Regulating exclusions? Gender, development and the limits of inclusionary financial platforms

Abstract Digital financial-inclusion platforms have gained increasing attention as instruments for economic growth that also contribute to development goals such as poverty reduction and gender equality. One of the most acclaimed digital financial platforms to date is M-Pesa (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money) in Kenya – a mobile-phone-enabled money-transfer service realised via a public–private partnership between the UK's Department for International Development, Vodafone and its local partner, Safaricom. Since its launch in 2007, M-Pesa has grown at a phenomenal rate and it is now used by over 70 per cent of the Kenyan population. Bringing together socio-legal enquiry, feminist political economy analysis and post-colonial literature, this paper discusses M-Pesa's inclusionary regulatory arrangements and examines their implications for gender equality. It shows that, while these arrangements contribute to including women in the formal financial system, they fail to adopt the redistributive measures necessary to address the gendered socio-economic disadvantages that cause and reproduce financial exclusion.