Techno-Worlding and the Mobility of Money

Over the course of 2024, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the City of Los Angeles convened more than a dozen listening sessions in support of the city’s development of its first-ever Africa Trade and Investment Strategy. The listening sessions brought new voices, perspectives, and geographies directly into the policymaking process. In support of these sessions, select scholars developed exploratory essays on California-Africa connections. These essays are meant to inform policymaking considerations and to identify potential questions for future consideration in developing and examining California-Africa connections. They are at once expert and experimental and attempt not only to shape policy but also to provoke additional scholarship. 

For migrant communities everywhere, the ability to send and receive money is essential. Given the high costs, long delays, and weighty regulatory rules that burden financial institutions such as Western Union or traditional banks, many migrant communities have developed their own financial networks which facilitate and shape transaction pathways and circuits. While these networks have been the subject of significant scrutiny and punitive regulation, the circulation of money at the supranational scale must be understood as core to substantiating and mediating urban life and economies.¹ At the same time, technological advancements are reshaping both global processes and localized experiences of transnational remitting. In an effort to think about the relationships between African and American cities in generative and mutually beneficial ways, we engage with a diverse set of concepts which help to advance thinking around this issue and the related stakes.   

The Transnational Mobility of Money

Places are connected through the transference of ideas, the migration of people, the movement of goods, and, of course, the flows of money. In fact, most material movement—such as the import and export of commodities and the circulation of people—is necessarily supported by systems of money transfer. Money moves in various forms and ways: cash carried on boats and planes, SWIFT settlements between international banks, transactions communicated and documented through tech-enabled distributed ledger transactions (such as Bitcoin), trust-based agent networks (known as the hawala system), and more. All these modes of movement have costs. They also have risks, including theft, exchange rate fluctuations, and compliance fines.

Many development finance institutions and multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the United Nations quantify the movement of money by estimating the value of a remittance corridor or countries’ net trade deficits. However, given the complexity of measuring these values because of illicit, informal, and undocumented flows, a wide range of proxies and guesstimates are used to fill gaps in the data.

Although getting closer to this “real” value of transnational payments is useful, this article focuses on reframing these flows, using concepts that advance notions of Africa as a site of innovative and advanced technological development. We propose the concept of techno-worlding as a way to make sense of the rich relationships that have been created or animated by technological change. Techno-worlding allows us to see the active, if often ambivalent, ways in which technology is central to money movement and associated world-making processes.

World Making: Beyond the Local-Global Binary

What do we mean by world-making? The term “worlds” refers to the material, infrastructural, social, and cultural assemblages that are created through various diffuse actors and processes.The concept of worlding has been essential to disrupting binary notions of the global and the local. By thinking about overlapping and multi-sited worlds, rather than discrete and localized places, worlding scholars challenge unhelpful categorizations, including binaries such as formal and informal and indigenous and foreign.

For example, imagine a financial technology (fintech) startup conceptualized in Nairobi, Kenya, by a founder who grew up in London and Kisumu. The startup is incubated in Cape Town, hosted across several data centers, funded first by European development aid and later by American venture capital (VC), and eventually expands to Lagos, Nigeria, or Accra, Ghana. Such a reality resists easy classification as either local or global, big or small, or dynamic or fixed. Mapping these urban worlds and valorizing the processes, people, and technologies that create them, we can focus on the interconnections and relationships that give effect to specific and durable networks.

Worlds are constituted through “ongoing processes of composition” and are made and remade.² They are produced by routine and often unspectacular activities that, by their sheer scale, have immense reach and impact. However, such everyday processes operate within wider structural contexts, such as changing climate patterns, extractive modes of accumulation, and the so-called war on terror, which is discussed later in the context of Somalia. In this sense, worlds that connect Africa’s urban spaces and those in California are created through complex relationships—some with components that are fluid and others that are durable—none of which can be divorced from the histories that gave rise to them. The dynamic nature of world-making is instrumental in the formation of new geographies, circulations, and places, reterritorialized and rescaled through diverted and dynamic flows of people, ideas, goods, and money.

