinking from "user-centered design" to "design-centered use" could be applied to mobile money systems. (The video above shows mobile phone operated vending machines in China.)

The first talk on the "Impact of Mobile Money Services on Microfinance Institutions by Patricia Pulido, Maricruz LaCalle, and Casey Conzett focused on an analysis of operational costs in Tanzania, where they said mobile money services were not developed despite the entry of companies like TIGO and Vodacom in the market and a growing role for microfinance institutions that emphasize small-scale finance. Researchers studied 37 institutions all over the region, which included places like Mufundi Community Bank, Njombe Community Bank, or Tandahimba Community Bank. They interviewed general managers, loan officers, and other bank personnel and identified a number of reasons that mobile money might be appealing, including "flexibility to adapt to client needs" (44%), "greater outreach to rural areas" (30%), "new sources of revenue by commissions" (30%), and a "greater number of clients" (15%). They also cited difficulties when electricity was unstable or the network slow, problems with training and marketing existed, or forced loyalties restrained consumer choice. Although they lamented limitations of time and acknowledged that "the field is not a laboratory," they pointed out that this was also highly original research given current literature reviews.

Speakers Panthea Lee and Zack Brisson of Reboot presented a design-savvy talk about "Value Systems in China: A User-Centered Approach to Designing Inclusive Second-Generation Banking." (Brisson was formerly active in the anti-genocide organization Enough.) In leading off his talk, Brisson joked that it was "almost as scary talking to a room full of anthropologists as it is to talk to a room of psychoanalysts." He described ReBoot as devoted to "getting to better research results" by understanding "lives and contexts" and the fact that "process maters." In focusing on China as a region of interest with an economy that was "literally skyrocketing," he argued that it was important not to forget the "many left behind" by "exacerbated economic inequality. Now, he insisted "innovation is possible" if it aims at "an inclusive, second-generation banking system. Brisson argued that China was a particularly likely area in which the unbanked could become banked through mobile money, because 70% of the population used mobile phones, remittances already shaped financial practices, and there were many existing agents. Like M-PESA in Kenya, there was also a clear vision for partnership between the telcom and the financial institution, as in the case of China Mobile and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. Although these technologies may follow different uptake patterns, "desire for financial stability is universal."

Brisson and Lee described the core of their methodology as ethnography. Their study of study of mobile money focused on 4 cities and 6 towns and villages across a cross-section of the country. During a period of three weeks they conducted 113 interviews in the context of homes, places of business, or communal gathering points. The study relied on both unstructured and structured interviews and observations of direct service use in sectors such as health care and travel. As they explained, after unprofitable rural banks were closed as a result of market reforms, there was a strong need for mobile money to improve access to financial services. They noted that migrant populations were another important factor in the economies that they studied and that such Chinese often treated as another commodity, although they contributed to half of the nation's GDP and worked much needed high-risk, low security jobs. Furthermore, the marginalization of minority populations could create more obstacles to financial inclusion for certain segments of the unbanked, such as herdsman who had been forbidden from raising livestock by the authorities. (Older parents may have been compensated for the loss of their livelihoods, but children were not eligible for these government payments.)

Lee and Brisson emphasized three main themes:

1. Trust, defined by the in-group tendencies of kin, caste, or geography
2. Uncertainty, which might cause some to choose to forgo the risks associated with pursuing wealth. (As one couple said of their lives under Mao, "We knew we were poor, and would continue to be poor. That's better than not knowing where we will be tomorrow.")
3. Touchpoints

Lee and Brisson argued that it was necessary to design for agents, intermediaries, and influencers, not just end-users and to focus on trust, networks, and relationships. (Those interested in this approach may also want to check out the "infomediaries" research of The Global Impact Study and the work of François Bar.) For more about the work of Lee and Brisson in China, see ReBoot's blog posting on "Mobile Money in the Land of Mao."

"Best Practices in Mobile Microfinance" by Fatima Yousif, Elizabeth Berthe, and Olga Morawczynski provided a global overview of how the technology was being adopted in multiple countries. As Yousif explained, although MNOs focus on quickly profitable services, MFIs have to focus on the hard-to-reach and difficult-to-profit from. In their study an online survey was sent to over 100 microfinance institutions, and the group also conducted direct interviews of 16 MFIs, mostly in Kenya 16 MFIs, with the aim of addressing the relationship between "industry and us" and the "need to address real needs." By focusing on areas like low agent penetration, the group was able to examine social and commercial sustainability. Socio-cultural complications and research challenges are inevitable when mobile phones are frequently shared, there are problems with checks and controls, and there are low literacy levels. Yousif noted that in Cambodia low-end phones might not able to read Khmer script, and that there may be other complications in countries with citizens who have low literacy levels in own language to begin with relying on text applications. She also observed that there may be situations in which it is still less expensive to travel to a bank than to use mobile payment services, so newer technical solutions weren't always welcome. She said that it was surprising to see how few institutions did cost-benefit analyses, and how many providers assumed that there was no need for market research, because a particular approach was "obvious." In a market dominated by money transfers, where mobile network operaters know they can make the most profit, innovation was often hampered by pre-existing assumptions and the fears of stakeholders. For example, loan officers feared losing their jobs if new technologies were adopted. She also pointed out that the success of M-PESA was "both good thing and a bad thing," and she cautioned against "copy and paste" approaches in other regions. Certain factors may be "necessary but not sufficient," particularly in markets that are urban and peri-urban. She argued that "IT/MIS integration is one of the greatest challenges faced by MFIs today," a problem exacerbated by top-down decision-making.

