Introduction

This book examines and problematises the narratives and institutions of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality by looking at Kenya’s pathbreaking mobile money project, M-Pesa. The introductory chapter presents the rise of M-Pesa as an archetype of digital financial inclusion in the Global South and outlines the assumptions governing the relationship between financial inclusion and gender equality that this book aims to interrogate. It explains the use of ‘gender’ as an analytical and methodological tool to question the rhetoric of financial inclusion, and describes the methodological approach adopted here to bring together socio-legal enquiry and feminist political economy in an analysis that engages with postcolonial feminist debates and law and development literature. This introduction presents the book’s key argument: that M-Pesa is premised and regulated according to a logic of entrepreneurial opportunity rather than a politics of redistribution, limiting its ability to challenge unequal gender relations at the lower end of the income distribution and to contribute to gender justice overall.