In effect, world-making and urban worlds offer an alternative to reductionist and developmental views of Africa and its cities. These limiting perspectives are perpetuated through literature, policy and media wherein African experiences are framed as parochial and provincial, replete only with suffering and crises.³ From influencing popular culture to the creation of rich economic networks for trade, world-making rethinks Africa, not as the periphery, but as central to important, specific, and innovative urban networks.

Technology from Africa: Beyond Africa as a Frontier  

It is difficult to think about innovation and networks without considering technology and its central role in reconfiguring urban worlds. Africa is often seen as a technological frontier; a place largely still untouched by the expansion of technological advancement and infrastructures. While some see an exciting “untapped” market, others are fearful that the expansion of technology will disrupt indigenous practices and commodify African life and culture. Techno-worlding, as we advance in this piece, rejects both techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic views of technology in Africa. Technology will not “save Africa” from past autocracies or future exploits, however, it cannot be wholesale rejected as it will be instrumental in creating more just systems and economies. 

Techno-worlding also rejects the idea that technology is un-African or that African societies only tinker with technology,⁴ but do not make it. Thinking about technology from (rather than for) Africa, Nigerian American author Teju Cole, speaking to a room of European academics at a conference in Germany in 2015, gave a lecture entitled: “Do African Digital Natives Wear Glass Skirts?”⁵ His lecture challenged the notion that digital technology is not authentically African. In 2018, following the hype and excitement around the imaginaries of technology in Africa exhibited in Wakanda, South African writer and poet Mohale Mashigo titled a chapter in her collection “Afrofuturism: Ayashis’ Amateki.” The title refers to a song about a pair of shoes being pretty but too small to fit comfortably. (She published an abridged version of the essay under the title “Afrofuturism is not for Africans living in Africa”⁶). The titles reflect her discomfort with the wholesale adoption of ideas about Africa’s technological futures, cities, and imaginaries emanating from the diaspora. Indeed, from Lagos to Johannesburg, commentators on Twitter reminded the world that high-speed trains and digital dashboards already exist in many African cities and should hardly be considered fictional.

Advancing this critique, prominent scholar of Africa, social theorist, and activist AbdouMaliq Simone emphasizes the inseparability between African urban life, everyday technicity, and the life worlds and material effects of technology.⁷ Simone draws attention to how African urban systems, practices, and networks are calculative, mediating, and engineered. Notwithstanding the ways in the African context (and in the diaspora) that technology has been used violently to catalog, control, and extract, Simone writes that “logics and instruments of the technical can facilitate a progressive re-imagination of what it means to inhabit the urban.”⁸ This reimagination moves us beyond the past developments and present realities, presenting us with possible and probable futures of technological advancement.

Speculation: Between Calculative Risk and Uncertain Futures  

Projects that seek to intervene in existing ecosystems, shifting their workings in an effort to produce different outcomes, must engage with the somewhat esoteric question of the future. The future is where decisions made today will manifest. Moreover, the future is where transitions already underway—such as the digital transition in Africa —will be enacted.

Against the backdrop of Africa’s rapid change, it is useful to consider the techniques and technologies associated with conjecturing, imagining, prophesying, and speculating. It is here where we move from describing worlds that exist to imagining ones that could. While speculation is often associated with finance (think of day traders or real estate investors speculating on the future value of a stock or asset portfolio), there is a rich body of work in the humanities that engages with the concept in generative and critical ways. This rich body of work is useful for thinking beyond the sorts of developmental imaginaries which have animated much of global policy towards Africa since Bretton Woods.