She closed with a number of recommendations, which included "understand your market environment," "communicate, communicate, communicate," "invest time in developing your distribution network," and "test and monitor your product," because "new uses will come up." Her recommendation to "collaborate with regulators" proved to be the most controversial piece of advice during the question and answer session that followed.

As moderator Dourish asserted, "HCI not about interfaces but about relationships between design and use" and "producing designed effects." In answering his own question about where the sites of innovation might be, he emphasized the importance of "temporalities of innovation" and "directionalities of innovation." He also noted that "operator selection" was a "design decision in its own right."

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Taking Mobile Money Out for a Test Drive

The next panel on "Mobile Money: Adoption, Uptake & Transformation" was filled with both facts and figures and narratives about inclusion and alienation. In "An Assessment of Adoption and Use of Mobile Money Services in East Africa: Case Studies from Uganda and Tanzania" by Batilda Moshy and Paul Mukwaya, researchers examined the customers' experiences with companies like MTN, Airtel, and UTL in Uganda and Vodacom, Airtel, and TIGO in Tanzania to assess how "social cultural" factors play a role in adoption, although the presentation opened with responses to more conventional survey questions about ease of accessibility, security, convenience, decreased travel time to service points, cheaper costs, good service, and decreased time spent queuing. Mukwaya pointed out that customers' and potential customers' decision-making and perceptions might also be shaped by the company first in the market, as in the case of MTN in Uganda.

They noted the importance of acknowledging instabilities and network failures, and -- like many researchers on the day's previous panel -- they asserted the importance of branding, customer care, and managing vendors. They claimed that successful awareness campaigns included several media outlets and road shows. They also observed that unregistered users could be incentivized to become registered users by "walled gardens" that made certain services more expensive.

In "Differences Between Fee Structure of Mobile Money Technologies and Traditional Banking Systems, Social Psychological Determinants and Service Uptake: A Case Study of Uganda," Bruno Yawe and Tinah Nassali used interviews with officials from the bank of Uganda to understand how fee structures might shape the attitudes of potential users. Although researchers complained about how challenging it could be to get data from banks and grappled with the complexity of accounting for transactions across the Uganda-Kenya border, they were able to show that large amounts of mobile money was banked in in customers' accounts and that it was used for many purposes, including the payment of school fees.



Jose L. Estuar introduced his talk on "Mobile Phone Cash In Cash Out Service in a Frontier Area: The Dynamics of New Money Technology and Embedded Systems of Money Relationships" with the official video above from CGAP, which showed a fluent montage of images of GCASH usage, but he also presented less polished videography from his ethnographic work with 43 households in a frontier village on a remote peninsula in the Philippines, where he also studied financial diaries. Estuar's videos showed the arduous journey by boat to his field site and card-playing in unlit domestic urban interiors to give his audience a stronger sense of place. In explaining his research on cash in and cash out services, he also said that "we will tell the stories as we go along" of "social and cultural relationships. Estuar characterized the larger project of his research as an exploration of "embedded money relationships" in the "money ecology of a frontier area."

Following Viviana Zelizer -- the Princeton sociologist who studies how interpersonal connections enter into the production, distribution, consumption, and transfer of economic value, Estuar described himself as interested in subjects who are "partly autonomous" and in interdependent relationships that are historically variable rather than in financial analysis that focuses exclusively on impersonal instruments or objectifiers. He also made no claims of finality: as he explained, “for now we tell stories of this work in progress.”

The Philippines is a country that Estuar said had reached 43% penetration with mobile phone use. As he joked, the nation even had Angry Birds, and he showed an image of Filipino spokesperson apl.de.ap of the Black Eyed Peas as an endorser of mobile phone technology. His research focused on an area outside of Manilla, which was hard to reach but not totally inaccessible and located in a spot that was not an island but might as well be, because there was no road, and visitors had to choose between travel by boat or attempting to navigate the dense thicket. His methodology involved a housing index in which domiciles might be named "house 1," "house 2," or "house 3." He reflected about how these houses related to each other in terms of money and how they might be at different stages. As he observed, "scholars call it dependency; we call it something else . . . a relationship." Although he granted that the question might remain if such a relationship was unfair, he argued that Mark Granovetter's embeddeddness theory encouraged scholars to explore how social relationships might include a seemingly exploitative boat owner.

The irony that Estuar emphasized was that a telecommunications device had been put into the hands of people in this remote area of the Philippines seemingly in order to make expansion beyond a tight circle of social relationships possible, so they could exercise more economic independence. However, ultimately the device facilitated existing relationships rather than established new relationships, particularly among people with a strong preference for face-to-face interaction rather than neutral exchanges with remote markets.