ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that mobile money is the value equivalent of money that is stored using the SIM card on a mobile phone. Depending on the business model, the cash value on the mobile SIM card is physically held by a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) or a bank or financial institution in which the MNO has an established agreement. The SIM in a mobile phone and its corresponding number is the mobile money account, similar to a bank account in the conventional sense. The chapter looks at the reputation of mobile money as an artefact for alleviating poverty from the perspective of marginalized male users in Uganda. It draws on ethnographic research in Kampala, Uganda’s metropolitan district, and explores how motorcycle taxi drivers, colloquially referred to as bodabodas, use mobile money. The chapter explores mobile money that is approached from a social shaping perspective in which the mutual co-construction of technology and gender.
