ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter summarises the analysis and draws together the key themes and arguments presented in the book’s investigation of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality by means of a look at mobile money and in particular Kenya’s M-Pesa. The chapter focuses on two strands emerging from the narratives: the role and responsibility of colonialism and development interventions in shaping the gendered dynamics of financial exclusion and defining the conditions of inclusion; and how inclusionary platforms such as M-Pesa are built on existing gendered inequalities which the digital financial inclusion agenda fails to recognise and address. The chapter reiterates the book’s argument that while M-Pesa has increased the number of women who have access to formal finance, it has not contributed to challenging unequal gender relations, particularly at the lower end of the income distribution, mainly due to the lack of corresponding redistributive measures addressing the gendered socio-economic inequalities that both cause and reproduce financial exclusion.