Economic anthropologist Laura Bear provides a useful and generous explanation of speculation.⁹ She argues that speculation infuses questions of (hopeful or dystopic) futures with technological and financial logics of durable accumulation, creating a scaffold for sense-making at the fringes of (un)certainty. Building on this, social anthropologist and queer theorist Shaka McGlotten reminds that speculation is “intimately tied to seeing—to speculums, spectacles, and the spectacular.”¹⁰ In this sense, speculation reflects a commitment to the deployment of tools of measurement that dissect the world in ways that make contingent futures visible. These tools aim to discern the possibilities of uncertainty from the calculability of risk—the former being unknowable and the latter being something that could, with the right data and information, be attempted to be measured. This draws attention to the fundamental role of uncertainty in speculation.¹¹

Of course, the domains of calculability are intensely skewed. For instance, while health insurance companies appear to be able to project and accordingly price the risks of death and disease on particular populations, scholars of African urban studies still seem unable to get decent figures on the current population of major cities and urban areas, let alone viable predictions for their growth trajectories in even the medium term.¹² Notwithstanding the many challenges related to data, African cities promise to be exciting sites for the trial and experimentation with speculative technologies. From digital platforms that support property markets (tech-prop) to advancements in electrical vehicles (e-mobility), diverse urban sectors use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in many (if not most) aspects of urban life, mobilizing whatever data is around and using proxies for whatever is not.

While these calculative and algorithmic tools, such as digital dashboards or gaming technologies, are powerful and undeniably getting more so, they cannot alone speculate. They must be used. Speculation requires these tools to be put into practice. Speculative practices of world-making, in this sense, are about labor—the work that goes into imagining the future and acting on this imagination—with more or less appetite and aptitude for the risks. Technology, in this sense, does not just exist but is put to use,¹³ achieving meaning and value through its enrolment in speculative processes. This meaning and value is as much linked to the worlds that it creates as to those that it imagines or hopes to make. 

Fintech and Remittances: Transnational Techno-Worlding

The above discussions of world-making, technology from Africa, and speculation can be drawn together in a conversation about fintech. As a portmanteau of finance and technology, the word fintech captures innovations in the delivery and outreach of traditional financial services, such as credit and insurance, as well as entirely new products, such as mobile money and cryptocurrencies. Fintech’s growth, particularly in the African context, builds on the recent expansion of access to mobile phones, data services, and related information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. California-based tech companies have been major innovators in the fintech space—some with an eye to optimization of advanced markets and others orientated towards global development objectives. In Africa, the majority of venture capital (VC) has gone into financial services, including fintech and digital banks.¹⁴ One of the areas where fintech has sought to improve is that of remittances. This has been particularly important in California, a state which has benefited immensely from global migration and where migrant communities live, work, and contribute to the culture and economy.

Remittances are marked by high volume low-value payments, aggregating to determine the relative size of corridors between places. Transnational remittances have been a key site for innovation around financial models and technologies. Notably (and notwithstanding data limitations), the value of remittance circulations frequently outstrips the aid or foreign direct investment (FDI) invested in African countries. This reality has impacted the financial industry and development sector, both of which has sought to make transnational remittance processes cheaper and address the perceived risks associated with remitting, both for migrants and for nation states themselves. New technologies and models have sought to overcome a wide range of costly processes, including the monopoly of international banking communication network SWIFT and the laborious know-your-customer legislation implemented after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In some African contexts, fintech enabled remittance innovations form part of the startup and tech-enabled ecosystems that are said to mimic, though in many ways do not, the tech worlds of California. Propelled by the VC-fintech thrust, transnational mobile money options have multiplied with more and less successful offerings. Every year sees the launch of new apps attempting to capture diverse customer bases, contest regulatory blockages, and ease payment rails that connect disparate geographies. For example, the WapiPay App focuses on Africa-Asia transfers, a corridor currently devoid of functional options. Linked to remittances, many companies have expanded their service offerings, partnering with other technology companies or expanding and tailoring the platforms by, for instance, setting up chat functions, micro-lending facilities, and even insurance options. Given concerns by remitting parties over the use of funds, the option to purchase particular goods, such as petrol or groceries, has been trialed as a minor deviation from the sending of fungible cash. Mukuru, for example, offers a WhatsApp-based service that allows people anywhere to purchase fuel or groceries for those in Zimbabwe and several other places where the platform is active and where soft currencies are prone to devaluation.

These remittance platforms are often cash poor, offering software as a service and relying on existing infrastructures, whether they be supermarkets or e-money, to manage digital currencies or paper notes. An example of software as a service is Uber, a company that neither owns cars nor hires drivers but has a digital platform as its service offering. However, not all technological advancement in the space of remittance flows takes place through the California-style startup/VC ecosystem. And not all of the innovation is aiming to disrupt legacy networks. In fact, durable and expanding mobile phone companies, undeniably at the forefront of fintech innovation, supermarkets, and retail outlets are increasingly partnering with remittance companies, offering the last-mile in the remittance value chain (for example, see Shoprite Send). In many cases, traditional telecommunications companies, rather than tech startups, are paving the way for remittance innovation. Somalia, for example, presents an additional alternative technological scenario. The country’s home-grown telecommunications sector has developed intense networks of money transfer infrastructure, both in the Horn of Africa and far beyond.

In Somalia, the technologies to support remittances have not been imported from Silicon Valley–style disruptions, but were formed through Somalia’s contingent history—an extreme case wherein the formal financial system fell into disrepair, Somali people migrated around the world for work, and the clan-based trust networks provided an alternative to the state.¹⁵ Intermingling finance with logistics, dense networks of agents formed to facilitate the flow of money across borders that were once replete with frictions and porosities exist all over the world. Often known as hawala (an Arabic term that loosely translates to “transfer”), such networks rely on kinship trust, managing debits and credits across cities and regions. Such networks rarely require the actual movement of money and often work alongside logistical networks, trading items like livestock or cement to settle debts across the network of agents. Today, Somali ICT companies are built on these hawala networks.¹⁶

A good example is Hormuud Telkom, the leading platform for mobile money in Mogadishu. Notably, Hormuud did not emerge as an expanding frontier of a global company (as is common for African telecoms). Rather, Hormuud’s expansion and growing importance was a response to the fall of Somali hawala business Al-Barakaat. When Al-Barakaat was listed as an al-Qaeda affiliate by various United Nations and U.S. agencies, it was subsequently shut down. Hormuud was established in 2002 by Ahmed Nur Jimale on Al-Barakaat’s assets in Mogadishu including fixed telephone lines and an existing customer.¹⁷ Following this, Hormuud Telkom pioneered the much-used mobile money service known as the EVC-Plus,¹⁸ more recently developing even more advanced platforms, such as WAAFI. Hormuud has since developed hard networks (such as cables, landing ports, and data centers), distributed networks of agents in most global cities, from London to Los Angeles, and created digital platforms that allow mobile phone users to make cross-border payments from anywhere. While the company is home-grown, it has developed a global footprint, linking Somali people all over the world. It is a vital example of how technology from Africa connects diaspora communities with global networks.

The Somalia case shores up the vital role of technology in the development of circulations between Africa and the world. It provides an alternative development scenario to that of the California fintech expansion story, much discussed when debating the role of American cities in African development. It reminds us that technology is not always imported from elsewhere but can also be developed in Africa and can have global reach and impact, driving interoperation and connection. Such innovations and technologies in the space of the movement of money (in both hard and virtual forms) cannot be conflated with big tech, nor are such worlds reducible to small or informal practices. African companies, both startups and established ICT, are involved both in world-making and future-making. The thickening and advancement of the technological networks that support remittance circulations reflect the vitality not only of micro-worlds but also of techno-worlds. Here, technology shapes finance and trade. Strengthening connections, for example between California and Africa, requires working with these techno-worlds. They exist at a scale and regularity that any policy concerned with the relationships between places must contend with.

Notes